Sparty
Khris Spartachino did not fight dinosaurs. What he did do is better, and it is why the tennis courts carry his name.
Ask a Rockbeach student who Khris Spartachino was and you will be told, with a straight face, that he founded Osprey in 1697 after fighting off dinosaurs and an alien invasion.
Kids say the craziest things. This particular one has been handed down long enough that a surprising number of adults half believe it, and a surprising number of families tell it at dinner as a family story, and correcting it flatly is the kind of thing that makes a person no friends at all. Laugh first. Then give them the real version, which is better.
What he actually did
He was an Osprey man in the 1930s, and what he built first was clubs for returning troops. Rooms. Somewhere a man could sit down, have a cocktail, hear good music, and tell old stories to people who had been where he had been.
That is the whole business. It made him rich.
Afterwards he moved into automotive repair shops and absolutely crushed it, which made him rich a second time, in a decade when a great many people managed neither.
The gift, and the other gift
His daughter came to Rockbeach and played tennis. That is why Spartachino Courts carry his name and not something larger — the man gave this school twenty-seven million dollars, which stood as the largest gift in Rockbeach history for a very long time, and it bought the tennis courts, because that is where his daughter was.
Then in 1940 he gave two hundred and seventy-five million dollars to found a school outright, and they renamed it in his honor.
That school is Spartachino — the Lions, in Massachusetts. They are in the Seaboard Conference. Rockbeach plays them in December.
From A Book of Rockbeach History.