The Fort Hill community lost a member of the family on Friday. Many lost a favorite uncle; many more a beloved brother. Fort Hill High School lost a loving son.

I think Jim Manges, who passed away on Friday at the age of 79, would have liked that — to be known as a loving son of Fort Hill High School and her community, because that’s what he was, dating back to the days when he entered Fort Hill as a seventh-grader and went on to become one of the most beloved students, faculty members, coaches and friends to ever pass through Fort Hill’s doors.

To know Jimmy Manges was to love him, because to know Jimmy Manges was to be loved first. He was one of the gang when being one of the gang meant going home-to-home every morning in South Cumberland to gather your pals, and walk everywhere on God’s green earth with them. It meant playing ball with them all day long, going to the movies with them, living the Avenue with them, going to school with them, walking home from school with them, and not going home yourself at the end of the day until all of the girls had been escorted home safe and sound.

Jim Manges loved his friends, and he had so much faith and belief in every one of them. He had a quality of goodness to him that was so rare it’s downright troubling all of us don’t have it. He made having it look so easy and natural; and to him, it was easy and natural, because that goodness is who Jimmy Manges was.

My generation grew up hearing the stories about Jimmy Manges, who earned only 11 letters at Fort Hill because there were only four sports for him to play. Think about that. Eleven letters, playing football, baseball and basketball, and running track. He was the triple-threat football player under Coach Bill Hahn, and the great and wonderful basketball and baseball player under Coach Bobby Cavanaugh. In fact, Jimmy Manges helped lead the Sentinels to a state championship in basketball, saying on more than one occasion, “I knew if I could get the ball to Deanie (Mel Dean) or Charlie (Lattimer), there was no way we weren’t going to win.”

His teammates likely felt the same way about him, but, again, Jimmy Manges never worried about Jimmy Manges; he was always so selfless. It was his responsibility, he felt — his duty — to make sure those around him were the ones who were taken care of. There couldn’t have been a finer teammate than Jimmy Manges. Or a finer pal.

Jimmy Manges was always an “Aw, shucks” kind of fellow. Never one to seek the limelight, the limelight often found him as you can never fool your friends, your classmates, your teachers, your coaches or Principal Victor Heisey. For not only was Jimmy Manges the Hazelwood Award recipient for being the best athlete at Fort Hill, he was also voted Outstanding Boy of the Class of 1948, with both votes by the Fort Hill student body.

After college, and after teaching and coaching at Strausburg, LaSalle and Beall, Coach Manges returned home to Fort Hill where he taught math and coached football for his old teammate and fellow South Ender Charlie Lattimer. Along with Dick Bittner, Ken Poling and later Glenn Cross, Coach Manges helped to make up one of the finest varsity football coaching staffs you’ll ever see.

Coach Manges coached the backs and the secondary, and while coaches Lattimer and Bittner, and later Cross, were normally the hard-driving taskmasters of the group, Coach Manges was the levity that everybody needed. If you had just gotten your head bitten off in Coach Bittner’s station, and then again by Coach Lattimer as you were changing stations running from one end of the field to the other, you could rest assured that a friendly face and warm embrace would be waiting for you at Coach Manges’ station. He just had a way of making you feel at home and making you believe we were doing it the right way, and that everything was going to be all right.

Sure, he would bring yesterday’s practice schedule to today’s practice every now and then, and, yes, he did have some adventures with some names. For instance, he often called Bill Feeney “Terry,” because he had previously coached Bill’s oldest brother Terry. And he would call me “Bill” from time to time, because he grew up with my two uncles, both named Bill Burke. In fact, one time he called me Bill, which I just naturally reacted to by that time, but then caught himself and said, “Oh, hell, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean your mother’s brother; I meant your dad’s brother this time.”

And that’s the kind of guy he was. He was there to teach; he was there to help, to assure and to share a friendly moment when the situation called for it, which, with Coach Manges was pretty much every situation. He was our coach, and we respected him; but he was like our uncle, too, and we loved him.

Then in 1984, Dick Bittner called, and said, “Jimmy, we’re getting the band back together,” or something along those lines as Coach Bittner had come out of retirement to be the head football coach at Fort Hill. And for two years, Coach Bittner got the Sentinels out of the funk they had been in, leading them to a two-year split with Allegany, after the Campers had beaten them four in a row (they only played once a year then) and guided Fort Hill back to the state playoffs. And right along Coach Bittner’s side was his old pal, Jimmy Manges, who gladly came out of coaching retirement as well to help teach another generation what it truly means to be a loving son of Fort Hill.

Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.