EDDIE “THE SHEIK” GARDNER OF SEATTLE

Eddie Gardner was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1898, more than 30 years after the end of the Civil War. As a black family, the Gardners were locked into a system of Jim Crow segregation that condemned them to a permanent underclass. Shortly after his birth, the family fled to the West, first to Colorado, then to Washington State, and joined the hodgepodge of immigrants that peopled the state.

In his 20s, Gardner had a job servicing steam boilers and became a familiar face to legions of Seattleites as he trained for the annual 10-mile Washington State championship held on the Fourth of July. He wore white shorts, a sleeveless white shirt, and a white towel tied around his head, giving him the look of a desert sheik. As he trained, people would cry “Oh, you Sheik.”? The name stuck, and Gardner became the Sheik of Seattle. Eddie won the 10-mile championship three times before entering the 1928 bunion race.

During the derby, Gardner ran with an effortless, graceful stride, but he couldn’t seem to pace himself during the daily stage races. He would win one stage only to struggle through the next. When Route 66 took the derby to the gates of the Old South in Texas, alarm bells went off among southern whites. Blacks were not supposed to compete against whites, let alone beat them. Across Texas, Gardner and the other blacks were hounded and threatened. Finally, by Oklahoma, Gardner had had enough. He decided to forget the death threats and run his race. He went on to win many of the remaining stage races. He earned the thanks of the

EI Reno Carnegie Library

A Missouri’s John Gober (#36) and Eddie “The Shiek” Gardner (#165) on Route 66.

thousands of blacks who he passed on the long road to New York. The Sheik was a star of hope to black America and was embraced by the citizens of Seattle for his gutsy eighth-place finish.

The exploits of Payne, Salo, Joyce, and Gardner became daily reading for the millions of fans who followed their progress in their local papers, thanks to a corps of syndicated sportswriters and big-city reporters who accompanied the derby. Their gritty example of courage and determination inspired local communities to hold their own one- to two-day derbies.

THE GREAT PORT TOWNSEND TO PORT ANGELES BUNION DERBY

In the Olympic Peninsula in the northwest corner of Washington State, the town fathers of two seaside towns, Port Townsend and Port Angeles, held their own 52-mile Bunion Derby on May 1, 1929, with a $100 prize for the winner. These communities were rough-cut places, recently emerged from virgin forests. These towns survived from the land—farming and cutting, processing, and shipping timber. Twenty-two of their sons—one woman signed up but thought better of the idea—lined up in Port Townsend for the 52-mile trek to Port Angeles.

Most of the contestants were in their 20s. They worked with their hands as mill workers, loggers, farmers, and construction workers. An exception was Ernest Nelson, a crewman on a Coast Guard cutter based in Port Angeles. This was not a race for college or high school athletes since the contestants were racing for cash prizes. In those days, amateur athletes were prohibited from accepting prize money or participating in a professional event. This race then was for the everyday working stiffs who could use an extra hundred bucks in their pockets.

Few of the men who gathered at the start had trained for the event. It was common knowledge that training over 30 miles a week for endurance events strained the heart and that it was better simply to run the distance. They didn’t look much like marathoners: they wore ill-fitting clothes and tennis shoes but were confident that a life spent plowing fields or felling trees would get them through the long miles.

The race seemed easy at the start. It was an event that no one wanted to miss. The 22 starters were surrounded by a thousand well-wishers who jammed Port Townsend’s downtown streets. A military band from nearby Fort Worden serenaded the men with martial tunes. The event was broadcast live by Seattle’s KOMO radio. The mayors of three coastal towns on the route, Port Townsend, Sequim, and Port Angeles, made grand speeches and then briefly paced the runners in their own brief mayors’ race.

After the starting gun, the runners soon saw that it would take more than music and speeches to get them through the race. Eleven men dropped out along the

way, and most of the survivors suffered from severe muscle cramps and massive blisters. First-place winner John Gehrke, a 32-year-old gravel pit worker from Port Angeles, crossed the line with blisters the size of silver dollars in 9 hours, 22 minutes. He had to be carried to the banquet hall to receive his cash prize. The second-place prize went to the coast guardsman Ernest Nelson, who kept up a constant dogtrot during the race.

The last man to finish was Tony Sofie Jr. of Port Townsend. By about the 40th mile, Sofie had cut his feet to ribbons, and blood oozed out of his shoes every time he took a step. He had crashed through the proverbial marathon Wall on many occasions. Close to collapse, he looked at a nearby field and saw a threelegged dog herding cattle. Sofie decided that if a dog could work without a leg, he should be able to finish the derby on his two. He pulled up his last ounce of courage, staggered through the last 10 miles, then fainted after he crossed the finish line. He spent the next two days in a Port Angeles hotel trying to recover from the ordeal.

These men were not forsaken on the long, lonely miles to the finish. Virtually the entire community turned out to cheer them along. Friends and neighbors lined the course and passed out food and drinks to the exhausted men.?

CONWAY’S GREAT TRANS-COUNTY FOOTRACE

Inspired by Andy Payne’s performance, the Ozark mountain-farming town of Conway, Missouri, held its own 86-mile, two-day “trans-county footrace.” It consisted of a one-day, 43-mile race to nearby Springfield, Missouri, with a return run the next day. The town fathers opened the race to all physically fit “white male athletes” within a 30-mile radius of Conway.‘ This reflected the tenor of the times, when strict segregation was the law of the land.

Under a scorching sun, 58 men lined up for the start of the two-day event, lured in part by a $150 cash prize and a bevy of free merchandise from local merchants. The first married finisher received an Ozark mattress; the first farmer to cross the line received a bushel of 99 percent pure timothy hayseed.

The men who vied for these prizes were much like the men from Washington State—blue-collar, roll-up-your-sleeves guys. And like their brothers from the Northwest, most were woefully unprepared for the task at hand. Most men “had given up the ghost” long before the runners reached the outskirts of Springfield.

Eighteen men completed the course, including 59-year-old Frank Smith of Conway. William Perryman, a 29-year-old farmer and father of three, had the biggest payday, taking home the first-place cash prize, the new Ozark mattress, and the bushel of hayseed. The Conway Weekly Record noted, “Probably the largest crowd ever gathered up in Conway” was on hand to witness the finish of

the race.> The residents of Conway, like those on the Olympic Peninsula, turned out in force to support the contestants.

GUTHRIE TO LANGSTON MARATHON

Oklahoma’s black community also caught Bunion Derby fever and held a race of its own, an abbreviated 14-mile run from Guthrie to Langston. Black athletes from across the state converged on Guthrie for a shot at the $25 first-place prize. El Reno sprinter Ned Gooden led the contest for eight miles before he collapsed like a “punctured automobile tire.”° The aptly named P. E. Jones of Oklahoma City went on to win the race in | hour, 11 seconds, and Kenny Booker of Tulsa took second. Throngs of black supporters packed the road from Guthrie to Langston.

Soon after the race, the Reverend E. J. Cain of Okalahoma City began to organize a 25-day stage race from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Houston, Texas, with $1,000 in gold as prize money. Billed as “The First Great Modern Marathon Contest,” or alternatively “The Great Olympian Marathon Contest,” the Reverend Cain restricted entry to “any Negro boy between 12 and 25 years of age,” provided they first paid a $7.50 entrance fee.’ The race had not gotten past the planning stages when Oklahoma’s African American newspaper, the Black Dispatch, found the reverend to be of dubious moral character and advised its readers to avoid the