Longtime SRJC coach Bob Mastin dies at 97

Little did scholar-athlete Bob Mastin know when he departed Santa Rosa Junior College for Stanford University, where he played on the 1940 football team that won every game clear to the Rose Bowl, that he’d return one day to take charge of the JC’s athletic programs.

Mastin was a Navy veteran of World War II when he accepted a coaching job at SRJC in 1946. Through 1979, he led teams to championships in four sports and served also as the two-year college’s athletic director.

He was preparing for induction into the California Community College Athletic Association Hall of Fame when he died March 3 in Ukiah, where he’d lived the past nine years with his son Jim’s family. Bob Mastin was 97.

“He loved Santa Rosa JC,” his son said. For nearly 70 years, the younger Mastin said, the school’s sports community was Coach Mastin’s second family.

Mastin coached football, basketball and baseball at the college, and in the 1950s he founded the golf program. He was an assistant coach to the Bear Cubs’ historic 1949-50 varsity football team and a regular at the many reunions of that team, nicknamed The Huddle.

Mastin became head coach of the football team, and of the basketball, baseball and golf teams. Jim Mastin recalled that it was great fun having the coach as his dad, but there was also a downside.

“I have to say that the coaching that was done at that time was hard on the family. I know it was hard on my mother,” he said. His father’s responsibilities as the JC’s primary coach for 33 years put him on the road constantly.

“It was kind of a trade-off,” he said.

Bob Mastin was born in Dryden, Ore., in 1918. Hard economic times of the 1920s drove his family to head south in search of better employment opportunities.

The Mastins settled in Mountain View. The Great Depression was still on, and war clouds gathered as Bob Mastin became a student and athlete at Santa Rosa Junior College.

From there he went to Stanford and became one of the “Wow Boys” of the 1940 football team that capped an undefeated season with a Rose Bowl victory over the University of Nebraska.

Mastin was a month short of 24 years old when the U.S. entered World War II in December of 1941. He joined the Navy, which put his background in athletics to use.

He worked as a physical training instructor, trimming and strengthening new sailors, before being assigned as second-in-command of Rest & Recreation camps in Hawaii. He rose to the rank of lieutenant.

Not long after the war ended and Mastin returned to the Bay Area, he met Jessie Brown in Oakland. Through the course of 55 years of marriage, they traveled extensively in the U.S. and Europe, they raised two sons, and they went to a whole lot of games.

Coach Mastin had been retired from SRJC for nearly 20 years when the couple left California for his native Oregon. They lived in a hillside home overlooking the Rogue River and the Pacific, a spot that nourished Mastin’s love of oil painting.

Jessie Mastin died in 2001. Five years later, Bob Mastin moved to Ukiah to live with his son and daughter-in-law, Mary Buckley.

His death came 11 days before he joined the likes of John Madden, Bill Walsh, Jackie Robinson, Lon Simmons and Joe Morgan in the Visalia-based California Community College Athletic Association Hall of Fame. Current Bear Cub football coach Lenny Wagner accepted the honor on his behalf.

In addition to his son in Ukiah, Mastin is survived by son Steve Mastin of Berkeley, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

There will be a celebration of his life at 1 p.m. Sunday, April 26, at the JC’s Bertolini Student Center.

His family suggests memorial contributions to the SRJC 1949-50 Football Scholarship Fund, c/o SRJC Foundation, 1501 Mendocino Ave., Santa Rosa 95401; to Plowshares, P.O. Box 475, Ukiah 95482-0475 (www.plowsharesfeeds.org); or to Ukiah Players Theatre, 1041 Low Gap Road, Ukiah 95482 (www.ukiahplayerstheatre.org).