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Sat, 20 Oct 2007 05:37:53 -0400
Starting Lines 1: The Winner
RUNNING COMMENTARY 698[From my book-in-progress, titled Starting Lines. Photo of Henderson boys in the early 1920s -- (back from left) Chuck and Milt, (front), my future father Jim, and Bruce.]
DES MOINES, IOWA, April 1931. The story of how I came to be a runner, and soon afterward a writer on running, starts long before there was a me. It starts with choosing my ancestors well. It starts 150 miles northeast of Coin, at the 1931 Drake Relays in Des Moines, when the family took this track meet and the sport as a whole into a lasting embrace.
"G-go, Ch-ch," my future father Jim Henderson tried to shout during the main event for him at Drake that year. By the time his brother's name came out, Chuck had already passed his family's seats at the head of the backstretch.
The more excited or worried Jim became, the worse his stutter grew. And now he felt both excitement and concern for his big brother. Chuck had taken the lead in his biggest track meet so far, the Drake Relays, but could he hold it against competition this tough? For an Iowan of any era, Drake was as close as he could come to running in the Olympics. Winning a wristwatch there was as good as a gold medal.
The Hendersons already knew that Chuck was a thoroughbred. As a 12-year-old he had beaten his age-mates, then on the same day stepped up to whip the 13-14s and 15-16s at the Page County Farm Bureau Picnic. Chuck's high school running had caught the eye of the track coach at Iowa State College in Ames.
Since the oldest of the four brothers had enrolled there, his family had only read about his races in letters and in the Des Moines Register. Reading these results from a far corner of Iowa was a statistical exercise. Seeing Chuck run in person was an emotional experience, which Jim almost literally couldn't put into words.
Chuck ran the quarter-mile leg on the distance medley relay for Iowa State. He bolted ahead on the first curve, stretched his lead to three strides down the backstretch, then added another step before handing off the baton. Then he stumble-walked down the slope to Drake Stadium's sunken infield and doubled over, hands on his knees, to catch his breath. He didn't recover enough to notice the ongoing race until the next Iowa State runner had gone a lap. This one extended the Cyclones' lead, and the anchor man protected it.
The four runners stood on the victory stand at the Hendersons' end of the track to collect the winners' watches. Chuck then dashed across the track and up into the stands to show the family the biggest prize of his career. Jim beamed with brotherly pride but didn't try to say anything. Just 14 himself, Jim had already shown talent himself as a sprinter. He now vowed silently to train harder so someday he could follow his big brother onto the Iowa State team and into the Drake Relays.
UPDATE: FAST PAST
Jim Henderson never grew as big, or strong, or fast, or bold as his brother Chuck. Plus, Jim graduated from high school at 16 and always had lagged behind his classmates in physical maturity. He still ran the sprints and long-jumped (the event was the "broad jump" then) well enough to win the cigar box full of medals and ribbons. His own boys would use these as awards in their own track meets, and lose too many of the prizes.
Jim signed up for the track team at Iowa State but lasted a single season. The combination of his youth, his sometimes paralyzing and always embarrassing stutter, and his fears that caused him to throw up before every meet drove him into early retirement. He channeled his athletic interests into covering all sports as a student journalist, paying special attention to his favorite sport.
Brother Chuck lasted longer in the sport, but still might have left his best races unrun. He had been but a sophomore at Iowa State the year his distance medley relay team won at the Drake Relays. He kept improving as a runner and was fast enough to compete in the 1932 Olympic Trials. But Depression-era economics deprived him of that one chance. Instead he worked that summer on the family farm.
Charles R. Henderson, Ph.D., became an internationally recognized expert in livestock genetics. He taught for most of his career at Cornell University, then traveled the world as a guest lecturer in "retirement." When he died, a professional journal from his field paid homage to him in an article that naturally dealt mostly with his animal work.
Only the next-to-last paragraph held the facts I'd always needed to know because Chuck himself never advertised these credentials. I'm sure this report is accurate because Uncle Chuck was a scientist whose greatest sin would have been misstating a number.
"His lifelong interest in athletics was track and field," reads the tribute. "While running for the Cyclones, he was part of the 4 x 220 relay team that set an indoor world record of 1:31.8 in 1932. In 1933 he set an Iowa State College fieldhouse [13-plus laps per mile] record of 51.7 for the indoor 440 yards that stood for 30 years." This article confirmed that Chuck's best quarter-mile time, 48.6, came in a year, 1933, when the world record-holder was only 1.2 seconds faster.
The first rule of speed is to choose your bloodlines well. I did, even if I never fully honored that family gift while drifting to ever-longer distances, and later to ever-slower runs.
[All completed chapters now appear together in the "New Books" section, http://joehenderson.com/startinglines.]