With the Red Sox getting thumped by the hated Yankees in the Bronx and the Patriots stumbling through the kind of September that conjures memories of the Rod Rust era (nice man; anemic teams), Boston could use a good sports story right now. Fortunately, one arrived in my inbox this morning. An email from T.K. Skenderian sent me back nearly fifty years, to a cool October day on Charles Street, a handful of faded photographs, and a moment I didn’t realize would shape the rest of my life.

T.K. heads up publicity for Conventures, the sports marketing company his mother, Dusty Rhodes, founded half a century ago. Among Conventures’ first big events was the inaugural Boston Bonne Bell 10K, the championship race of the Bonne Bell 10K Road Race Series created by Jess Bell, president of Bonne Bell, the Cleveland-area cosmetics firm whose sponsorship helped fuel some of the earliest women’s road races in America.

On Saturday, October 10, the same date as the first race, what’s now known as the Boston 10K for Women will celebrate its 50th running, another major milestone in the history of women’s sports.

Looking at those old photos, I can still see a younger version of myself, long hair and all, standing at a microphone on Charles Street. I didn’t know it then — though I had hopes — but I was standing at the start of a career.

The Call

I had launched Runner’s Digest on May 24, 1977, the first radio show in the country devoted to running. The show was barely five months in when Dusty called. She had a new women’s 10K coming up, and she wanted someone to introduce a couple of guests to the crowd: Bill Rodgers, the reigning king of American road racing, and Dr. Rob Roy McGregor, the famed Boston podiatrist who had kept half the region’s runners on their feet.

It was a modest assignment. No problem. I knew both men well. I ran with Bill often, and Rob Roy was a regular guest on my show.

The Scene on Charles Street

The race started on Memorial Drive in Cambridge on Monday, October 10, 1977, and finished on Charles Street between the Public Garden and the Common. That’s where we set up, behind a thin red rope, under a bouquet of green-and-white balloons, with the brick and glass of downtown Boston rising behind us.

It was just the second all-women’s road race in the country, following the Mini Marathon 10K that had begun in New York’s Central Park in 1972. Women had been fighting for a place on the starting line for years. Given the opportunity, more than 2,000 showed up on that October morning.

The photographs here aren’t from that first race—they were taken circa 1979—but they capture the people and atmosphere of those early Bonne Bell years.

Massachusetts Governor Edward J. King had come down from the State House, just up Beacon Street, in a dark suit. Half in the frame at the left is Johnny Kelley the Elder, winner of the Boston Marathon in 1935 and 1945, holding the eponymous bell by its clapper. And wearing bib number 79 is Ruth Rothfarb of Cambridge, who took up running in her seventies and went on to run marathons into her eighties. She was among the eldest women in the field, if not the eldest, and as far as I could tell, one of the most studious.

There was a sense of history in the air. But when something new begins, you rarely know it’s history. You only know it feels important.

The Walkie-Talkie

Here is where the modest assignment turned into something else.

My co-host on Runner’s Digest, Todd Miller, was riding in the lead vehicle. Before the start I handed him a walkie-talkie and told him to call back to me at the finish with whatever was happening up front. Todd and I were students of the sport. We knew there was a real race shaping up, and we didn’t want the people at the finish waiting in silence for it.

The competition came down to a duel between Lynn Jennings, the 17-year-old high school prodigy out of Harvard, Massachusetts, and Patti Lyons of Quincy, the top road racer in New England and arguably in the country. Todd’s reports crackled in from the race course, and I relayed them to the crowd on Charles Street, while filling in the racer’s bios. Finally, I just held my walkie-talkie up to the microphone and let people hear Todd for themselves. He was always an enthusiastic race caller. People who had come to cheer for a friend or a daughter suddenly had a stirring race to follow, with two local legends battling for supremacy.

Lynn got the better of Patti that day and added five more titles over the years. Patti brought home the top prize three years later, in 1980.

“Can You Come Do That at Our Race?”

After the finish, four or five different people must have approached Todd and me with essentially the same question: could we come do that at their race?

That was it. No plan, no audition, no job description. Just a spur-of-the-moment idea, a couple of walkie-talkies, and a crowd that we thought needed to know what was happening out on the course. Some careers begin with a strategy. Mine began with a radio handset and a hunch that spectators deserved and would welcome a race story.

Everything that followed traces back to that morning on Charles Street: the finish lines and broadcast booths, Boston, New York, Chicago, Honolulu, and so many more. Nearly five decades of calling a sport that has never lost its hold on me. I still find it as intriguing today as I did on October 10, 1977.

Fifty Years On

The race has changed names and sponsors, from Bonne Bell to Tufts Health Plan to Reebok to what it is today. But Dusty and her Conventures team have conducted it every year, overseeing the show like a road racing Arthur Fiedler, the longest-serving female road race director in the world. This year, Dusty will sound the starting horn as part of her race management responsibilities.

As the years passed, women took over the announcing job. Most years, I joined a crowd of husbands, boyfriends, coaches, and track club teammates gathered on the Tommy Leonard Bridge outside the Eliot Lounge near five miles to cheer on the remarkable Boston-area women who made this race their own. More than once, we’d look at one another and wish someone would organize a men’s race on the same Bonne Bell course. It was one of the great road-racing layouts in New England, the stage for countless fast times and memorable battles. Yet there was something fitting about that, too. For one day each October, the spotlight belonged entirely to the women.

This year, seven women who ran that first race in 1977 and have run every edition since will line up again. I can’t think of a better measure of what Dusty built. 7,500 runners will join them.

So thank you, Dusty. And thank you Jess Bell, Ruth Rothfarb, Lynn, Patti, Todd, and all those women who turned a modest morning assignment into the beginning of my life’s work.

I can’t believe it’s been fifty years. Then again, doing what you love always makes the calendar pages flutter like a caffeinated hummingbird.

END