Leave it to Bob Timmons to create major headlines at least once every 40 years.

Of course, the beloved former Kansas University track coaching icon was an eminently successful high school coach before 1965. Then he led athletes great and small to national and international honors for 23 years.

He has kept involved in the arts as a writer and sculptor, remains active internationally in church activities and in his down-time is just a doggone notable American citizen.

You can’t tabulate how much Timmie and wife Pat have contributed to the university and the community for umpteen years. Just for the heck of it, though, they’ve now deeded to the university their scenic 100-acre Rim Rock Farm, where cross-country racing has touched thousands of lives in such positive ways.

Experts estimate the gift is worth something like $500,000. Heck, that might even earn Bob and Pat 10 or 20 extra points under the new KU football-basketball priority-seating plans.

How appropriate that the Timmons gift came just about a week before another Kansas Relays spectacle will unfold in and around KU’s Memorial Stadium. Timmie and the late Bill Easton before him shed tears and sweat blood for eons while battling obstacles like a cinder track that too often was soggy.

Things got better when ex-trackman Jim Hershberger made possible an all-weather oval about 1970. But Easton and Timmie — with the aid of superstars Wes Santee and Jim Ryun — gave the Relays a luster it has been trying to regain for a long, long time.

In a moment, back to that “40 years ago” headline Timmons helped create. It was a doozy. But first:

This year, Tim Weaver and the Relays chiefs have cranked up a Gold Zone feature for April 23 that will telescope big events into a more compact Saturday format and show off the likes of Maurice Greene, Marion Jones and Stacy Dragila. It could open the door for a “return to those thrilling days of yesteryear,” as the Lone Ranger announcer used to declare.

What a great tribute that would be to Bill and Adamarie Easton and Bob and Pat Timmons who had so much to do with getting us where we are. We lost Bill in 1997, but the incomparable Ada still is a live wire in Georgia.

You wouldn’t expect two pole vault boxes, total cost $60, to create the conflict and the resolution they did in 1965, resulting in Easton’s ouster and Timmons’s installation as KU’s head coach. But without the Big Box Blowup, KU might never have been blessed by the rich Timmons legacy.

The aggressive Easton and hard-nosed athletic director Wade Stinson hadn’t been lovey-dovey for a long time, often feuding over money and administrative issues. Bill ordered the vault boxes which he said the NCAA required for the Kansas Relays of 1965. Stinson in a brash show of authority nixed them and had them sent back. Bill intercepted the packages at an express office and installed the boxes. More bicker, bicker.

Wade canned Easton three days after the Relays; Bill said he’d quit. There was a tremendous uprising of athletes, students and fans against Stinson demanding that Easton be reinstated.

Timmons had been Easton’s assistant in 1964-65, coming from a great Wichita East career that featured a kid named Jim Ryun as his bell-cow. But Timmie had accepted the Oregon State head coach job and had already gone to Corvallis. Further, the celebrated Ryun, still in high school, had said he intended to follow Timmie to Oregon State.

As things smoldered here, the determined Stinson quickly tore after Timmons to return. Timmie, an old World War II combat Marine whose heart and soul are cored by loyalty, refused to accept as long as there was the slightest chance Easton would be retained. Stinson kept calling and insisting the Easton Era was officially kaput.

“I’d been in Corvallis only about a week and I never got off the phone,” Timmie recalls. “When I finally saw it was over, I decided to return” (to KU’s everlasting benefit). Ryun had committed to OSU but after a month and some negotiating he was released to come to Kansas with mentor Timmons.

The Easton-Stinson conflict simmered for quite a while on a “he said — he said” basis and Timmons the peacemaker often felt caught in a maelstrom. Hard feelings seemed likely to endure until Easton learned just how hard Timmie had campaigned to get Stinson to keep Bill as coach. Things mellowed as time passed and that’s a blessing, because Bob and Bill had been close associates. Stinson also has died.

Easton always had lots of irons in the fire, including a summer camp in Minnesota. He and Ada were by no means hurting. Bill remained on the physical education faculty at KU, and wound up as coach of the Mexico track outfit in the 1968 Olympics.

Maybe the greatest thrill he and Ada ever had was watching ex-Jayhawk Billy Mills become the first American ever to win the Olympic 10,000-meter run, and in record time, in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo.

The driven Bill and the sensitive Billy had also had periodic run-ins. Whatever animosity there was, it vaporized that day when an emotional Easton embraced Mills and called him “the greatest Jayhawker of them all.”

After the Stinson-Easton-Timmons headline-creating triad of April ’65, the goal-oriented but tender Timmons started getting things done as only he can. By the time he retired in 1988 his teams had registered 13 Big Eight indoor and 14 Big Eight outdoor titles, three NCAA indoor track titles and a tie for the 1970 NCAA outdoor championship. He refused to sign foreign athletes, saying scholarship benefits should go to with American kids.

He’s done charity work for his church in Mexico and the Orient and risked a terrible fate by smuggling Bibles into no-god parts of China. Tales of such harrowing experiences make your hair bristle.

The Little Marine has overcome countless health problems including heart trouble and a stroke and has always managed to bounce back to display even another talent most never suspected he had. Now comes this great gift of Rim Rock Farm to the university that he and Pat, a former Jayhawk cheerleader, love so deeply.

Yep, Timmie has been involved in two major stories 40 years apart. But it’s his consistent contributions to society before, during and, hopefully, for a long time to come which glisten most brightly on his incredible dossier. If those $60 vault boxes weren’t the main reasons Bob was brought back, they sure were among ’em.