Hyman Perlo
	By Adam   Bernstein Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, April 27, 2006
Hyman Perlo, 83, a standout Washington basketball player at the dawn of   World War II who became a community relations executive for the Capital Centre and the Bullets basketball franchise, died April 26 at his home in Kensington. He had bladder cancer.
Though only 5 feet 10 inches tall and a master of the now-archaic two-handed set shot, Mr. Perlo was among the District's most revered athletes of the late 1930s and early '40s.
His skill as team member and captain of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders prompted Basketball Hall of Fame coach Red Auerbach, who briefly coached at Roosevelt, to once recall him as "the greatest high school player in his day.
Besides his many local honors, including all-Met for three years, Mr. Perlo was selected in 1940 and 1941 as the outstanding Southern high school basketball player in the Duke-Durham scholastic basketball tournament.
He was offered more than 50 college scholarships upon graduating from Roosevelt in 1941, but after briefly attending George Washington University, he enlisted in the Army paratroopers during World War II.
He saw combat in Italy and once spent 69 days in a foxhole in Anzio. He received the Silver Star for swimming injured soldiers across a river to safety despite the enemy fire around him. Later, he was shot in the leg, and this ended his athletic career.
I've never cursed my fate, he said. I was thankful to come back alive.
Hyman Myer Perlo was born in Durham, N.C., on Oct. 8, 1922. His family relocated to Washington in 1925 and started a women's fashion boutique. Mr. Perlo later worked at the shop until it burned during the city's riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
After he returned from the war, Mr. Perlo graduated from GWU with a bachelor's degree in education and spent about a decade as director of athletics at the Jewish Community Center in Washington.
In the 1960s, he supervised a jobs training program at the Boys' Junior-Senior High School for emotionally disturbed boys. He also was a director at the Buffalo Gap summer camp in West Virginia, using his connections to bring in guests such as Auerbach, then the general manager of the Boston Celtics, and Wes Unseld, then a player for the Baltimore Bullets.
In 1968, Mr. Perlo went to work for sports executive Abe Pollin, a fellow member of Roosevelt's class of 1941 who owned the Bullets. Pollin hired his friend to do public relations work and handle special functions. When Pollin's Capital Centre was built in Landover in 1973, Mr. Perlo's portfolio grew to include boxing promotion at the complex.
After the Bullets moved to Washington, Mr. Perlo organized a club of players' wives to visit children in hospitals and special education programs. He also distributed thousands of tickets to residents of veterans' homes, arranged for their transportation and ensured their well-being during the game.
Those old soldiers are rotting away in their wheelchairs, he once told The Washington Post. They come here and they feel like part of the community.
Before retiring in 1992, he also led for many years the Bullets' summer clinics, where he tried to balance the children's often unrealistic ambitions of basketball stardom by reminding them of the importance of academics.
He was fond of quoting Shakespeare, Yeats and lyrics from songs popularized by Frank Sinatra.
Survivors include his wife of 63 years, Edith Miller Perlo of Kensington; two daughters, Lisa Paul of Pikesville and Carla Perlo of Takoma Park; three grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
His late brother, Phillip Perlo, once played for the Houston Oilers football team.