Runner in Red Page 3

  The receptionist at Channel 6 in Needham outside Boston told me Stan was busy, but he’d see me after his conference call ended.

  “You can sit in the lounge and watch TV while you wait,” she said, pointing to a room off to the side.

  I sat down to watch as a segment called “Lead up to the New Millennium: A Women’s History of the Boston Marathon,” played on the station’s waiting room TV. About 1,000 runners, all men, lined up in the street in Hopkinton for the start of the race in 1971 as half a dozen women lined up for photographers.

  “It had been four years since Jock Semple chased Kathrine Switzer down the road in the 1967 Boston Marathon, calling world-wide attention to the issue of women’s exclusion from the Boston Marathon,” said a commentator. “But by 1971 women still were not permitted to run, and six young ladies have come to the start today to show their displeasure with the rules and run in the race, including the race co-director’s daughter.”

  I watched as the gun went off and a duel developed in the race between Pat McMahon of Boston and Alvaro Mejia of Mexico, but at intervals the video cut to the six women sprinkled among the field and to one in particular, a blonde women with a Boston College singlet leading the women’s contingent.

  Then down the final straightaway came Mejia who had pulled ahead of McMahon and he raised his arms in triumph. But that shot cut quickly to the broader field and to a shot of the blonde woman from Boston College as she opened her lead on the other women in the final miles on Beacon Street. The film showed her barreling down the straight-away toward the finish line as the commentator and the crowd went wild, “Here comes Gallagher, the race director’s daughter, she’s on pace to break the women’s world record for the marathon, unofficially of course since women are not allowed to participate formally. But nevertheless she is pouring it on, in a time close to three hours, faster than any woman has ever run a marathon, and uh-oh, here comes her father, Pop Gallagher, the race co-director. He’s on record saying he won’t allow a breach of the rules and he’s moving to a place in front of the finish line. Oh, boy, looks like we may get a confrontation, since everyone knows Pop Gallagher will protect the integrity of the Boston Marathon….”

  At that moment, Stan the news director, came into the lounge. I assumed he was Stan, because he said, “Are you Colin Patrick, the kid who wants to see me?” I nodded as I continued to watch the video with the blonde coed steaming toward the finish when all of a sudden, Pop Gallagher jumped into the street in front of his daughter, and waved his arms to block her.

  “Bridget Maloney gave me your name,” I said, one eye on the TV. “She said I could see you for a job.”

  “You know Bridget well?”

  “I worked for her for six months as her cameraman in Philly.”

  “You know her well and you don’t recognize her?”

  “Huh?

  “That’s Bridget,” he said, pointing to the TV. “And that’s her father blocking her at the finish line of the 1971 Boston Marathon. It’s a fairly famous shot in running circles. I trust you’re a better cameraman than you are a sports historian.”

  OMG! I didn’t say the words, but my face showed the shock. I stepped closer to the screen for a better look as Bridget squared off, her face inches away from the sour-faced curmudgeon who blocked her, and it WAS her. That was Bridget!

  “Oh, my God!” I said, and Stan smiled.

  “Come this way. You can tell me about all the other close friends you have.”

  I followed him to his office, but I walked backward so I could watch the screen and watch as Bridget, MY Bridget, melted under the glare of her father, Pop Gallagher, and stepped away from the finish line before crossing it, failing to finish the race in 1971.

  Stan was a tall, stocky African-American, a guy I pegged for a linebacker in high school by the size of him. But what got me were his eyes: they were clear and bright and they held my gaze without wavering. He had outtakes from the video of the 1971 marathon, and he gave me the full background on Bridget, showing her running with the track team from Boston College to practice for her Boston Marathon run. The clips showed her practicing on the track with two guys, one identified by Stan as Jack Maloney, who Stan said was her estranged husband, and a guy who looked vaguely familiar.

  “I know that guy,” I said, meaning the one who was not her estranged husband. “I think I do anyway.”

  “You should, if you worked in Philly. That was your boss, the station owner, Steve Roman.”

  I offered another OMG face as I failed to make the connection between the huge portrait of Steve Roman in the news station lobby in Philadelphia and this shot of a trim, young guy—a top runner—in the 1971 video clip.

  “If I hire you, as you tell me Bridget wants me to, he’ll be your boss here as well.”

  I saved the OMG face, but said, “What?”

  Stan told me how Roman had made a fortune on Wall Street and was buying up television stations, starting with two, one in Philly and the other in Boston, “Including this one, Channel 6. He has a pattern. He likes to own stations where Bridget works.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Roman owns a marketing company that bought a sponsorship from the Boston Marathon as part of celebrating the new Millennium at this year’s race. He wants our station to lead the search for the Runner in Red and he wants Bridget to come up from Philly to lead the project.”

  “When’s she coming?”

  “In a week. She’s in NY now with Roman planning strategy to find the Runner in Red and make a big PR splash out of it.”

  The confusion showed on my face as he muttered, “Ah, neophytes,” then he grabbed his clicker for the TV screen on the wall across from his desk.

  “Let me show you a little history. You look like you’re new to school.”

  “I’m baseball. I don’t know anything about running.”

  “Obviously.”

  He showed clips from a Boston Marathon with the date “1966” stamped across the top. It showed a woman, “Roberta Gibb,” as identified on the screen, running among the men and crossing the finish line in 1966 in 3 hours and 21 minutes.

  “Bobbi Gibb was the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon. She snuck into the race in 1966 and beat more than two-thirds of the men’s field. The media went crazy. There’s a story about a reporter from the Herald who felt he was giving up Pulitzer Prize material when his editor had him tank his prose on Kenji Kenimara, the men’s winner, to write a story on Gibb.”

  “Why weren’t women allowed to run?”

  “Amateur Athletic Union rules that governed the sport suggested women could hurt themselves if they ran more than 200 meters. That was the world back then. The Boston Marathon had to operate under those rules or lose the AAU sanction.”

  The next clip, “1967” showed a young woman in grey sweats, identified as “Kathrine Switzer,” being pursued by a burly man who hopped off the press bus to chase her down the road.

  “Who’s that guy?”

  “That’s Jock Semple. He and Pop Gallagher were running rivals in the 30s and 40s. They became co-directors of the Boston Marathon in the 50s, and oversaw the race together. Jock passed away in 1988, but Pop was a bit younger and he’s still around. He’s in his 80s today, but he was stripped of his title as co-director after his skirmish with Bridget in 1971.”

  Again Stan put the scene up on the TV, the one with Pop Gallagher and Bridget squaring off eyeball to eyeball at the finish line.

  “They canned Pop in 1971, why didn’t they can Jock in 1967 for what he did to Switzer?”

  “Jock made himself public enemy number one with the female gender in ’67, that’s for sure. But he was smart, too. He repented and he embraced women’s running after his confrontation with Switzer. He became a strong advocate for women, and he even took to training top women runners, such as Patti Catalano. Women
embraced Jock, including Kathrine Switzer. Pop on the other hand never made his peace, though he does train high school kids today. He has softened, I think, and a lot of people love him for all the good he did for the marathon over the years. But he never made peace with Bridget, and she never made peace with him.”

  I shook my head, trying to absorb it all.

  “So there you have it. Bobbi Gibb and Kathrine Switzer broke the ice for women runners in the mid-60s, but if Bridget can prove that a woman ran in 1951, fifteen years before Bobbi Gibb, that will call for a total rewrite of women’s running history. That’s what Roman wants, he wants us to cross the finish line first on that story.”

  “Can you play the scene again? The one where Bridget approaches the finish line and Pop jumps in front of her in the ’71 race.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “What did Pop say to her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Play it again, take a closer look,” I said, and he played the scene two or three more times, with the shot of Bridget barreling toward the finish, about to cross the line, when three feet short of the line Pop leans in front of her and has words. Whatever words they were, they froze Bridget more than his flailing arms did, and she recoils, not from the windmill of his arms, but from his words.

  “Wow, you’re right,” Stan said. “He does say something to her. I never noticed. I’ll ask her when she gets here. When I ask her what she wants me to do with you.”

  “Do with me?”

  He held up the slip of paper with his name on it, the one Bridget had given me in Philly, the one I had passed onto the receptionist for Stan.

  “Obviously she wants me to hire you. But for what? I assume to help her with Runner in Red, but give me a call next week and I’ll get you an answer.”

  My head was spinning!

  Bridget was not just a runner, but a champion runner. A Boston Marathon historical figure, a freakin’ radical focused on breaking the gender barrier with Gibb, Switzer and other women pioneers. And taking on her father to do it! Now she was focused on the Runner in Red, a hunt for the first woman who quite possibly ran the Boston Marathon fifteen years before history knew there had been a first female runner.

  But why? For revenge? To show the world there was one woman her father couldn’t stop?

  I needed answers so I stopped at the Boston College library on Commonwealth Ave. on my way back to Boston. I learned that the Runner in Red was indeed a legend created after a group of Canadian runners in the 1951 Boston Marathon claimed they saw “a woman wearing red” running beside them during the marathon.

  Their claim caused a great ruckus at the finish line in 1951 as reporters circled the Canadians for details. Had they been able to prove what they saw, the Runner in Red would have been the first woman to run a marathon on American soil. But Pop Gallagher, the race co-director, doused the flames of any scandal when he said the runner in red had been Tim Finn, a member of his Dorchester Athletic Association marathon team. Pop produced Tim at the finish line wearing a red sweatshirt with a red hood over his D.A.A. singlet and Tim—who had placed ninth in the race, securing victory for the D.A.A. team in the team category—said, “Yes, that was me wearing a red hood.”

  The Canadians continued to protest. They even took their claim to newspapers in Toronto, prolonging the story for a few more days, but Pop continued to insist the Runner in Red had been Finn and because “Pop was the staunchest champion of the rules God ever created,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Jerry Nason, the dean of Boston sportswriters, that did it.

  The story never got legs, beyond becoming an urban legend.

  I got in my car to head back to Dorchester after finishing at the library when I saw her!

  She was a hundred feet down the road, and I hit the brakes. It had to be her: blonde ponytail!

  She stood next to her disabled car on Commonwealth Ave. She had the car’s hood up and I pulled in behind her and walked gingerly, thinking ah, serendipity!

  That’s what the world gives us when it wants to be kind.

  “Trouble?” I said. I couldn’t believe how gorgeous she was. Long and tall in tight fitting jeans, she wore a red t-shirt on that warm fall day. But all I focused on was her unmistakable trademark, her blonde ponytail. I had last seen that precious commodity flying back and forth across her shoulders in Philly as she had sped away from me and out of my life. Forever, as I had believed, until now!

  “My car,” she said. “It stopped, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Here, let me take a look,” I said, and I made “hmmm” sounds like a doctor examining a patient.

  “Do you know what the problem is?”

  “I do,” I said, and I took a shot. “These old cars, like my sorry case back there,” and I pointed to my car, which I had bought battered and bruised off a gas station parking lot after arriving in Boston. “Before the electronic ignition systems, these old cars worked off a set of points, which need to have a proper gap. I suspect the gap between your points collapsed.”

  She looked at me like I was speaking Greek, but all I could see were her blindingly brilliant blue eyes. I pulled out a parking ticket from my pocket, the one I had just gotten after overstaying my research in the library, and I used the thickness of the ticket to reconfigure the gap in her points, and voila! It worked.

  I asked her to start her car again, and presto, it turned over. Through the windshield I could see a huge smile suffuse her face—directed at ME! I looked in the back seat of her car, at the countless boxes she had stacked back there.

  “What’s with all the baggage? You moving?”

  “My mother just gave hell to my father again. I was staying there, but she’s hopelessly cruel to him, and I’m going to Dorchester to live with my grandfather.”

  “Dorchester! That’s where I live,” I said, looking for any connection possible.

  “Really, where in Dorchester?”

  “I live above an entertainment establishment. Where does your grandfather live? Possibly I could follow you home to make sure your car doesn’t break down again.”

  I saw the processing of that offer play out in her brain, but ultimately she decided I wasn’t a stalker and she smiled. “That would be great, thank you!”

  She scribbled on a piece of paper and handed the page to me: “Ellen Crutchfield. 183 Minot Street.”

  I took the paper, as horns blew and trumpets blared. It was like a Hallelujah chorus concert right there on Commonwealth Ave. in front of sandwich shops, auto dealer storefronts, and computer fix-it joints.

  Just then a car pulled up, and pulled in behind mine.

  “Ellen?” said a man in his 60s, a gray-haired hippy in a jeans jacket with his own ponytail, gunboat gray, under a ball cap. “You all right?”

  By that, he meant “with me.”

  “Yes,” she said, beaming. “I called you. But you didn’t need to come actually. This nice guy fixed my car, he said he’ll follow me home.”

  “No need for that,” said the aging hippy. “I’ll take you in my car. Then I’ll come back and get your car after I get you home safe.”

  He turned to me and said, “Thanks for your help,” his tone perfunctory, hardly warm.

  “No problem,” I said, and several moments later blonde ponytail was pulling out of my life again, this time with an aging hippy.

  Still, she offered me a smile and a cute wave out the passenger side window as the hippy’s sedan sped away.

  I watched her go and my spirits sank to a new depth, until I realized what I was holding in my hand and I beamed larger than I could ever remember smiling. I opened my hand and stared at the paper, with her fine delicate writing.

  I had her address.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I couldn’t get the image of Ellen Crutchfield out of my head, the picture of her mesmerizing blue eyes as she smil
ed from behind the wheel of her car after I had made it start. I carried her image up the stairs to my apartment above the bar on Dorchester Avenue north of Fields Corner that evening and I was smiling until I checked my mail and saw the letter from my brother, Kenny.

  “Hey, guy, haven’t talked to you in a while,” the note said, and I got a pit in my stomach, the way Kenny could be brusque when he meant to be affectionate. “We got the Mass of Remembrance for Dad at St. Patrick’s in Huntington on Wednesday. It’s the third anniversary of dad’s passing and I know you won’t miss the chance for a graveside visit, especially the way you still feel guilty about Mom.”

  I loved the guy, but oh his ham-handed way at connection-making!

  Then I saw the PS and understood his real reason for the outreach: “I got something I need to talk to you about. An idea to help you turn your life around finally. Call me.”

  I had kept one thing from my playing days, my bat. I carried it in my duffle bag. A 31-ounce Louisville slugger, the bat had my initials, “C.P.,” on the knob and pine tar on the handle from the day I got hurt.

  The bat had traveled with me everywhere and I grabbed it after turning on the TV to watch the Red Sox. The Sox were doing well as they had earned a spot in the playoffs, and I assumed a position in an imaginary batter’s box at the foot of my bed and stared hard at the Toronto southpaw as he looked in for the sign.

  Moonlight bathed the floor of my tiny room as I locked eyes with the pitcher who curled into position, arm cocked, and I tightened my grip along the handle, waiting. I watched the ball as it left the pitcher’s hand, and I leaned into the pitch, swinging hard with all my might and I turned on the ball, driving it deep into the night, out my window and over the huddled rooftops of Dorchester.

  Gone.

  A tape measure job.

  “I’ll turn my own life around, Kenny,” I said as I rounded the bases in my mind. Then, as I put my bat back into the duffle bag, I said it again to myself and to the world beyond the rooftops.

  “I’m going to find her again, damn it, and I’m going to make Ellen Crutchfield mine.”