Runner in Red

by Tom Murphy

  “He’s my husband.”

  “I read in the Herald that you threw him out of the house.”

  “Howie Carr exaggerates. I never tossed his clothes out the bedroom window in the rain.”

  “My sources say you’ve been having trouble with Jack a long time, not just the estranged part since Ellen got hit by the car in Oregon, but things have gotten worse since Pop began training Ellen again.”

  “Love means you can look someone in the eye, even if you’re estranged, and like what you see, Steve. I stopped being able to do that with you in 1971.”

  “I hear Jack’s a bit out of sorts, now that you’ve started seeing me again. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, Bridget.”

  “I’m seeing you, Steve. But I’m not seeing you. Let’s keep our terms straight, OK.”

  “Still, how long can you keep going home to dinner-for-one?”

  “Longer than it would be worth your while to wait. But I thank you for the assignment. We’ll make this happen.”

  She turned and walked away, signaling to Stan and me to return to our car. But as we walked, she said to me, “Did you hear that?”

  And I realized she had worn the live mic on purpose.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Bridget went to New York to coordinate with Roman’s team and devise a strategy to research more on “Delaney.” While she was away Stan sent me to the library where I was fast becoming an expert on women’s running.

  Few women throughout history had ever tried to run a marathon, I learned as I read hundreds of newspaper accounts and watched tapes from the archives at Boston Public Library, my new home away from home.

  One legend told of a woman, Melpomene, who slipped into the marathon in the 1896 Olympics in Athens. Over the next seventy years—before rules were changed to permit women to compete officially at distances greater than 200 meters—a handful of women “crashed” marathons, pressing for the right to run, including Marie Ledru in France in 1918, Violet Percy in 1926, Dale Greig in England in 1964, and Mildred Sampson in New Zealand in 1964. The Runner in Red, should it be proved—and a name identified—would be the first woman to have accomplished the feat on American soil.

  As I watched videotapes of old Boston Marathons, working fourteen hour days to gather background before Bridget’s return, I found one clip that showed Bill Rodgers stopping at the crest of Heartbreak Hill to take a sip of water during the 1975 Boston Marathon. Asked why he would stop while thousands of runners chased up the slope behind him, Rodgers, who won the 1975 race in record time, said, “If the pace is fast, it helps if I pause to catch my breath.”

  And so I pause also, not simply to catch my breath, but to take a break from the narrative at this point and provide product of the research I collected. When the pace is fast—as Bill Rodgers said—it’s useful to lay out the background, in this case, the important contributions made to the running game by the early women runners, the “women pioneers of Boston,” as Stan called them.

  Bridget was in high school during the mid-1960s when, on a cool April day in 1966, 24-year-old Roberta Gibb jumped out from behind a bush at the start of the Boston Marathon. She had applied for admission to the race, but Jock Semple, who worked as a trainer at Boston Garden and assigned the marathon numbers in between his duties as a trainer for the Boston Bruins, had scratched, “Reject,” on her application and sent it back.

  Not to be deterred, Gibb had ridden a bus into town from the west coast and tucked in with the crowd in Hopkinton that gray day in 1966, and the men, sympathetic, shielded her from the view of the officials’ truck. Dressed in a bulky sweatshirt with a one-piece black bathing suit underneath, Gibb forged ahead, worried she might be spotted, but she was not, and she completed the entire distance in 3:21:40, thus becoming (aside from the ‘Runner in Red’ possibility) the first woman to run the Boston Marathon.

  The next year, 1967, Jock assigned Kathrine Switzer a number by mistake after the Syracuse coed mailed in her application, using her initials, “K.V. Switzer.”

  Jock missed it, but Pop spotted the mistake the next morning when he stopped in at the Garden following his night-shift at the airport working on a cargo loading dock, his full-time job. It was his practice to check on Jock to make sure his co-director partner was doing his job assigning marathon numbers competently, but Jock did not appreciate the special attention from his former running rival.

  “Blast it, mon,” Jock roared in his Scottish burr after Pop advised Jock to call the applicant and ask for the full name as rules required. “He’s a Kevin or Karl, mon, let it go. We’ll never see the imbecile again anyway.”

  The day of the race, however, the sportswriters spotted the error. “Hey, guys, you got a broad in your race,” they shouted two miles after the start. “And she’s wearing one of your official numbers.”

  With that, Pop and Jock were off the bus—reprising their competitive fire from days past—as they tried to beat each other down the road to retrieve the number and restore the sanctity of the Boston Marathon’s rules.

  As all the world knows, thanks to the UPI photographer positioned perfectly for the shot, Jock beat Pop that day and the three photos depicting the action —Jock chasing K. V. Switzer, Jock reaching in to rip the number, 261, off her sweatshirt, and finally, K. V. Switzer’s huge boyfriend leaning his shoulder into Jock to propel Jock toward a ditch—ran Page One around the world and effectively helped launch the campaign to open the marathon to women.

  What Johnny Carson couldn’t do by poking fun at Jock, four years later, Bridget’s “Stand-off at the Finish line” with Pop in the 1971 race served as the coup de grace, and the next year, 1972, the Boston Marathon officially opened the race to women.

  Nina Kuscsik of New York won the first formal women’s division in 1972 in a time of 3:10:36. By that point, following her incident with Pop the year before, Bridget had given up running, which I learned from patching together accounts from several magazines.

  She broke up with her boyfriend, Steve Roman, and moved to San Francisco where she kept a low profile. Roman and Jack Maloney, the other runner she had shared stardom with in college, moved to Martha’s Vineyard to paint houses while they trained for the 1972 Olympics. Then fate interceded as one day Jack Maloney left his ice tea on a porch in the hot sun. When he climbed down from his ladder for a sip the drink had warmed and he put cool strawberries in the glass. “Hmmmm,” he said, and he bid Roman to come down off his ladder to have a taste.

  The next day they made a bigger jug of the stuff and invited the other house painters to try it. Soon Jack Maloney, who possessed a silver tongue, convinced a local bottler to let them use his facility at night to bottle their concoction. While Roman applied for a trademark, Jack hiked all over the Vineyard convincing store owners to carry their drink, called “Runner’s Delight.”

  The beverage took off and without knowing it Jack Maloney and Steve Roman had created Snapple before Snapple.

  They sold their trademark to Pepsi, who paid them one hundred thousand dollars for the rights, but Jack and Roman fell out after Roman, who insisted he had created the greater value by engineering the trademarking process, signed up the rights 90/10 his way. Jack, who never paid attention to fine details, got snookered, while Roman trucked to Wall Street with his take and grew that during Wall Street’s go-go days of the 80s into a small fortune.

  By this point Jack had moved to Boston and had turned his gift for gab into an insurance job, but most significantly, one night he climbed in his car and set out for San Francisco to scour the city looking for Bridget. Finding her down and out, he convinced her to come home and marry him, and by the mid-70s, while Roman was starting to build his empire in New York, Bridget was back in Boston with Jack, as his wife, and a young mother.

  I hit a barren patch and couldn’t find out any more information on the family until I came across an issue of Runner’s World from that s
pring, with a story titled, “Comeback Gal?”

  It told how Ellen Crutchfield, who under an intense training regimen tailored to her by her grandfather, Pop Gallagher, was fast regaining her world-class form after her failure at the Olympic Trials and a car accident in Oregon. She was making strong progress, but according to the author, she needed a major victory to convince the skeptics that the once rising star could be a national champion again.

  The story filled in some blanks for me: as a ninteteen-year-old college freshman on coach Randy Thomas’s team at Boston College, Ellen had run the Philadelphia Marathon in 2:32:14, and had set an American junior’s record. That had prompted her in her sophomore year to want to become the youngest Olympic champion ever and she trained hard with Pop, a former trainer of champions, which created a rift between mother and daughter.

  Ellen led the Olympic Trials for twenty miles that spring of her sophomore year at BC, but she developed a stress fracture and though she finished the race, she hobbled across the line in 10th place and in frustration at the “told you so’s” from her mother, she quit running, dropped out of school and married a classmate.

  The marriage didn’t work out, and two years later she moved to Oregon, to try for a comeback with Nike. But she failed to make the team, and one evening while running alone she was hit by a car on a desolate stretch of country road outside Eugene and lay in a ditch overnight until hunters discovered her the next morning. During a slow and painful recovery her grandfather penciled her a note from Boston.

  “The champion you are is waiting inside you,” he wrote. “Come home and we will put wind in your sails and send your ships to sea.”

  She was in her mid-20’s by this point and she moved back to Boston. She moved in with her father into the house he had kept after he and Bridget had separated three years earlier. Her father, Jack Maloney, gave full endorsement to her training with Pop again, the story said, and this did not sit well with Bridget who by that point was working for a television station in Philadelphia.

  “Admittedly, things are strained with my mom and me after my choice to train for a comeback with my grandfather,” Ellen said. “But I will beat the demons.”

  She responded under Pop’s nurturing eye, and she ran sub 33 minutes for the 10K three times that spring. Despite the continuing tug between Pop and her mother, and the emotional tax involved with that, she set an American record for the half marathon in June, which was the basis for the article.

  “She won’t have the credentials to be a favorite at New York this November,” which was now a month away, the story said. “But this ‘Comeback Gal’ could surprise!”

  I drove to Pop’s house to see Ellen—eager to try to see if I could patch things up with her—but no one answered. I tried again the next morning, but still I got no response when I rang the bell. I left a note, “Call me,” but no call came that night, or the next day, so I drove back to knock on the door again.

  “You casing the place?’’ said a kid on a bike who eyed me.

  “What?” I said as I returned to my car at the curb.

  “I seen you watching the house when I went to school yesterday. Then again this morning I seen you. In the movies that’s how guys case a place.”

  “I’m looking for the girl who moved in here with her grandfather.”

  “Oh, you want the road runner.”

  “Yeah. The road runner.”

  “Nice looking chick, though she’s too skinny for my tastes.” The kid was maybe 10.

  “You have any idea where I might find her?”

  “Try the track at Hyde Park High. That’s where the old dude coaches high school runners.”

  I thanked him, but he held out his palm. “Like in the movies,” he said. “They pay for information.”

  I gave him a five.

  “Ooh, big spender,” he said, and off he pedaled on his Huffy as I headed for Hyde Park High three miles away.

  The sun set through a mask of gray clouds on a spring-like October afternoon as I approached the athletic field at Hyde Park High School. A group of boys in sweat suits walked for the gate following their workout, while behind them in the distance, Ellen wore a yellow singlet and shorts. She strode powerfully around the cinder track as Pop, wearing his gray jacket and peak cap, barked orders.

  “Faster, lass,” he shouted. “Stay strong, you’ll last long.”

  His bark carried across the field as I passed the boys. “Man, she’s awesome,” said one, while another added, “She’ll be kickin’ some Ruskie and Kenyan butt in New York next month, that’s for sure.”

  I stood at the gate watching Ellen run, impressed by her long, powerful stride, her erect shoulders, the smooth churning of her legs and the easy swinging of her arms—and of course, her blonde ponytail flapping.

  “What the hell you doin’?” Pop shouted, as I walked to the top of the turn for a closer look and he swung his arms at me as if shooing the cat. “Get away!”

  “It’s all right, Pop,” Ellen said, as she interrupted her run and trotted over.

  “What the hell you doin’?” Pop shouted at me, his thick white eyebrows arched like a tiger’s back. “Upsetting the girl’s workout!”

  “He’s OK, Pop,” she said, stepping between us to save me from destruction.

  “I am?”

  “Who told you I was here?”

  “Let’s say I stumbled upon you.”

  “Come on, Ellen,” Pop said. “I want you running, I don’t want you talking.”

  She turned to me. “I’m not ready.”

  “I just want to talk to you.”

  “I’m not ready for a relationship, and that includes talking,” she said, and she jogged away as Pop ambled back to his spot in the middle of the straightaway, hot as an iron still. But as Ellen passed me at the top of the turn on her next lap, I shouted, “Your mother loves you.”

  This stopped her in her tracks. “What did you say?”

  “I talked to your mother about you.”

  “When?” she said, as she sauntered over, hand on hip.

  “I’m going to see her again when she gets back from New York. I’m sure we’ll talk some more about you.”

  “She’s in New York?”

  “For two weeks.”

  Ellen turned away in disgust. “That damn Roman,” she said, as the breeze played with her hair, wafting the loose golden strands that had come free from her ponytail during her hard run.

  “Your mom said she loves you more than anyone can know.”

  “When can we talk?”

  “Whenever you want.”

  “Thursday. The Ritz. You know where that is?”

  “The Ritz? A hotel?”

  “On Arlington Street. 3pm. Ask for Bailey at the front desk,” she said, and she darted off. Pop marched toward me to yell again, but I preempted him by waving good-bye and he bought it.

  He returned to his coaching spot in the middle of the track, but as Ellen passed me again on the turn, she shouted something.

  “What?” I said, but I missed it, and I waited for her to come around again on another lap.

  “Bring your running stuff,” she said over her shoulder as she sprinted by me.

  Then she was gone again, around the turn and down the straightaway, running hard, blonde ponytail pounding wildly across her shoulders as Pop hollered, “Stay strong, lass. You’ll last long.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Junior assigned Bridget to do a feature on young girls buying track shoes at a downtown mall. She told him she was busy, but he reminded her who was boss.

  “You’ll find the shoe store in the Prudential Center Mall. The manager is waiting for you. Take your boy with you,” he said, too self-absorbed to realize that the icy stare she gave him burned hotter than a sunspot.

  The owner of the running store in the mall—a r
ound man with Chia Pet hair, pink shirt, and a green cardigan—clapped when we walked in.

  “Girls, girls, get ready,” he said, as he turned to half a dozen giggling high school girls seated with boxes of “Women First” shoes on their laps.

  Bridget, ever the pro, shook hands with each of the girls making them comfortable as I unpacked my camera and set up for a shot of the girls trying on the shoes, bouncing on their toes, smiling—most of all smiling, as the paper Junior gave Bridget specified. Behind us, a tiny man in his 60s with bright blue eyes, a mop of hair and a Bobby Kennedy profile walked in. Dressed in a faded windbreaker, he looked perplexed as if he had wandered into the wrong room. It was Bridget who saw him first.

  “John?” she said. “Young John?”

  “Jesus, Bridget Maloney. How are you doing, how’s your dad?”

  “Dad...oh, he’s fine,” she said, but the tiny man—realizing his mistake—apologized, as Bridget called me over to introduce me to Johnny Kelley, whose picture I had seen in countless news stories during my research.

  Called “Young John,” to distinguish him from John A. Kelley (the Elder), the champion from Pop’s era, John J. Kelley (no relation, but called the Younger) had won the Boston Marathon in 1957. The star of Jock Semple’s B.A.A. team, Young John had competed in two Olympics, in 1956 and ’60, and was the American national marathon champion eight times in a row, a record yet to be broken.

  “Young John is the link between the early runners and the champions of the 70s such as Bill Rodgers, Frank Shorter, Amby Burfoot and Jack Fultz, Bobby Hodge, Greg Meyer, Randy Thomas, Vinnie Fleming, Dickie Mahoney, so many others,” Bridget said. “He was the premier runner of his era in the 50s and my inspiration.”

  “Don’t let your dad hear you say nice things. I ran for Jock’s B.A.A., remember.”

  “What are you doing here, John, I thought you lived in Connecticut? Still driving a cab?”

  “I do and I am. But I gave my copy of Kerouac’s On the Road to a friend and I stopped by to pick up a new copy. I know every pebble from Hopkinton to Boston, Bridget, but I can’t find Barnes and Noble. I must be getting old.”