Paul Bass Photo
Bill Dixon at WNHH FM (above); Rally the Raven, with tail intact (below).
Bill Dixon has one regret: What happened to Rally the Raven’s tail.
Dixon spoke about that regret while looking back on a 42-year career running youth rec programs and fighting fires for the City of New Haven.
Dixon, who’s 68, retired this fall from his double public-service career. This past Thursday night hundreds of New Haveners attended a gala in his honor to thank him for making a difference in thousands of young people’s lives over his career.
Middle-school, high-school, and college basketball and baseball and hockey programs continue running decades after Dixon founded them and kept them running. He brought sponsors, professional athletes, volunteers, pretty much people from all over town into the enterprise of making sure young people had productive, fun ways to learn how to play well with others and focus on productive lives. He did whatever it took to bring people to the field or the gym and make sure it was ready.
“If the gym floor had to be swept, I swept the floor. I don’t need the custodians. If the clock was not operating, get a ladder. What’s the Nike logo? ‘Just do it.’ I just did it. I may have pissed off some unions and stuff like that, but I didn’t care. It was about kids,” Dixon reflected Tuesday during a career-retrospective interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
Dixon, who grew up in Bridgeport’s Beardsley Terrace projects, began working with Elm Haven kids at Winchester School in the mid-1970s while an undergraduate recreation major at Southern Connecticut State (then-) College. By 1980 he was coaching women’s basketball at Quinnipiac and forming a still-existing summer hoops league for collegiate women.
Long before the WNBA and UConn Huskies finally put female athletes in the limelight, Dixon focused on making basketball opportunities available to girls and young women.
The only regret he mentioned during the interview involved the minor-league New Haven Ravens baseball team mascot.
One summer day he invited the costumed Rally Raven to visit the hundreds of kids at a summer sports camp Dixon ran on the Green.
“If you see Rally,” Dixon told the kids from the Green summer stage, “go see him, because he’s got tickets for baseball games.”
When Rally showed up, a kid spotted him and called out. The kids mobbed him. Dixon was busy on other tasks, didn’t notice.
A half-hour later, a Ravens employee approached him. “We have to take Rally back to headquarters.” The kids were so enthusiastic about touching the larger-than life stuffie, that the tail was now torn off, and the costume badly ruffled.
“I felt bad for the kid in the costume,” Dixon said. “But it was a learning experience.”
Click on the video below to watch the full interview with Bill Dixon on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven,” including fires he’ll never forget fighting, his work helping coordinate New Haven’s Special Olympics games, his role in reviving ice skating and hockey lessons for middle-schools at Walker Rink, and his plans for the next stage in his life. (Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”)