Archdeacon: ‘His love of Dayton never diminished’

It was September 18, 2021, and Mike “Mickey” Lozan had returned to Dayton from Weymouth, Massachusetts, outside Boston as he did every year this time. And as had been the case for nearly a decade, his close friend Gerie Owen was with him.

Mickey grew up in Dayton’s East End in the late 1940s and 1950s, graduated from Chaminade High School, entered the Air Force in 1962 and eventually began working as an electrical engineer in the Boston area.

He and Gerie were runners, and they’d come here each year for the various races that make up the Air Force Marathon weekend at Wright Patterson AFB.

The COVID pandemic wiped out everything in 2020; and 2021 ended up being turned into a virtual racing only competition.

“Mike never liked virtual running, he wanted to be there,” Gerie said. “We already had the flights and hotel when they canceled the race, but we decided to come anyway. I went online to find a race in a neighboring state and found one at an elementary school in Indiana.”

Gerie and Mickey — as only folks who grew up with him here in Dayton still call him — both won their age categories and got medals.

That afternoon they had tickets to tour the Frank Lloyd Wright House back in Springfield.

As Gerie tells it, Mickey decided to “take the back roads home and we ended up struck in a pig festival as the parade went by.”

She was talking about the Pork Festival in Eaton.

“He decided to take another detour, zig-zagged around and we ended up right in the middle of it again,” she said.

By some accounts, they were in the route of the parade.

“Thanks to his shortcut, we nearly missed the tour,” Gerie said.

As she retold the story the other day, she started to laugh and that’s what’s needed now for everyone who knew Mickey Lozan.

He was supposed to be in the 5K and/or 10K race this weekend at the Air Force Marathon — he was the 10K’s two-time defending champ in the age 80-and-over division — but the only place you found him Saturday was on the homemade memorial bib Gerie had pinned to her race shirt.

Next to a photo I took of Mickey when he won in 2023, she’d printed:

In memory of Mike Lozan

USAF Ret.

Air Force 5K & 10K

Age Group Winner

At the end of August, Mickey was visiting his sister Bev, a 1971 University of Dayton grad, and her husband Max in Vermont when he suddenly became ill after eating pizza. Initially, they thought it was food poisoning.

He insisted on driving the 3½ hours back to Weymouth. He stopped at an urgent care facility, was given an IV for dehydration and went home. One of his daughters, Arianne, lives nearby and she checked in on him.

My wife Kate, who is Mickey’s first cousin, happened to call him to chat — something she rarely did — and that was one of his last communications with the family.

He was found dead at his home on Sept. 1.

He was 82.

He left behind his two daughters, Arianne and Shonna; his beloved younger sister Bev and her husband, Max; Gerie; some cousins and friends back here in Dayton; and an extensive running family in the Boston area.

He was a longtime and quite active member of the Colonial Road Runners, whose membership includes 450 households said club president Dan Inglis.

Many of those members knew Mickey.

A thorough records keeper, his tallies show he ran 442 races when he was in his 60s and 578 when he was in his 70s.

This past June 12, he completed his 500th Fun Run with the club. That’s a record for the three-mile runs the club puts on at different courses three nights a week in the summer and twice a week — as four-milers — in the winter.

He’s annually won a club award for racing in the six different New England states. Over the years he ran half marathons in Hawaii, Alaska and Arizona and, of course, he’s been an Air Force Marathon regular for years.

He also was a Boston Marathon volunteer for 21 years.

What’s remarkable is that he didn’t start running until he was in his early 40s.

“He worked as an engineer and was a single dad when it wasn’t fashionable and there were no support groups,” Bev said.

“My dad raised us from the time I was two and my sister was five and he did his best,” Shonna said.

Bev agreed: “He gave those kids a good life, but maybe not with all the soft touches. “I can remember Ari coming up once with one of her doll babies, saying something like, ‘Daddy, I can’t get the pantyhose on my little doll. Can you help me?’ Try to imagine my brother doing that.”

Shonna laughed as she remembered her dad getting them ready for school: “He didn’t really know what he was doing with little girls’ hair. I remember he bought an electric hair detangler.”

But when it came to science and math — especially science fair projects — Mickey turned into super dad.

“I remember I had to a diorama to do in fourth grade, and we worked on it like you wouldn’t believe,” Shonna said. “It came out absolutely stunning.”

Today, Arianne’s a science teacher, and Shonna runs the floral department at a Whole Foods store in Worcester, Mass. Both have master’s degrees.

“But when the girls hit puberty, my brother had a lot of anxiety and his blood pressure was skyrocketing,” Bev said. “His doctor told him, ‘You’re working and you’re spending all the rest of your time with your girls. You need a hobby. You know what I do? I run.’”

Mickey tackled the sport the way he tackled his daughters’ science projects.

“He was so meticulous about record keeping that he has a big spread sheet that goes all the way back to his first race,” Arianne said. “He wrote down everything about every race…even the registration fees.”

As it turned out, he got far more than his money’s worth from those events:

“Our house had a dining room that we never needed so it became a children’s playroom when we were growing up,” Shonna said. “It was empty when we moved out and then it became Dad’s trophy room.

“Now it has four shelves, a bookcase and hundreds and hundreds of trophies, plaques and medals hanging down.”

‘He was still just Mickey’

Mickey grew up in East Dayton. His first 13 years he and his family — his parents George and Georgia, brother Bogie and later his little sister Bev — lived in the Crane Street home of his Croatian grandmother, Agnes Miljanic.

His Aunt Mary also lived there with her two children: Carol, who was just four months younger than him, and Tommy. The extended family shared two bedrooms and Bogie slept in the hallway. A boarder, Luka, lived in the basement.

“It was a real family affair and Grandma was in charge,” said Carol, who now lives in Troy and has been married to Max Current for 62 years. “We didn’t have much money, but we took care of one another.”

Eventually Mickey and his family moved to Wright Avenue and after high school he joined the Air Force and ended up stationed at Thule Air Base in Greenland.

After his service he graduated with an associate’s degree in electrical engineering from RCA Institutes in New York City and worked for General Electric and then Teradyne.

“He wasn’t an MIT grad, but he worked with MIT people,” Bev said. “He had that kind of brain.”

But, as Carol stressed: “He never forgot where he came from. You’d never have known he lived in a whole different society than he grew up in. Around here, he still was just Mickey.”

He had a routine he followed when he returned here for the marathon.

The Thursday night before the race, he and Gerie had dinner with Carol and her family. Friday he’d visit a longtime buddy and that evening he and Gerie would run the 5K.

Saturday morning, they both ran the 10 K and there were some years Gerie jumped straight into the half marathon, too.

That evening they always came to our house in the Oregon District, and we’d go to one of the neighborhood restaurants for dinner and stories Mickey and Kate shared of family and Dayton from decades past.

On Sundays he’d have coffee with another cousin, Michelle Lozan, and then return to Boston.

Mixed in with those visits were trips to places like the Air Force Museum, Huffman Prairie, Carillon Park and drives around town past schools, churches and old haunts, as well as a visit to Crane Street, though the family home, like most there, had been razed long ago.

“His love of Dayton never diminished,” said Bev, who recently got him two books — Andrew Walsh’s “Lost Dayton Ohio” and Tony Kroeger’s “Hidden History of Dayton Ohio” — that he devoured

In turn, he had brought them into the Air Force Marathon experience.

He convinced Bev and Max, who’d lost his eyesight, to run the 5K race in 2012.

“Mickey helped me figure out how I could be Max’s guide,” Bev said. “We spent three months getting ready. First, we had to figure out what I could use to lead him.”

They each tried holding one end of a short pole. They tried a belt. They even tried holding hands. Finally, they settled on a head band.

“It gave him flexibility to move, and it kept us the right distance apart,” Bev said.

“The race went well; except we didn’t know there was a hill. But the crowd was great. Someone had a drum they beat that motivated us and people were calling out, ‘C’mon Max! You can do it! You can do it!’

“Mickey ran too and when he finished, he came back for us. When we got to the finish line, Max wanted to run past me. I said, ‘I’m your guide, you can’t beat your guide!’”

They ended with a laughing tug of war to the finish, as a grinning Mickey watched from behind.

After a moment’s silence, Bev said quietly: “I’m so glad we did that with my brother.”

A champion of older runners

After she graduated from UD, Bev initially married someone in the Navy and left Dayton. And Mickey was in the Boston area.

To keep them abreast of life and family back here, their mom would call them every Sunday night.

“She was a waitress at Suttemiller’s (the famed supper club) on Main Street and Sunday was her one night off,” Bev said. After their mom died in the 1970s, Mickey took up the tradition and for some 50 years had called Bev every Sunday night at 9 p.m.”

“To prepare for those calls I’d read the sports page and find out what was happening in NASCAR and with any of the Boston teams — the Red Sox, the Patriots, whoever,” she laughed.

“I wanted to be able to talk the talk.”

“And he’d tell me what was going on with the girls or, in later years, about his running.”

The past few years Mickey got into exploring on his electric bike, especially Vermont’s Rail Trails. Although Bev stayed home to care for Max, he shared his trips with her through the videos and photographs he sent her.

In those final days in Vermont, he went on two long bike rides and took Bev and Max by car to see 11 different covered bridges.

A few days later he died.

His wake was held in Weymouth. Lying in a veteran’s casket fitted with USAF insignia, he wore his yellow florescent Colonial Road Runners’ windbreaker over a special Vermont T-shirt.

His daughters put two medals in the casket: one from his running club; the other he’d won at the Air Force Marathon.

At the funeral, Colonial Road Runners president Dan Inglis saluted Mickey in his eulogy, noting how he was a role model to club members and had championed the recognition of other older runners.

In her tribute, Shonna noted: “The three core values of the Air Force are ‘integrity; service before self; and excellence in all we do’….That was my dad.”

Mickey was buried at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne on Cape Cod. Last Wednesday the Colonial Road Runners held a Life Celebration Run in honor of Mickey. Some 65 members took part — each flashing Mickey’s trademark race-ending peace sign before they started. Several other participants joined in remotely.

Bev and Max donned their old Air Force Marathon bibs and — with Max using a walker — reenacted some of their past effort. And, here in Dayton, Carol’s daughter Mindy took part.

Gerie returned to Dayton to run the 5K and 10K on Saturday in Mickey’s honor.

“He was just a good, good guy,” she said. “He always had your back. If you stumbled in a race or you stumbled in life, you could count on him to be there and help you get back up.

“He always helped get you going in the right direction.”

Well….

Unless you’re trying to get to Springfield by way of “the pig festival.”