Home. Just one plane ride and one train ride away, followed by a five-mile zoom in my pal George Terry’s powerful Pontiac. Then, on Monday morning, spit-spot, I’ll be stationed behind my Fitch Junior High School teacher’s desk. And my round-faced, thumbs-up principal, John Bates, will look in to inquire about the success of our photography mission. John and his Groton Rotary Club buddies packed me off with a new camera and a dozen rolls of film, plus a greeting scroll that I duly delivered to the Melbourne Rotary chapter. I’m sure to have my lunch periods, and probably sixth periods too, commandeered for civic purposes for months to come.

I began my first year of teaching (“Reading”) blessed by an elated Groton superintendent. Yale graduate Dr. Lewis Allbee well understood the public relations value of signing on an Olympian.

Isag onto a bench, my luggage clunking on the tile floor. I wonder if I should just pull up the stakes so recently set in the town across the river from my hometown. Tell Jessie to pack and get set to fly?

I feel exhausted, not only from the Melbourne adventure, but drained of getup-and-go through every pore. Tired of the road-racing demon that has possessed me for 10 years. Tired of the barely begun teaching grind.

My New York—bound plane is loading. En route to the ticketer, I sidetrack to a pay phone.

A thousand miles away, in Genevieve’s house, Jessie picks up.

“T’ll be in New London at 2:00. That’s a.m. Oh yeah. . . tired,” I tell her. “Come on home,” Jessie says.

FIRST TRAINING DAY, 1957

Call the predawn morning of January 2, 1957 custom-made for the most unhinged of running fools. Snow came to Groton yesterday. On Shennecossett Road, where I jog out of warm-bed sleep toward the golf course rendezvous George Terry and Ihave set, it persists, plow-scored and compressed. An eightdegree-above-zero wind frisks every fiber of my old army khaki pants and hooded cotton sweatshirt. Two minutes more and I spot my friend jogging in place inside a streetlight’s amber cone. Seeing me, he grins his trademark wry grin and asks, “Kind of hoping I wouldn’t make it, lad?”

“What? On this perfect morning?”

And we’re off over the golf course’s low boulder wall, k-shish! into a snowdrift, then running south along the wind-scoured fairway’s edge. It’s our first workout of the first training day of our running year 1957. And if we peer hard enough into the dark and cold, we both believe we will see a bright April day when what we’re doing now will have been raised from the realm of madness. In a way, it seems to me, George and I are the Boston Marathon’s

answer to the Corsican Brothers. Running, we sense each other’s joy and distress. We’re both on the rebound with something to prove. Last Patriots’ Day, George crumbled after setting checkpoint records through Natick. All his athletic eggs cracked in that basket. He’s been toiling up arocky comeback trail ever since.

And me, I “retired” after my Melbourne crash last month, only to unretire on the condition that George stand honestly behind his consoling words: “Melbourne was a fluke. You have to prove that.”

We’ re about a mile along now, still heading south and downhill, the wind off the nearby Thames River carrying the sweetly acrid odor of a iM pharmaceutical company’s smokestacks. Any YELENAK

At 5:45 a.M., with as yet no hint of dawn, a sky full of stars seems itself to shiver. We’re getting into the swing of it now—familiars of all weathers, brothers of the night. I think my hands in their cotton gloves may start to feel toasty soon.

“Are your shoelaces frozen?” George asks.

“Think so.”

“T forgot to wear socks,” he says.

“Jee-eez!”

“Abh, you kind of get used to it.”

Yes, we’re doing okay, seeing better than usual because of the snow glow, taking the drifts exuberantly.

“Two laps is all, today,” George pronounces. “We’re lucky to do 25 minutes a lap in this stuff.”

“Hey, George,” I tack. “Exactly what the hell are we doing?”

“Training, lad. To win Boston,” he says, as if there were no other possible answer.

“All right,” I say. “But let’s, for argument’s sake, say we crap out.”

“Then, we crap out” says George. “ People’!] feel sorry for us for a couple of days because we were so nutty and then move on and forget it.”

A hundred yards later he adds, ““We both have that good one waiting. You have to believe it. One of us can win this year.”

“Okay. What about the other one?”

“He can win the next year,” George says, with the Don’t-you-see? tone of one spelling the obvious out for a kid.

At the golf course’s southern boundary we execute a 90-degree turn eastward. The cruel wind at once transforms itself into a giant’s assisting palm at our backs. I fix on a point just above the horizon to see Venus, morning star of ancient mariners, casting her serene and reassuring light.

GOOD FRIDAY, 1957

Supper at Laura Harlow’s home on the Watertown-Belmont, Massachusetts, town line is a private affair. The supper hour spells relief from the day’s busyness for Laura, who is a Kendall Company department manager; and for her fiancé, 49-year-old Johnny A. Kelley, a Boston Edison Company maintenance worker. The Boston Edison Company never before employed such a maintenance man. It’s a safe bet they never will again. Johnny won the 1935 and 1945 Boston Marathons. After his work day is done, he quite literally lives to run.

Road racing, that athletic hybrid that flourishes in New England’s cranky climate, has brought Johnny a share of fame in his city, if no commensurate amount of money. He is so adulated that were he to signal his wish to be mayor, the office would be his. But why bother? Racing on Boston’s streets, he can have his cake and eat it, too. Still, a life on the run must have its refuge.

Last marathon eve, the once-widowed, once-divorced “king” of the road took in a movie. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he found them straying to the attractive woman a couple of seats away.

It was one of those storied romantic coincidences. Laura Harlow had been Johnny A. Kelley’s Arlington High School classmate some 30 years before.

So at supper tonight, Good Friday, April 19, 1957, in Laura Harlow’s mother’s home, conversation naturally turns to Johnny and Laura’s forthcoming marriage.

“Circle the date, kid,” Johnny instructs me.

Laura brings in the main course. Her frail, smiling mother gets first serving. The chiseled-featured king sets our dinner conversation pace. Johnny’s a master psychologist when it comes to diverting an edgy marathoner’s thoughts from the impending agony.