Of Mice and Marathons

Having a swimming pool in one's back yard was unusual in St. Louis. The winters were long and the summer season hot and short. Most folks didn't feel the expense and upkeep of a pool was worth the bother. However, my mother, swimmer that she was, wanted a pool and our back yard became a gathering place for cookouts, family, friends, and neighbors. Rare was the weekend that the pool area wasn't filled with people. During the middle of my high school junior year, I had a boyfriend who was a senior. By that summer, my entire family fully hated the poor boy. I think I probably did too but wanted to ensure I got to go to my senior prom and decided to stick with relationship. That's not saying much about me, but the young man was good-looking and in love with me. At seventeen, what other requirements are there? However, tall, gangly, and the star of all the school musicals, he envisioned himself as a Robert Goulet and was as vain as any movie star, which honestly didn't make him entirely endearing either. My thirteen-year-old brother Eddie especially disliked Barry so when he came to our house to swim with me one hot summer day and threw some unnecessary insult at Eddie, pandemonium ensued. Eddie had a hot temper, and he used any excuse to terrorize me and my unloved boyfriend. On this occasion, the insult spurred him to unpack my father's WWII machete and proceeded to chase Barry around the pool with it. Waving the machete high in front of him, Eddie hurled insults back at Barry, calling him names and threatening to murder him. At first, Barry laughed thinking it was all a joke. His long skinny legs stretched into strides to put a good distance between himself and my brother, but my smaller, chunkier little brother was fueled by Barry's arrogance, which is what usually put Barry at odds with so many people. Eddie's face grew red with heat. He began to close in on Barry who, glancing over his should from time to time, finally realized my brother wasn't playing around and he was in mortal danger wherein his amusement turned into alarm and his cocky dance around the pool changed from a spritely jog to a full-out run. Once I, too, grasped that Eddie might very well take a large slice of flesh out of Barry, if not actually kill him, I joined the chase, running after my brother pleading with him to cease and desist. In the meantime, my grandmother spotted the mayhem through the kitchen window. The machete was a key factor in her determination that we were not playing a game. Out the backdoor she flew. Grandma was a small, spry woman and that day I learned she could still sprint fairly well for a woman in her early seventies as she ran after the three of us yelling "Halt! Verruckt kinder!" (Stop! Crazy kids!) Any neighbor who might have spied us saw this: Lanky Barry running in the lead, his skinny legs pedaling for his life, followed by my brother Eddie wildly wielding a machete shouting out every profanity he had acquired in his black book of bad words, with me in tears stumbling behind him as snot ran from my nose onto my chin, and coming up from the rear a tiny, old woman waving a kitchen towel in the air and angrily shouting in German. I imagine the race looking something like a Marx Brothers comedy sketch or the 1904 Olympic Marathon.

The first U.S. Olympics was held in 1904 during the St. Louis World's Fair, and the Olympic marathon event took place on an August day in the 90 degree heat. It too was a madcap race. For 40 km (25 miles) runners pounded a dirt road open to traffic that blew dust into the eyes, noses, and mouths of the runners who were denied water until the 12th mile mark because one of the event's organizers wanted to study the effects of dehydration on them. The 32 runners had qualified earlier that year by running the Boston Marathon and the majority of them were men without any training or experience. For example, one runner was a Cuban mailman with a handlebar mustache who showed up wearing a beret, heavy shoes, a dress shirt, and trousers. When he realized he was the only participant wearing long pants, he found a pair of scissors and cut his trouser legs off to make shorts. Because he had not eaten in almost two days, during the race he stopped at an orchard and ate several rotten apples which gave him stomach cramps that caused him to leave the road to take a nap. A loquacious man, he also stopped periodically to chat with the people who lined the road to cheer the runners on. He managed, however, to finish 4th in the race. And then there were two runners from South Africa that showed up barefoot. During the race, one of them was scared off by wild dogs and got lost, but managed to find his way back to the road and the race, finishing 9th. This was Len Tauyane who, along with Jan Mashiani who finished 12th, were the first two African participants in an Olympic marathon. Neither man was in St. Louis for the marathon, however; they were highly trained commandos who had fought in the Boer War and attended the World's Fair to appear in the Boer War Exhibit.

Only 14 of the 32 runners crossed the finish line. The winner was Thomas Hicks from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hicks nearly collapsed 17 miles into the race, but instead of water, his trainers gave him a drink of egg whites and strychnine. At that time, there were no rules regarding drugs, so when Hicks hallucinated and began to run around in circles, he was given a bit more strychnine and a shot of brandy. This revived Hicks enough to come to his senses, but too weak at the last mile to continue, his trainers carried him across the finish line, his feet in perpetual running motion. He finished at 3:28:53, the slowest time in Olympic history. None of the runners for this marathon should be denigrated in spite of the St. Louis Post Dispatch's headline declaring the race as "Barbarians meet in Athletic Games," an intentional swipe at the non-white participants in the race organized by James E. Sullivan, the head of the Physical Culture Department for the World's Fair. Sullivan wanted to showcase white American excellence through a series of events that were deliberately and poorly executed to put unprepared participants, especially those from third-world countries, at a disadvantage. Regardless, in 1908, the first Olympic gold medal awarded to a black athlete was John Taylor who ran in the winning U.S. distance medley relay squad. Well, Sullivan, so much for white American excellence.

Thomas Hicks crosses the 1904 Olympic Marathon finish line high on rat poison.

And as to how my boyfriend met his finish line in the race around the swimming pool, I recall he managed to bolt through the gate of our backyard fence and hightail to the safety of his car in which he sped off. We all survived the ordeal, but Barry still took me to my senior prom where I broke up with him. Unsure why I chose that particular night to do so, with some guilt I remember he cried when I told him I no longer wanted to date him. I am not a bad person, but that incident surely didn't win me any Gold medals for compassion, and perhaps screwed up my karmic balance sheet. Then again, perhaps when Barry had a chance to think through things, he may have decided he didn't want to date a girl whose brother had attempted to kill him anyway or a girl who took advantage of him. Who could blame him? I hope the guy found a wonderful girl to settle down with and had a good life. He deserves that for having taken me, the schmuck, to the prom.