Evanston RoundTable, Feb. 6, 2025
As he embarks on his 10th decade, Jim Harper is still grateful he can get out on the McGaw YMCA pickleball court and have a good time.
“I’m not as quick on my feet as I used to be,” laughed the former tennis and racquetball player, “so I’m grateful my partners don’t seem to mind covering more court than usual. When my opponents lob the ball over my head, I just yell, ‘Yours!’”
His Y partners seem fine with it. “I want to be like Jim,” said Ron Davis. “We’ve played a million times together. I mean, he’s got game.”
“Jim can hang with anybody,” agrees Dave Kirby, one of the roving “ambassadors” at the Y pickleball courts who fills in when a fourth player is needed for doubles and keeps the games moving.
Not bad for a guy who turned 90 on Feb. 6.
Harper’s pickleball teammates celebrated on the big day with treats at courtside and — of course — the usual spirited play.
Evanston born and raised
Born and raised in Evanston, Harper has a strong family connection to the McGaw Y. His father, a local businessman, was a counselor at the Y in the early 1950s. An Evanston native and Evanston Township High School graduate, Jim started going to the Y when he was in sixth grade and spent a lot of time with his friends in the gym and swimming pool. “I was almost born and raised there,” he said with only slight exaggeration. He and his schoolmates formed an informal Y group, the Johnson Club (named after famed Washington Senators pitcher Walter Johnson), numbering a couple of dozen people over the years.
Later, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Jim coached a Y all-star traveling basketball team, the Ramblers, which played against other YMCAs in Chicago and outlying suburbs.
His route out of and back to Evanston was somewhat circuitous. After graduating ETHS in 1953, he went to University of Colorado and majored in business. After a two-year stint in the Coast Guard, he stayed on in San Francisco to work in Shell Chemical Company’s accounting department.
In 1961 he returned to Evanston to help run his dad’s industrial distribution business, known as Product Maintenance Inc., located at 2200 Main St. There were six employees, including father and son, three salespeople and an office administrator. Harper did the business’s accounting. “Not what I had my heart set on when I went to college,” he reflected.
From Sears to NU
In the late 1960s he went to work as a Sears copywriter, then took time off to get a master’s degree in advertising planning at Northwestern University.
During those years, he spent a lot of time playing tennis and racquetball. He was president of the Illinois State Racquetball Association for two years in the 1970s. “We did a lot to develop racquetball throughout the state, including a juniors program for young people that ran as many as four tournaments a month.”
After he got his master’s degree, he went back to Sears, where he worked until 1992 in advertising and research, and retired, while continuing to do some work as an industrial contactor until his final retirement in 2000.
He’d go to Naples, Florida, for the winters and around 2010 he and his wife Judy — (whom he met playing racquetball at the Evanston Court Club in the late 1970s; together they have a blended family of three children and four grandchildren, all in Evanston) — started seeing people playing pickleball. “We went over one day to see what it was about. We had a good time, but we weren’t very good,” he recalled. He and Judy took one pickleball lesson there. But they didn’t start playing in earnest until 2015, first at the Levy Center, then outdoors during the pandemic. He started at the Y in 2023.
‘A great sport’
Despite the usual aches and pains, he added, “By and large pickleball is a great sport for folks our age. You don’t injure yourself as much as you might playing tennis or racquetball.”
Harper tries to get to the pickleball courts, which are set up in the Sebring-Lewis Gymnasium starting at 9.a.m weekdays, on average four times a week, and he plays a hardy 60 to 90 minutes per session.
He likes playing there. “It’s only two blocks from our condo at Maple and Church, so we can walk there. It’s a good place to play indoors. Everybody is very friendly. They don’t care how good or bad you, they just like playing.”
Of the festive Y party on the 6th, he said, “It was lovely, wonderful. I had a great time. It was very special.”
I asked him how he was celebrating wirth his family, and he said there was a big party scheduled the following Saturday where he was expecting more than a dozen people.
“And in the meantime, how about this afternoon?”
“Going to the chiropractor,” he said deadpan.