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PASSING OF A HERO

An ArmoryTrack.com news release has informed us that two-time Olympic high jump medalist John Thomas of Brockton, Massachusetts passed away Tuesday, January 15, 2013 at the age of 71.

A soft-spoken gentleman, Thomas was revered – especially in his native New England – as one of his sport’s most enduring icons.  He was also among a small cadre of personal boyhood heroes of mine, along with former mile record holder Jim Ryun, St. Louis Cardinals baseball star Stan Musial, and St. Louis Hawks basketball All-Star Bob Pettit.  With great fortune I got to know “JT” during my quarter-century living in Boston.  Meeting your heroes later in life and finding that they embody all the qualities you’d  imagined of them as a young fan is one of the pleasures life can offer.  Think of that legacy, alone, in today’s world of Lance Armstrong and Tiger Woods.

The following is from last March 25th’s High Jump Heroes which speaks to the seeds of a life long passion planted in a young boy’s heart by heroes like John Thomas and his great Russian rival Valery Brumel. Continue reading →

A PLACE WE COULD ALL CALL HOME

The Hub

Among its other nicknames Boston is called “The Hub”, or in full, “The Hub of the Universe” — a title conferred by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1858.  While a tad presumptuous given the size and scope of at least one other five-borough burg 220 miles to the southwest, it is nonetheless rather less disputable that The Hub of the running universe in the decade from 1977 to 1986 existed at 372-A Chestnut Hill Avenue in Boston’s Cleveland Circle, the address of the original Bill Rodgers Running Center.

For those too young to remember, even after the Running Boom hit in the wake of Frank Shorter’s Olympic Marathon gold medal in Munich 1972, we still bought our running shoes at regular shoe stores or general sporting goods shops.  Back then there were no such things as running specialty stores.   I remember buying my first pair – I think they were $9.00 ProSpecs – at a little hole-in-the-wall shoe store on Harvard Avenue in Brighton, Mass.  I was just quitting smoking, so I didn’t want to spend too much in case I didn’t like running.

But as one habit was exchanged for another, and the running wave continued to mount, Wesleyan grad Bill Rodgers appeared as a legitimate rival to ex-Yale Eli Shorter. And with that, the sport of foot racing surged into the mainstream of American culture and finally business, too.  There was a booming new market to service.  A generation which had once assembled for ‘sit-ins” during college was now meeting for fitness runs after work.

“Ready, Set, Sweat!” announced the cover of Time Magazine in the summer of 1977.

SI Cover Boy

Following his victories in the Boston Marathon in 1975 & 1977, then the first two (of four straight) New York City Marathon titles – when the five-borough course was still brand new – “Boston Billy” led running into its coming of age.  Thus, with his fame still budding, Bill and his older brother Charlie opened the first Bill Rodgers Running Center in the fall of 1977.

Cleveland Circle was an ideal location, on the western edge of the city, just one mile from the leafy Boston College campus, and terminus for the MBTA’s Green Line “C” trains.  A bustling urban neighborhood, The Circle also happened to join the Boston Marathon route as it passed the 22-mile mark as the route turned onto Beacon Street for the final four mile stretch into town.

I had moved to Cleveland Circle in February of 1976, and by the following spring had begun Runner’s Digest, the first radio talk show devoted to the sport of running. When Bill and Charlie opened the store just two blocks from my apartment, it all but became my production studio. Continue reading →

HIGH JUMP HEROES

Valery Brumel & John Thomas

The two silver maples in our small backyard stood like sentinels some twenty feet apart as they guarded the house with their spreading canopy of green.  During the brutal St. Louis summers when the heat and humidity fought to reach 100F first – then stay the longest – the shade from those old squirrel-bearers represented the fringe ground of relief in a world bounded by torpor and sweat.

Strung at a height of around seven feet between those two trees ran a twisted rusty wire on which my mother used to hang potted flowers, part of the riot of colors she spread in our yard in the blazing summer sun.  But that old wire always represented something more to my agitated young mind than a tree leveller or flower pot holder.

You see, I was a high jump enthusiast in my youth, just as I would become a running enthusiast in my adult years. So whether it was jumping up to touch the top of every door jamb I passed, hopping over the hedge mom had planted out front along the sidewalk, or paying a neighborhood kid a nickel to keep holding a broomstick for me to scissor over, my life was nothing but an extension of my athletic passions. On many a sweltering summer night as I lay open to the endless possibilities ahead, I dreamed of being able to leap over that wire in our backyard, because that was how high my heroes jumped.

During those growing years when athletes were still unseen giants of the imagination, two of my athletic heroes were Olympic high jumpers John Thomas of Boston, and his great rival Valery Brumel of the Soviet Union.  Between the two of them Thomas and Brumel exchanged the high jump world record nine times in the early 1960s (six for Brumel, three for Thomas) as they battled for leaping supremacy when Olympic sport was a highly-charged subtext of the Cold War. Continue reading →

MISSING THE SONG OF THE CITY

    Another small chorus in the song of the city has begun to go silent in the nation’s neighborhoods, as the U.S. Postal Service continues its removal of their iconic blue collection boxes from street corners throughout the country.  It’s been going on for six to eight years, now, as the decline in first-class mail usage, the ubiquity of email, increasing competition from Fedex and others, internet bill-paying, and the cost of collecting a dwindling number of hand-mailed items has made the post office collection box increasingly obsolete.  First installed in the 1850s alongside post offices and on street corners in large cities, their final delivery will certainly be to the Smithsonian Institution, the reliquary of America’s memory in Washington D.C.

Like the neighborhood service stations of old which ballyhooed the cleanliness of their award-winning bathrooms, rang out with the industry of double service bays, and produced both a uniform-clad window washer and pump jockey as cars drove in over the black rubber hoses announcing each arrival with a distinctive “Ding-Ding” bell, the corner mail box was a part of the strains of neighborhood life. Continue reading →

Happy Mother’s Day

     Sitting at the local Starbucks this morning reading the New York Times on the IPhone when a young guy sits down adjacent waiting for his double mocha latte, or somesuch.  The music is particularly pulse pounding, especially for 8 a.m.  I mention this in passing.

     “Yeah,” he agrees. “Kinda strange.”

     “Maybe they’re trying to pump us up for Mother’s Day,” I suggest.

     “Maybe,” he considers.  “This is my wife’s first Mother’s Day since our baby was born.”

     “So you’ll need the energy, then.”

     He laughed.  “I had to keep telling myself, you can’t forget this Mother’s Day.”

     “It’s one of the differences between men and women,” I proffer.  “My dad was in the jewelery business and, cynic that he was, he always used to tell me, ”Tone, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Christmas, it’s all marketing.’  

     “Red letter days generally mean more to women than men,” I continued.  “And woe is the man who manifests that cynicism openly. But consider the evidence.  Holidays now stretch from January to December in an unbroken line of sales extravaganzas.”

       His name was called, and we said so long.  I wished him and his wife Happy Mother’s Day, then prepared to drive north to Los Angeles with Toya to spend the day with my own dear mother-in-law.  Can’t be cynical about everything.

     Mothers come in all shapes, sizes, and ages.  Fortunately, they all fit neatly into the hearts of those who love them.

END