Runner in Red Read online

  Runner in Red

  Runner in Red

  A Search for the First Woman to Run a Marathon in America

  Tom Murphy

  Encircle Publications, LLC

  Farmington, Maine, U.S.A.

  Runner in Red Copyright © 2017 Tom Murphy

  Paperback ISBN 13: 978-1-948338-02-8

  E-book ISBN 13: 978-1-948338-04-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962453

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher, Encircle Publications, Farmington, ME.

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual places or businesses, is entirely coincidental.

  Editor: Cynthia Brackett-Vincent and Devin McGuire

  Book design: Eddie Vincent

  Cover design: Beth MacKenney and Deirdre Wait

  Cover images: © iStockphoto.com and Shutterstock.com

  Published by: Encircle Publications, LLC

  PO Box 187

  Farmington, ME 04938

  Visit: http://encirclepub.com

  Sign up for Encircle Publications newsletter and specials http://eepurl.com/cs8taP

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Murphy, Tom Aloysius, author.

  Title: Runner in red : a search for the first woman to run a marathon in America / Tom Murphy.

  Description: Farmington, ME: Encircle Publications, LLC, 2018.

  Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-948338-02-8 (pbk.) | 978-1-948338-04-2 (ebook) | LCCN 2017962453

  Subjects: LCSH Boston Marathon--History--Fiction. | Women runners--United States--Fiction. | Marathon races--Fiction | Semple, Jock, 1903-1988--Fiction. | Switzer, Kathrine--Fiction. | Mystery and detective stories. | BISAC FICTION / Sports | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General

  Classification: LCC PS3613.U7555 R86 2018 | DDC 813.6--dc23

  DEDICATION

  For Caitlin and Justin, my siblings and my dear friends, the late John J. Kelley (Young John) and Jock Semple, as well as Johnny and Jessie Kelley’s three daughters, Julia, Kathleen and Eileen.

  And for stars in my Boston Marathon galaxy. The list is long, but so is a marathon: Jan Greaney Clark, Gloria Ratti, Roni Selig, Jack Fultz, Amby Burfoot, Jim Roy, Tom Derderian, Dave McGillivray, Kathrine Switzer, Christy Olsen, Rich Horgan, Kara Corridan, Peggy Peters Fox, Richard Johnson, Bobby Hodge, Billy and Charlie Rodgers, Susan Hurley, Joan Kenney, Nancy Fitzgerald, Barrie Brett, Mark Longo, Terry Monell, Tom Morante, Joe Salois, Fr. Isaac Keeley, Mike Dunford, Janine Wert, Jessica Joyce, Bob Casey, Randy Thomas, Julie Heyde, Joann Flaminio, Gina Caruso, Bobbi Gibb, Karen Warner, Pam Steenland, Mary Ann Penglase, Marty Brown, Bill Kelly, Patti Catalano Dillon, Jerry Ford, Johanne and Terry Connors, the teams at Tracksmith, Regis College, Boston College, and cancerGRACE.org, the Villanovans (Kieran, Bob and Bob,) my legion of Murphy/Rice cousins and

  in-laws and so many others who have offered me inspiration and a life-time of Boston “running” friendship.

  Proceeds from this book will support the RUNNER IN RED campaign (in partnership with the Bonnie Addario Lung Cancer Foundation) to cure lung cancer (see runnerinred.com) and Kathrine Switzer’s charity project 261 Fearless to empower women.

  INTRODUCTION

  All great stories begin with, “What if?”

  I was an aspiring writer working as a teacher in Boston Public Schools in 1980 when Jock Semple, co-director of the Boston Marathon, asked me to write his life story.

  I jumped at the chance, since I was a runner and Jock was a legend. In 1929, he ran his first Boston Marathon after emigrating from Scotland. Nine times in the 1930s and 40s he finished in the top ten. In the 1950s, he took over operations for America’s most historic race and in 1967, he made himself “infamous” by chasing Kathrine Switzer down the road in the Boston Marathon at a time when women were not permitted to run. He was not against women, or as he put it, “I was simply protecting the rules.”

  Each day after school I would sit in Jock’s cramped cinderblock cubicle in the old Boston Garden where he worked as a trainer and a physiotherapist. I would write furiously with my pad and pen (no iPads in those days) as Jock’s “patients,” as he called his portly businessmen clients, teased him about his irascible responses to “cheats,” including decades of chasing interlopers who tried to get into the Boston Marathon without conforming to the rules.

  Oh, the stories, which became a book I co-wrote with John J. Kelley, winner of the 1957 Boston Marathon, called Just Call Me Jock.

  It was an on-the-cuff comment by one of Jock’s patients that triggered my long-standing interest in a “what if” that has led to this story that follows.

  The fellow on the rubdown table asked Jock if he would have chased the “Runner in Red” in 1951, and Jock responded with a throw-away line, “If she woulda been real, I would have protected the rules.”

  “If she woulda been real...” caught my attention and sent me to the Boston Public Library to research the “Runner in Red.”

  I learned that this legend really persisted. There has been a long-standing belief that a woman slipped into the 1951 Boston Marathon undetected and ran the race, which, if that could be proven, would make her the first woman to have run a marathon on American soil. “She wore red,” as claimed by a group of Canadian runners who say they tried to bring the matter to the attention of Jock and other race officials, but to no avail, their story was never corroborated, and so today the “Runner in Red” remains a mystery and an urban legend.

  It remains a “what if” mystery I have long wanted to explore in novel form drawing upon Jock and all the wonderful stories I “soaked up” along with the liniment fumes.

  This fictional account, a period piece set in the 1990s to coincide with the 2000 Boston Marathon, the Millennial Marathon, is my attempt to solve the mystery of that historical “what if” in the context of a love story and family drama.

  I hope you enjoy the “run” with me.

  Tom Murphy

  CHAPTER ONE

  September 1999

  My name is Colin Patrick. For twenty-nine years before this story opens in 1999, I had been chasing love, luck, and stability, but swinging wildly and missing big in my search for the good life when I spotted a copy of Runners’ World on my boss, Bridget Maloney’s, desk in the newsroom of Philadelphia’s Channel 7.

  The magazine was open to a story about the explosive growth in women’s running since 1972 when after a series of confrontations between women and race officials the Boston Marathon relaxed its rules and permitted women to compete.

  “Women’s running?” I said to Bridget as she sat at her desk to read the story. “I didn’t know you liked sports.”

  “The Boston Marathon is planning a celebration of women at the 2000 Boston Marathon next April as they usher in the new Millennium and Roman wants us out front on the women’s angle,” she said. Steve Roman owned the station, but other than the huge portrait of himself he insisted be hung in the lobby he was a distant figure to me. “When 20,000 competitors toe the line at Boston on April 17, 2000 to start a new century, a third will be women. That’s our story, sweetie, how so many women run today, yet so few know the history of women’s running.”

  “I didn’t know you were a jock.”

  “I love news. Pack yo
ur camera gear. We have a press conference at City Hall. Then we’ll go to the track at U Penn to get tape on women runners for a feature I want to do.”

  I had other things I wanted to discuss with Bridget, namely, images that had begun to nag me in the mirror in the morning: sputtering shopkeepers, bumbling accountants, stammering non-profit executive directors, all with sins to conceal, and me with my camera poised to beam them onto the nightly news as Bridget shoved a microphone under their chins.

  “Do you ever wonder, Bridget, if this is the day we send a bugger down a deep dark hole they never come back from?” I said, alluding to the director of a Food Bank in South Philly who had dropped to his knees and begged us to go away that week.

  “It may seem odd,” she said, continuing to read, “but for the first sixty-nine years of the Boston Marathon, until Roberta Gibb ran in 1966 and Kathrine Switzer was chased by Jock Semple in 1967, there were no female participants in the race.”

  I reached for the magazine to get it away, but she slipped it into her handbag.

  “Do you ever wonder, Bridget, if any of the guys whose lives we break like glass might be innocent?”

  “Maybe you need a change of scenery,” she said with a wink. “Take the van, baby. I’ll meet you at City Hall. Brown starts her Council meetings at 11 am sharp. Don’t be late.”

  Bridget Maloney was a stunner as well as a crack investigative reporter. Late 40s, blonde, she had killer legs. Though she was single (separated from her husband in Boston, according to scuttlebutt around the office), I had never seen her date. Stories abounded, however, about her ability to impale a macho guy with a single sidelong glance. As well, she possessed a keen intuition to match her physical gifts. Certainly, nobody doubted her talent. She had worked at Channel 7 for three years and owned enough hardware, Emmys and other awards, to fill an aisle at Home Depot.

  She was my best friend as well as my boss since she had hired me six months earlier. I was in Philadelphia at the time only because that’s as far as my money and the bus from Chicago would take me after I got canned in the Windy City following a confrontation with the news director.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her the morning I stepped off the bus from Chicago and spotted her setting up for a remote on Market Street. Her Gucci skirt switched side to side as she walked sending a signal to the world: step aside, people, I own this ground I’m moving across.

  “I was at Channel 10 in Chicago,” I said as I strolled over to her, stumbling from the too-many beers I’d had on the bus. I don’t know why I pulled my Red Sox rookie card out of my wallet—twisted and faded as it was. Maybe it was the intuition I had that beneath the impenetrable shield she wore as a cover to the world she was kind.

  She studied the card a long moment, a good sign.

  “You hirin’ cameramen, lady? I’m a good cameraman.”

  “Go away. Before I call a cop,” she said.

  So much for kind!

  Two days later, I was sleeping on a bench at the 30th Street train station, still in town, when she tapped my boot with her dove gray Ferragamo shoe.

  “Need a wake-up call, sweetie?” That’s what she called me, sweetie, as I sat slouched on the bench waiting for a train to Miami, since I hadn’t tried the south yet.

  “So what is it exactly you told Sam Edwards, the news director at Channel 10 in Chicago, that he should put up his butt?”

  “You talked to the Prince of Darkness?”

  “I’m a reporter. That seems your pattern, to burn your bridges.”

  “I have opinions.”

  “Sam says you’re incorrigible.”

  “He means incorruptible. There are lines I won’t cross.”

  “Still follow the Red Sox since your playing days ended?”

  “How do you know so much about me?”

  She handed my baseball card back to me, which I didn’t realize she had kept. “I research my subjects. That’s what I do in addition to breathing.”

  “I’m a subject now?”

  “I saw you play. You banged a double off the Green Monster the day I was at Fenway. So you want a job? Talk to me.”

  “I need a job, but I don’t talk about anything anymore that requires my emotional involvement.”

  “Oh, my, sweetie, you do need my support.”

  That night I slept in a hotel, my first real bed in weeks, compliments of Bridget, and two days later Channel 7 hired me as her cameraman.

  “Why are you doing this for me?” I asked as I cornered her near the watercooler that first morning.

  “When you interrupted me on Market Street, I liked your eyes.”

  “How could you see my eyes? I was half asleep.”

  “I saw the other half. I’m taking a chance that you can find your swing again. But don’t blow this, sweetie, it’s not like you have any bridges left to burn.”

  We became inseparable after that, like two birds slicing through the crystal air, wingtip to wingtip.

  Little did I realize, however, that she had another reason for hiring me: she had a plan for me, one that was about to send my life into a spin again, bigger than my collapse with the Red Sox.

  The next several months with her would put me in the middle of the biggest women’s sports story of the year, a women’s story in a sport I knew nothing about, but even if I had known all the details about the intrigue to come I would have been powerless to resist Bridget.

  For if there is one thing true about me, it’s this: put me in the company of a strong-willed woman in motion and I will fall under the gravity of her spell every time.

  I was halfway to City Hall when the phone rang in the news van. It was Roman, Jr., the owner’s son, and the station’s lead assignment editor.

  “Reroute to Franklin Park,” he barked. “An item just came in about obesity in America.”

  “Oh, wow, Junior, stop the presses.”

  Junior (he hated it when I called him Junior) was a pasty-faced kid with an instinct for the jugular and a newly-minted MBA from Penn, courtesy of his daddy’s dough. I knew he didn’t like me, which had been my liability at the three other stations where I had been fired in nine years since an injury cut short my baseball career: I could not conceal my disdain for prissy boys who flaunted their silver spoons.

  “I want you to capture recreational runners, rollerbladers, whatever, in contrast to obese examples.”

  “Examples, Junior? We talking human beings here?”

  “I want your tape on my desk in an hour,” he said, ignoring my tone, and click went the phone because he knew I would never push back so hard as to jeopardize my gig with Bridget.

  I shot a close-up of a 300-pound man draining a 32-ounce Slurpee, along with a shot of a young couple in purple balloon pants wolfing Nachos, when suddenly my shoe crunched something soft on the path, a pink fanny pack, and I picked it up.

  When I looked up I saw a trim blonde girl, mid-20s, the fanny pack’s owner. She was jogging in place in front of me, her blonde ponytail bouncing side to side off one shoulder then the other.

  She wore a tight red halter, microfiber of some kind, and red shorts that hugged her perfectly sculpted hips. I glanced at her bare midriff, and her flat stomach, beaded with tiny crystals of sweat, then I heard her voice, clear, but with an edge.

  “Can I have my pouch back, please?” but as I lifted my camera and pointed it at her, her tone became very sharp, “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “I’m going to put you on the news tonight,” I said, focusing my camera on the terror showing in her amazingly blue eyes. “I need footage of fit people.”

  “I don’t want to be on the news!”

  “Wait!” I called, but she turned and I watched her long trim legs carry her away, her blonde ponytail slapping shoulder to shoulder again as she sped off down the path.

  “Hey! What about this?”
I said as I held up her fanny pack, but as quickly as she had appeared she disappeared around a cluster of bushes at the entrance to the park.

  When I opened the pouch I found no indication of her name, only three bucks, a gold medal with blue lettering, “Boston Athletic Association, 1951,” and a number for a road race with big red lettering, “F-1.”

  F-1, she must be good, I thought as I returned to my van, followed by my next thought: how does a guy get a chance with a girl like that?

  As soon as I got back in the truck, Junior came on the radio again.

  “Media 17. Change your route again. I want you to go to City Line Ave. and the Pike.”

  “I told Bridget I’d meet her at City Hall for a Council meeting at 11.”

  “That meeting’s been canceled. The City Council President got in a car wreck.”

  “How bad?” I didn’t know the Council President, Priscilla Brown, but she was a Hillary Clinton type, feisty, good copy.

  “Real bad. I’ll have Bridget meet you at the scene.”

  It was bad. I saw that immediately as I approached the crash site where a cop waved my news van through the morass of traffic before directing me to a spot between an ambulance and a shattered vehicle, a Honda Civic.

  This was Brown’s car, obviously, and I craned my neck to catch activity inside the ambulance, but I couldn’t see through the tinted windows. The Honda, on the other hand, looked like a crushed can. That along with the slow turn of the ambulance at the top of the block told the tale: Priscilla Brown, Philly’s rising political star, could not have walked away.

  “Colin?” Bridget shouted, as she rapped on my driver’s side window. “Junior wants us to go to Haverford County Day School. He’s got an angle for us.”

  The school, on the grounds of Haverford College, was about ten minutes away. “What’s there?”

  “Just drive,” she said, as she hopped in on the passenger side. “We’ll see when we get to the school. Hurry.”