special book bonus

Surviving the ‘60s became an endurance sport of its own. Part 2.

4. The pre-pros

ULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA, December 1967. It doesn’t take a paycheck

to define a professional. A runner can work like a pro without earning the salary and benefits of one. Olympians of the 1960s weren’t like those who would follow 20 or more years later. These early models were the pre-pros, who trained like the pros today but often lived perilously close to the poverty line.

Earlier distance runners had usually retired when their college scholarships (and in a few cases, military service) stopped supporting them. They moved into the rest of their lives, beyond racing, by their mid-20s. Then, in the 1960s, an older generation of athletes began to emerge. They delayed their business careers so they could reach maturity as runners. They often gathered in training enclaves, sharing the rent as well as a top coach.

In a way, I was one of them. Not in a running way, of course, but as a writer who had begun to think like a pro while earning little pay for it. My starting pay would decline on each of my jobs after the Des Moines newspaper. The third of those would leave me in need of food stamps, but I wouldn’t have wanted to work any other way at that time.

A priceless benefit from that work was meeting some of the country’s fastest runners. At first I acted starry eyed and tongue tied in their company. Then, after getting to know them better, I realized that they hadn’t dropped in from another planet. We were alike in most ways other than how hard we trained and how fast we raced. We were part of the same community of runners whose population was yet to explode.

Ron Larrieu was a pioneering pre-pro. Later he would be known (if at all) as “Francie’s brother,” but in 1967 he was an alumnus of the best Olympic distance

team this country had produced (for the 1964 Games). Francie Larrieu, 15 years Ron’s junior, would benefit from the money that flowed into the sport later. She would run in her fourth Olympics at age 39.

At 30, her brother was starting to wonder how much longer he could go on competing at this level. He had been the least-recognized member of the US 10,000 team at Tokyo, which included surprise winner Billy Mills and superboy Gerry Lindgren. Those Games were three years past in 1967. Ron had left his coach, Mihaly Igloi, as had his roommate Orville Atkins, a Canadian transplanted to Los Angeles. Neither was ready to use the r word: “retired.”

Ron wasn’t a marathoner. Orville was, at a time when all marathoners seemed to know each other, if not by name then by the task we took on. Recently I’d come to know most of the Bay Area marathoners. One was Gary Vann. His debut marathon of 2:38 that fall spoke for itself but became remarkable when backed by the facts that he was just 20 years old, blind in one eye, and seeing only shadows with the other.

The runner grapevine somehow informed Orville that Gary and I planned to run the Western Hemisphere Marathon near the Atkins-Larrieu home. At the time, this race in Culver City was the country’s second oldest and second largest but well behind Boston on both counts. Orville contacted me, asking, “Do you need a place to stay?” I did, and so did my friend Gary. This is how I happened to meet my first Olympian.

Orville easily picked us out of the crowd leaving the plane from San Jose. He drove us to his apartment. It was tidy but small and in a rough-edged area of the city, growing rougher. Ron greeted and treated Gary and me as if we were the celebrities. His manner, as well as his physical stature, which was no more impressive than mine, put us at ease. Prerace pasta dinners hadn’t been invented yet. Our meal was home-delivered pizza.

Orville, the fastest marathoner among us, was the only one not running that race day. He acted as our chauffeur, first to Culver City and then back to the nearby airport. We other three had mixed results. Ron ran 15 miles as training before dropping out. Gary told me later, “I took two wrong turns late in the race after the bicyclist riding with me couldn’t keep up.” He still improved by 11 minutes, to 2:27.

My third marathon was the hardest yet: the first in warm sunshine, first in smog, first on a course that repeated itself. It took us past the eventual finish line to retrace the opening six-mile lap. I’d never struggled harder with the urge to stop early (and would yield to that temptation there the next year for my only marathon DNF). Western Hemisphere was also the first race I ever wrote about on assignment. I said the least about what I would remember the most from that weekend—the friends who shared it and the friends not yet met.

One was Bob Deines, unknown to me then except in the ways that all marathoners were known, who ran even faster than Gary Vann at the same age of 20.

In 1968, Bob would compete with the best of the pre-pros. By 1969, he would loom large in my writings.

Update: old Western

The Western Hemisphere Marathon was no Boston, but what marathon could hope to be? The next-longest-running US marathon wasn’t in the same league as the leader—in age, size, wealth, or fame. The 55th—and last—running of Western Hemisphere needed no qualifying times to limit entries. No one paid anyone to appear or to win.

Technically, this was the third-oldest marathon in the country. Yonkers began in 1935 but had several interruptions, while Western Hemisphere continued without pause since 1948 and had the second-longest unbroken streak behind Boston’s. Culver City hosted an Olympic Trials in 1964. Women set three world records on this course.

Butat its end, in 2002, Western Hemisphere no longer attracted runners capable of breaking course records, let alone American or world marks. It couldn’t compete for entrants with the other big regional marathons of the season. “It was really a people’s marathon,” said Syd Kronenthal, a founder of the race. “We never got into the hype. When everyone else was turning toward marathons as exhibitions, we stayed focused on the marathon as a day for running.”

At its core, marathon running isn’t about big crowds, wide media coverage, record times, or hefty prize purses. Marathoning is about enduring and surviving. No race stood as a better symbol of this sport than the Western Hemisphere Marathon. It endured for 25 years before anyone talked about a “running boom” and before another big marathon came to the West Coast. And it continued for an additional 30 years in the face of increasing competition for runners. No other marathon in the United States passed through its first 55 years without interruption. Not even Boston.

5. The publisher

LOS ALTOS, CALIFORNIA, December 1967. Don’t judge a baby’s potential by its birth weight and initial appearance. This is only its start. It might grow really big and, at least in its parents’ eyes, quite beautiful.

This happened with Distance Running News. It was a scrawny and homely baby. Its publisher saw its potential—or, like any good parent, simply saw that he had no choice but to raise what he’d spawned as best he could. When he couldn’t do this alone, he asked for help even before he could pay for it.

I’d subscribed to Distance Running News from its start—partly because I tried to read everything published about the sport (which still wasn’t much), partly to support a magazine that I hoped would succeed (and privately doubted

its prospects), and partly because I risked only $3 a year on a subscription (of just two issues the first year).

The early copies mimicked the half-sized dimensions of the only other longdistance publication, Long Distance Log. The DRN logo was hand lettered. Editing errors littered the pages. We readers forgave because we appreciated the content and the effort of this young publisher-editor. The one-man staff listed himself as John R. Anderson. He signed his letters the same way.

The week after Christmas 1967, I visited Kansas City, Missouri, for a family wedding. John R. Anderson was a few miles away in a suburb, home from his freshman year at Kansas State University. We didn’t know each other well enough to have any idea we were this close, let alone to arrange our first meeting (which wouldn’t come for two years).

He addressed a letter to me during that same holiday season. It awaited me back in California, asking, “Can you write a year-end review of distance-running results for our magazine? Your work at T&FN keeps you on top of what’s happening in the sport.”

John R. didn’t offer to pay me, and I didn’t ask for anything beyond a byline. Running writers (with the notable exception of Hal Higdon, who was paid elsewhere but donated his work to DRN) hadn’t turned pro yet. Even we few running editors worked more for love than money.

I first wrote for Distance Running News as 1967 ended. So began my lengthy connection (the final break would not come until 2004) with a magazine that would later be known as Runner’s World. The money would someday come, and the love would sometimes be tested.

Update: Bob’s baby

I’d known him as John R. Anderson for years before he finally said, “You can call me Bob.” He began signing his writings the same way. The name Bob Anderson is too little known now, given what he started. The current regime at RW is too slow to acknowledge that it wouldn’t have this magazine to work for if not for Bob.

During his RW years, he was tough to work for and with. His critics among former employees, advertisers, and subscribers were legion. Criticism had little apparent effect on Bob. The only subject guaranteed to turn the self-styled tough guy’s heart to mush was his baby. He always called it “my magazine,” the way a father refers to a child.

He conceived and delivered the magazine. He nursed it through infancy, then sternly and proudly guided it through the rapid adolescent growth spurt of the 1970s. As RW grew up, Bob begin hearing offers from larger companies to buy the magazine for thousands of times more than his original investment (which he says was just $100). He refused. “I wouldn’t take any amount of money for it,” he said. “This would be like selling my own child.”

Yet in RW’s 20th year, 1985, he had no choice but to sell. A divorce forced him to give up his baby to Rodale Press. Rodale threw the magazine a 25th-birthday bash at a Broadway theater in 1991. Bob Anderson wasn’t invited, and his name was never mentioned from the stage. Bob isn’t so thick skinned that the loss of his first “child” doesn’t still hurt him. And he isn’t so hardhearted as not to care about receiving little or no credit for his early work.

As a charter subscriber, the first columnist, and the first full-time employee, I’ll do some boasting on his behalf. He created prototypes for the modern running magazine, newsletter, and book before there was any money to be made from them. His shoe surveys prodded companies to improve their products. He promoted marathon running, women’s running, masters running, corporate running, and fun running before they came into fashion.

Bob provided an early forum for many writers besides me who would fill future magazines and books: Hal Higdon, George Sheehan, Kenny Moore, Joan Ullyot, Amby Burfoot, Don Kardong, Mike Tymn, Rich Benyo, John Brant. Bob inspired competitive publishers who thought they could cover the sport better. George Hirsch started his own magazine, The Runner, and | left for a different one, Running. Benyo founded Marathon & Beyond.

Bob invited me back to RW when Running folded. Hirsch became RW’s publisher when The Runner was absorbed into the older magazine. We alumni are all where we are now because Bob Anderson was here first. The baby keeps running and spawning offspring of its own, long after the father had to surrender this child for adoption.

6. The year

ally, 1968 was one of those. By many measures, it would go down as the darkest for a generation born 20 or so years earlier. Martin Luther King Jr. fell to an assassin in early 1968, then Robert Kennedy two months later. An unwinnable war drove Lyndon Johnson from the presidency that year, opening the office to Richard Nixon. Battles on both sides of the Pacific split generations and races into us-versus-them camps.

As an Army reservist I wasn’t divorced from all of this. But I remained a sideline observer, waiting to see if the next foreign or domestic crisis would bring a call to active duty—and the prospect of fighting for the wrong camp. Yet I say with only slight pangs of guilt that as the country seemed to come apart in 1968, the pieces of my life fell nicely into place. I’d found a dream job (at Track & Field News in California) with many pleasures and few pressures, found a home (in a converted horse stable) on a small farm, found good friends (those who ran and those who didn’t), and found my first dog (a German shepherd mix named Liesl) since childhood.

My life, apart from its military component, had never been better. Neither had running, where I peaked as a racer that year. Never had I stayed so healthy for so long—or raced so well, so often, over so wide a distance range. I reached the tiptop of this peak year at a summer track meet. The results there provided my best rebuttal to doubters who warned that “your slow training will lead to nothing but slow racing.”

Foothill College in Los Altos Hills hosted low-key summer meets. I could see the stadium lights from the bathroom window of my stable-turned-studioapartment. My night of nights began with a warm-up run to Foothill. My plan there was to race only the mile. A friend had other ideas for me. Jeff Kroot had driven from Berkeley for this meet, a tough commute during Bay Area rush hours. For his three-hour round trip, the least I could give him was pacing help in his three-mile run.

Jeff was my first California running friend and would remain the best. I knew his name, as a credit line on Track & Field News photos, before we met at a race. Photography was a hobby he practiced while finishing his schooling as an architect. Jeff and Tina’s place in Berkeley became my second home. We talked long and often and with increasing despair about the escalating disasters of 1968.

My 4:28 mile that summer night was the fastest I had run after slowing my training, coming within 10 seconds of my speed-trained best. I’d paid a much higher price in work and worry for that earlier time than this one. I’d always been slow to recover after races, therefore a poor doubler. So my plan in the second race was only to help Jeff “for as long as I can keep up.” At two miles of the three we were still together. He freed me there, not to stop but to “go for it.”

I finished in 15:18, my second-fastest time at this distance and another slowtrained personal best, while completing my best double ever. Jeff broke his PR by a big margin. We were onto something good in our running. We just didn’t yet know exactly what it was.

Update: fastest friend

Elliott Evans and I both ran for Drake University, but we were never teammates. We were closer than that and still are. We just missed overlapping at Drake. Elliott came there the summer after I graduated, quickly becoming a friend of mine in the months before the Army snatched me away from Des Moines. By then my

parents had adopted him as a “third son” and my sisters as a “third brother.” He often came to the Henderson living room where he could talk track, even after I left for California.

Elliott joined me out west after his school year ended in 1967, immersing himself in the summer sport as I’d done four years earlier. He returned in 1968. By then he was a Drake Relays champion, having anchored the host school’s four-mile relay team. He held a watch on me the night of my best double.

His own track racing peaked the following season, when he set Drake’s school record in the mile with 4:02. After graduation he ran a marathon in the low 2:20s, at a time when very few Americans could go that fast. His career might have kept tracking upward but for happy events and a near tragedy. First was his marriage and arrival of a daughter, then a son. He took on heavy physical work as a carpenter to support his family. On the job he fell from the second floor into the basement and hurt his back badly, permanently damaging his running prospects.

Later, Elliott coached teams of high school and college athletes, and I eventually followed him into coaching. Both of us fathered a handicapped third child (a daughter for each). Both saw our first marriage end in divorce. Through all this, he remained a friend of all us Hendersons. And then more. Since the mid-1990s, Elliott Evans has been my brother-in-law, married to my sister Anne.

7. The camp

CAMP ROBERTS, CALIFORNIA, August 1968. Soldiers don’t just fight for their army. They often fight with it. The latter happened for me in summer 1968, during my biggest brush with Army reality since basic training.

This didn’t happen on weekend duty. Endured once a month with the reserves, that was pretend soldiering. My battlefield there was a reserve center office in San Jose—my weapon, a typewriter; my specialty, company clerk. I typed and filed for two eight-hour days, then went home on Sunday night to strip off the green fatigues and let my hair grow for the next 28 days while trying to forget that I was Specialist Fourth Class Henderson.

Now I couldn’t forget. This was my two weeks of summer camp at a real Army post, with real recruits bound for Vietnam, trucked to Camp Roberts from Fort Ord by real drill sergeants who had survived their ’Nam year without visible wounds. The full-time soldiers thought little of us “weekend warriors.” And with good reason. They didn’t just envy our freedom and safety. They sniffed out our incompetence right away.

In fact, we didn’t know it yet, but we would stay safe at home as almost civilians for the duration of this war. The higher-ups in Washington had quietly decided that most of us reservists were hopeless as soldiers. They could draw draftees from the bottomless pool and train them from scratch faster than they

could retrain us. But no one had told us yet in 1968. So our summer’s brush with the real Army was sobering.

We came to Camp Roberts for these two weeks to practice our company’s mission of delivering basic training. My job was as it had been on weekends, firing away with a typewriter. Except that now some of the kids who passed through the office each day wouldn’t live out the year. Their regular drill sergeants routinely announced this fact, even telling these trainees that wasting two weeks of basic among unskilled part-timers (us, that is) increased the risk.

Adding to the misery: kids who already didn’t want to be in the Army really hated coming to Camp Roberts. In 100 miles they moved from the cool fog of coastal Fort Ord to the dreadful heat of an inland valley. They went from a post operating at capacity, and with all the resulting amenities, to a semiabandoned rural outpost. The trainees had no escape, confined as they were to their company areas. I could take the same escape route I always followed, running after a recorded bugle sounded the end of my Army workday. Fellow soldiers, collapsed on their bunks at my corner of the barracks, cracked wise as I changed from fatigues to shorts, from boots to Tigers.

No response of mine could have convinced anyone how much I needed this, so I said nothing. Out the door I raced, into the oven. The temperature at the barracks door read 111. The heat rebounded up into my face as I crossed a square mile of asphalt drill field; then I breathed the hot dust of passing trucks and jeeps on the rifle-range roads. This run went into my diary as the hottest ever. The hours that followed ranked among the strangest ever.

I mostly drank my dinner—water, iced tea, lemonade by the quart and still not replacing all the liquid that the dry heat had sucked from me. Afterward I read a book, another habit that separated me from fellow soldiers, while fighting against nodding off before lights out. Minutes after the barracks went dark, the room sprang back to light and life. “Everybody up!” someone shouted. “Outside in five minutes!”

Ten minutes later—we were citizen-soldiers, remember, not used to jumping on command—we formed up in ragged rows. An officer second in command of our unit addressed us. “We have an emergency situation,” he announced. “The MPs are here, and they need to see those whose names I call. The rest of you, back to the barracks and don’t go anywhere.”

A strange order, given that no one had anyplace to go on a Camp Roberts night—except to sleep. I wasn’t going there anytime soon, as my name made the short list. “Report to the office,” the six of us were told. Each wondered to himself, What have I done? We kept wondering as the MPs conducted private interviews, one at a time. Waiting my turn, I could read nothing on the faces of soldiers led from the inner office without being allowed to speak to us.

Inside, the interviewer asked me, “Have you noticed anything suspicious about your captain since you came here?” No, nothing. The next question was more