Fire on the Track

by Roseanne Montillo

  And that was how Price wanted it, as there were areas of his life few people knew about and that he fought hard to keep to himself. For example, he did not want people to know about the property he owned, or that he had a lot more money on hand than others did. He also had a weakness for women, a quirk that few were aware of; nor did people need to learn that he had fathered several children while involved in a handful of previous relationships, or that his two oldest children, who lived with him in Harvey, had not been born to his wife (though she had agreed to take them in) but were the products of short-term relationships that had ended badly. Even fewer would understand why he would go on to marry four times and have numerous affairs as an aging man, earning him a complex romantic reputation that would accompany him until his death. Nonetheless, he had an undeniable aptitude for discovering athletic abilities. And he did not coach merely to express the devotion he felt toward his students or to find the next star athlete, or because he was content to stand in the background. He did it (mostly) to satisfy his own unfulfilled youthful desires. He had been a college runner and had coveted an athletic career of his own, a dream that had never materialized.

  He had been hired to teach the students not only the technicalities of a race or of becoming an athlete but also the art of it, for although it was completed in a manner of seconds, even the 100 meters was an art form. He also taught them about the lonely intimacy one had to develop with a track, an aspect of racing a runner had to get used to, as he had. There was an affinity between an athlete and a field, he often told his students. It was to the track that an athlete brought his or her disappointments. It was there that a runner learned to work with the elements: with the wind, which could provide refreshing coolness on a hot summer’s day or hinder one’s speed on a blustery afternoon; with the rain, beating down against one’s skin or muddying the track; with the sun, scorching hot in the summer, yet rejuvenating throughout the rest of the year.

  Parents in Riverdale, Harvey, and the surrounding towns took their boys to Coach Price for advice on how to fortify their natural talent and succeed as athletes. It was the finish line that interested them most, how quickly they could cross it. But for Coach Price, their talent, if there was any at all, appeared well before they broke through a ribbon. There were things he noticed firsthand: Were there any visible glitches that needed to be adjusted? How were their form and posture? How far forward did an athlete lean? Was his trunk consistently that erect during a run, or did he have to work hard at making it appear so? When did an athlete begin decelerating, how far before the finish line? And, most important, did the athlete have to think about all of this, or did it come naturally?

  A true athlete possesses various qualities and characteristics that differentiate him or her from a casual runner, including personal dietary likes and dislikes and their sleeping patterns. Yet, though most coaches believed that real runners were born with a natural instinct, Coach Price knew that there was much that he could teach them. Usually, by the time he was done with an athlete for the season, the techniques had become second nature. It took a lot of effort to make those kids look and act effortlessly.

  Girls, on the other hand, were never taken to Coach Price; instead, parents enrolled them in the county’s finest sewing classes, as it seemed irrational to them that their daughters might want to participate in track and field. Those who did want to participate in competitive running were discouraged, as it was considered too masculine. Even the American Physical Education Review, which most teachers like Coach Price read, in 1913 had reported that “for girls there should be little competitive track and field work.” But a well-trained woman, Coach Price knew, could race down a track as well and as fast as a man.

  —

  In early March 1928, just two weeks after he began training with Betty, Coach Price was paging through The Pointer when he spotted an advertisement for a track meet sponsored by the Institute Banking Society. It was an amateur competition held in one of Chicago’s amphitheaters, and, without Betty knowing it, he added her name to the list of participants and paid her entrance fee.

  Although it was premature to register her in a competition, he wanted to see how she compared with other women athletes. From the start, his aim had been to increase her speed quickly and help her participate in as many meets as possible, working until she reached the one he wanted most: the Olympic tryouts in Newark, New Jersey, in July.

  This was not the usual tactic a coach used when training an athlete. If a coach was faced with the prospect of working with an athlete who showed promise and had a whole season ahead of him or her, training began slowly, emphasizing a basic workout routine that helped develop good technique and endurance. As the season progressed, so would the training, the bulk of it stressing high-speed sprinting. It was the job of a good coach to make sure the athlete warmed up properly before every practice, to reduce the likelihood of injuries. Coaches also always advised short sessions of light jogging, leg extensions, and leg lifts, as well as back extensions and lunges. Each exercise had to be done correctly, step-by-step, as it could otherwise cause injuries.

  But Coach Price behaved differently with Betty; given their limited time, there was greater urgency to his instructions. And though she immersed herself in learning the elementals, he pushed her to run at her fastest speed right away. How was she to know what her body could tolerate if she did not push herself? There was no time to waste.

  Betty was unaware of it, but at the meet she would be running against the seemingly invincible Helen Filkey, the twenty-year-old undisputed superstar of the sport. A tall girl with fine porcelain skin and a bouncy dark bob akin to that of a Hollywood actress she adored, Helen had taken the track-and-field scene by storm. For the last three years, she had won the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) National Championships and the 60-yard hurdles, not to mention setting world records in the 70- and 100-yard dashes.

  —

  The night of March 30, 1928, the Institute Banking Society meet was crowded with attendees wanting to see if Helen could maintain those records. The boisterous fans had gathered hours earlier, and as Betty ran laps around the corridor, getting to know her new track shoes, she could hear the crowd’s earsplitting cheers. Bob had tagged along and now explained how the shoes should feel on her feet; the difference of the fit in the toes compared to the heels; what to do in case of discomfort; how to dig in her spikes at the starting line.

  One thing Betty could tell for certain: the shoes were ugly. Black and sturdy, they certainly commanded attention. The first track shoes were actually quite heavy and hot on the foot, very similar to a man’s dress shoe, with six sharp half-inch spikes embedded in the sole. The shoe was originally made of tough cowhide, although over the years it evolved into leather. It was ugly, most athletes agreed, though their most pressing concern was its burdensomeness.

  Only a decade or so earlier, the German cobbler Adolf Dassler, an amateur runner himself, had begun experimenting with various materials to see if he could devise a softer shoe that could gain better traction on the track. Track shoes had to not only possess strength and flexibility, he determined, but be light enough to catapult an athlete forward, giving him or her an edge over opponents. He tinkered with rubber, then designed different shapes geared toward various events athletes took part in, though in essence they were all the same basic design: narrow at the tip, with sharp spikes inserted toward the front to assist in gaining speed as the runner went over the cinders. Those protrusions, pointy like claws, were usually made of metal and screwed tightly to the bottom of the shoes. Dassler’s improvements were such that they revolutionized not only the way sprinters prepared for a race but also how they ran.

  Adolf Dassler and his brother Rudolf started a company they first named Addis, though family conflicts eventually caused a rift between the brothers and each went his separate way. Adolf’s Addis in time evolved into Adidas, while Rudi went on to build his own sportswear company, known worldwide as Puma.

  �
�

  The crowd rose to its feet as the runners entered the auditorium, cheering so loudly the floors vibrated with applause as each of the competitors’ names was called. Betty took her place at the starting line and looked for Bob and Coach Price, who stood at the periphery, watching quietly. She turned and smiled toward Helen, noticing the hard, fierce look on her face, the set of her jaw as she scanned the crowd, determined. Betty settled at the starting line, awaiting the command, trying to remember all that she’d learned in the past few weeks.

  The most important element of a race is achieving maximum speed right off the line. A strong push from a powerful takeoff would propel her through the rest of the race at top velocity. Coach Price, like others, advocated this wisdom of a strong push and a quick start. He had trained Betty to relax and stretch out her limbs before standing up on the balls of her feet, before her toes touched the ground. She then had to lean slightly forward with her hands an inch or so behind the starting line.

  Betty felt a flutter in her stomach as she crouched down in her lane, staring forward along the track, awaiting the starter’s signal. She ran through the mental checklist: Her arms formed a ninety-degree angle, pulled back and turned upward. She’d been cautioned to relax her hands and to do the same with the muscles of her jaw and her face. She looked ahead, bent forward slightly, and concentrated on her arms. Her legs felt tight and ready to explode as she excitedly waited for the gun to go off.

  The auditorium was so hot and loud—with thousands of spectators chanting Helen’s name—that Betty could barely think. She saw the official grasp the pistol, curl his finger around the trigger, then lift it up to the sky and pop it.

  The voices became louder as the runners dashed off down the track. Betty felt her breath catching in her chest, the muscles in her legs burning with effort, the breeze kicked up by the other competitors hitting her face like a gust of wind during an early-morning heat. The race was quick and dizzying; suddenly it was over before she even had time to think about it too much.

  As expected, Helen broke the ribbon. She took the lead right away and did not let up until she crossed the finish line, clipping off two-fifths of a second from the previous best run and tying the world indoor record for the 60-yard dash. The noise in the auditorium was overwhelming; fans and reporters barreled down the bleachers and crowded around her.

  Bob and Coach Price stepped off their benches and reached Betty, who stood at the sidelines watching the commotion, pleased with her second-place finish. It was odd, but it seemed to her that they were the only ones who had noticed her placement, that she had nearly overcome the champion at the last moment, when, having made a push for the finish line, she had sidled up next to Helen and forced her to work even harder for her win. For a split second, Betty had imagined overtaking her and been disappointed when she hadn’t.

  But Betty was mistaken. Helen had become aware of Betty running next to her; the newcomer had forced her to dash down the track faster than ever before. In fact, the idea that Betty, running her first official race, had finished second was not something that Helen could easily disregard. Meanwhile, officials of the Illinois Women’s Athletic Club (IWAC) had also noted Betty nipping at Helen’s heels, eager and awash with potential. They had observed Betty’s drive, the look in her eyes that told them she had the requisite hunger to be the first. So even though she had not won the coveted blue ribbon, the IWAC rewarded Betty with an invitation to join their club and to train under its banner. She quickly accepted.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  OFF TO THE RACES

  Membership in the IWAC offered Betty far more than the opportunity to train in their facilities. She was given a freedom that other girls of her age did not enjoy. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, when her school day ended, rather than heading to Coach Price, she boarded the I.C. train on 137th Street from Riverdale and took a forty-five-minute ride to Chicago’s Randolph Station.

  The city’s chaotic streets greeted her, an array of congestion, a multitude of acrid smells, people of every sort, and an abundance of criminals (or so the papers had visitors believe). In the early 1830s, much in the same vein as Betty was doing in 1928, a young man named John Wentworth, from Dartmouth College, had made his way to Chicago, and the cosmopolitan atmosphere of its people had struck him as odd. In a letter home to his family he’d written: “People from almost every creed and almost every opinion…Jews, Christians, Protestants, Catholics, and infidels…Calvinists and Armenians…nearly every language was represented….Some were quite learned and some were ignorant.” And for the first time in her life, Betty, too, was being confronted by a combination of creeds and races.

  When she did not take the city bus to the IWAC, she walked across the river and up Michigan Avenue, leaning against the rails and watching the wide sweep of the waters below her or staring at the buildings mushrooming behind her. She marveled at this opportunity given to her, reveled in her solitary pursuits, and was thrilled by her sudden independence. It invigorated her that her mother was home, her father was working at the bank, and neither of them could keep a watch on her. That her sisters were in their apartments, enveloped in their domestic duties, while her friends were confined by their school responsibilities and she was free to ride the train, roam the streets to the IWAC, spend the afternoon with persons unknown to her family and friends, and then return home in the dark. It was the evenings that produced the most enthusiasm, the times she left the IWAC late and came across heavily rouged women and elegant men entering places of grandeur or ill repute, cabarets and movie theaters. (Especially the movie theaters, for by the end of the decade, Chicago had nearly enough movie seats to accommodate every one of the city’s inhabitants, should they all have wanted to attend a movie at the same time.)

  The city’s mystique rubbed off on her, thrilling her, while this newfound adulthood also provoked an increased measure of arrogance that her schoolmates soon became aware of, an untapped self-confidence. In that respect, Betty was like many of the young modern women of her time, showing signs of empowerment that worried most men.

  Having earned the right to vote, women now were fighting for equality in other areas of their lives as well. Many had moved into the workplace (though household duties still awaited them after a long day on the job). They no longer settled for marriages that did not satisfy them, and unprecedented numbers sought divorces. Sexually, the modern woman was becoming increasingly aware that she was free to choose her partner. In the age of the flapper, women now sheared their hair, shortening it with the same eagerness that they shortened their hemlines. They drank in public and smoked if they desired. Where and when would this end? Next, critics feared, young women would be trespassing into the man’s domain not only at work but even in sports, where they were already making strides.

  By the time Betty walked into the IWAC, women were not just breaking all kinds of barriers—they were setting records. Glenna Collett Vare, who had learned to play golf at the age of fourteen, had been dominating the American women’s golf scene throughout the 1920s. In 1922, her skills had earned her the first of six US championships. Vare was also a proficient swimmer, but Gertrude Ederle surpassed her. In 1926, Ederle, an American competitive swimmer and bronze medalist in the 100-meter freestyle in the 1924 Olympics, became the first woman to swim the English Channel; she did it in fourteen hours and twenty-one minutes, besting the male record by nearly two hours and earning the nickname “Queen of the Waves.”

  Betty was aware of all this, felt lucky to have become a part of this group, and intended to reap the benefits of these new circumstances. Perhaps it was not by mere chance that track and field had come into her life now, at the cusp of this new women’s movement, this next step of radical change, as some of her teachers deemed it.

  —

  “This beautiful 17 story, newly erected building, a monument to Chicago’s largest Women’s Club, rises majestically in plain sight of all those travelling on Michigan Boulevard,” The Chicago Tribune wr
ote. And it was majestic. When Betty arrived at the IWAC for the first time, the seventeen-floor Italian Renaissance–style building, with its arched windows and low cornices, drew her eyes upward. On the first two floors, specialty shops had been opened, including a small bakery, its sweet buttery smells wafting out. Continuing upward, the third to ninth floors were occupied by offices, whose employees strutted in and out of its doors always in a hurry. The men wore dark suits and neatly pressed white shirts, their oxfords polished and briefcases in hand. Betty watched the women wobble on tall heels, their blue or brown midcalf-length pleated skirts accentuated by frilly silk blouses. They kept their hair in place with shiny bobby pins, stray wisps tucked behind their ears with well-manicured nails.

  From the tenth to the seventeenth floors, the IWAC held court; the tenth to the fifteenth were reserved for music and singing classes. Betty sometimes heard the instrumental notes through the walls, even as far up as the top two floors, where many of the athletes were engaged in athletic pursuits, while others were finishing up their workouts and changing out of their uniforms.

  Betty usually rode the elevator to the sixteenth floor and checked in with a guard at the desk. Then she headed for a small room in the back used as a changing area, where she exchanged her skirt and blouse for shorts and a jersey emblazoned with the IWAC logo, before heading to the short track to practice.

  The facilities were shared with coaches from DePaul University, who assisted the IWAC with their track program. Betty and the other athletes often went to them for advice. They also used their time there to view other sprinters and learn the jargon of the sport, along with witnessing proper athletic form. She learned, for example, that when she accelerated from a still position to a quick-moving one, it was referred to as a change in velocity and not speed, though the monikers frequently referred to the same thing. When such tidbits were shared, Betty and the other athletes would gather around the coaches, scribbling feverishly in tiny notebooks they kept stashed in their pockets.