A Bit of a Memoir of Life in 1944.

Our daring memoirist, Johnny “The Younger” Kelley, winner of the 1957 Boston Marathon, has shared many of his most famous races with our readers over the years. But until now, he has never told us how he became a runner as a kid. Johnny has been carefully reconstructing his young life, and we’re pleased to give readers a preview of The Younger’s early adventures.

t the beginning of the summer before I’m to start high school, I discover two loves. One is 11-year-old Veronica Reichenstahl. The other is running.

Veronica has moved into the house on Ledyard Street, directly behind ours, which the Farber sisters, Priscilla and Helen, have moved out of. ““Vonnie” is the younger sister of Frankie Reichenstahl, who’s a month older than I. The Reichenstahl kids live with their father.

He works across the river at the Electric Boat Company in Groton, building submarines, like practically all my friends’ fathers. I guess he was married, but nobody in the neighborhood knows whether his wife died or went away or what.

All know is I’m hopelessly in love with Veronica. Both kids have those Aryan blond features: clear blue eyes and wavy hair the color of cornsilk, though Vonnie’s hangs gracefully in the style of the movie star Veronica Lake, just grazing her perfect cheek, past a lovely little beauty-mark mole on the side of her mouth, as it falls below her collarbone. Frankie’s is cut pretty short, giving him a kind of scary, piercing look, like those Gestapo villains you see in the movies.

Yet Frankie is friendly in a cool way. He seems to me like a coiled spring, like somebody who knows he possesses special talents the world hasn’t realized exist in him.

A big problem for the Reichenstahls is their German name and appearance. They’ re not in their house two weeks before some of the neighborhood old-timers get to calling them Huns and Krauts. One morning I look out my back window and see Mr. Reichenstahl hurriedly painting over a swastika that somebody painted on during the night.

Things as stupid as that only intensify my unbearable passion for Vonnie. I imagine myself secreting her away from the stupid swastika painters. I hide her in our cellar where I’ve built a room full of comforts that nobody else knows about. After the war, we’re almost grown up, so we can come out and live happily ever after.

Only, in reality, I can’t even bring myself to speak to Vonnie. I pass her house as often as possible, finding any flimsy excuse to do so. Incredibly, if she happens to be sitting on her front porch, I look away toward the house across the street.

I feel so damned old. Vonnie is 11, and I’m 13, for God’s sake! I yearn to discover her birthday, to see if, just possibly, she might turn 12 before I turn 14 in December.

But there’s one thing I can do to impress her, and it’s a physical thing, like the knights-errant of old. I can run! And by unforeseen good luck, our neighborhood organizer, Flood Martin, though he’s only 15 himself, has come up with an idea for a great sports team, which he is calling the Skull Squad.

The Skull Squad will utilize every single kid’s talent, whatever it may be. There’ll be some particular sport, Flood believes, that some particular kid in our gang will excel at. So Flood is putting together his huge team of many sports, and it so happens that, at this low point of hot summer, his far-and-away favorite, football, is still weeks off; and since the noon sun can drain you dry of baseball

energy, he has devised a quick event, the “Block Run,” to start in front of my house at 33 Briggs Street and circle the block, a distance of about one-third of a mile.

I go into the first block run with high hopes, because I’ve saved my skin a few times already by outfooting the likes of bullies like Arnold Hanson, and I’ve always had an intuition that I’m naturally faster on my feet than most people. Lately I’ve been reading about the mile run duels in Sweden between Gunder Haag and Arne Andersson. I’ve begun dreaming of becoming a world recordbreaking miler some day.

Now it also happens that the block run passes in front of Vonnie’s house at exactly the halfway point. On our first attempt, with about eight of us kids in the field, I take the lead two houses before Vonnie’s and give the rest of the distance all I’ve got, to win in a few seconds under two minutes.

Winning the first block run puts a feather in my cap that I’ve never before sported. After years of being dismissed as “Rab” and “Destiny’s Tot” by the know-it-alls, I suddenly find even Jack Hubbard looking at me differently. And I figure, so what if Flood Martin is one of the know-it-alls whose Skull Squad is a way of making himself a kingpin, he can’t be all bad. He may even be a kind of budding promotional genius.

So my reign as king of the block begins and extends itself through July. I’m thinking that there’s nobody in the entire city of New London with a chance of ending it.

Comes the afternoon of a scorching day when both Frankie and Vonnie turn up at the start. With Vonnie looking on, I feel my knees sliding out from under me. All [have to do is pull them straight again to win this one for her. I tell myself it’s just something I must do. It’s what knights-errant do—no more, no less.

Our field of six takes the line. As Hubbie says, “Ready,” Frankie cuts in. “Can Irun, too?” he asks.

I guess Frankie has watched us pass his house a few times without catching the spark. Today he has the spark. Realizing this only makes me more nervous than I was when I saw Vonnie standing here, because if I do beat Frankie, I’ll be beating my secret beloved’s only beloved brother. If he beats me, I’ll lose my king of the block status.

But there’s no time for hashing these worries over. In the next minute, our now-seven-man field is off and running. I feel the good surge that comes once the race is under way. I run to beat the field. I hope to beat my own record.

As we round the corner onto Norwood Avenue, the third of four left turns, with 250 yards remaining, I have the lead, but my breath is a flame in my throat. I fight against nausea rising from my intestines. I haven’t shaken Frankie. I hear his dragon’s breathing at my back.

Now onto Briggs Street. One hundred yards to go. Somewhere in the clutch of kids waiting on the finish line, there’s Vonnie. Less than two strides behind me,

there’s the diabolically possessed Frankie, giving his all, I suppose, to avenge the insults he and his blond, blue-eyed family have had heaped upon them.

When he passes me with 30 yards to go, I know the sting of double defeat. Frankie Reichenstahl is our new block run champion and record holder. I trail him across the line just as Flood Martin claps him on the shoulder. “I can’t wait to put you in at quarterback,” Flood says.

All I want to do is crawl away into the weeds and curl up. As my dragging feet turn toward a hiding place, I hear Vonnie’s voice. “Hey, Johnny,” she says, “please don’t feel bad. It was a real good race. Frankie has always been a very fast runner. You are, too.”

All at once I realize there can actually be things better than winning i a race. “