FLRC Oral Histories

Okay, who’s here? So, first of all, we have Bob Congdon, president at the very beginning of the Finger Lakes Runners Club, and can hopefully give us some deep history into that. Tom Rishel, one of our early presidents and founder of the Skunk Cabbage Race. And me, Adam Engst, current president of the Finger Lakes Runners Club, and someone who came along way later. And this is not designed to be like an official history or anything like that. This is a little bit more of like, who were the people? What was the situations? Like, where did this club come from? What’s the cool stuff that we like would have talked about? You know, someone new showed up on a long run. You know, oh man, there was a Jim Hartshorne character. And let me tell you about him. That’s the kind of stuff I’m looking for to start. And we can tell stories. We can talk. We can go off on tangents. It’s all totally fine. And we’ll get transcripts out of this. If it’s fun, we’ll do it more. I mean, we can have a good time with this. So.

Tommy Hartshorne.

Jim Hartshorne. Oh, I’ll definitely get Tom. Don’t worry. I can’t shut Tom off. By all means. I’m sure. So where did Finger Lakes Runners Club come from?

No, you start because I wasn’t there.

You were there at the beginning, right? Jim Hartshorne. being the president of the club before that happened, Jim was a competitive runner. That was his lifestyle. Of course, he was a professor of ornithology. He had specially in the hummingbird business. And that’s something I might want to come back to because as a club, maybe we can have some kind of recognition or memorial for his service to that location. And he had something different. But because he competed in running, primarily the mile was his interest, he would travel all over the world. He would go overseas. He and George Gavras, who was a postman from Groton, would go overseas and they’d run the international master’s mile. And he often went to California where the master’s mile originated. I don’t know what dates or time. So he brought that idea back to Ithaca. And what he wanted to do, he wanted to have some kind of a name recognition for those people who were interested in with him and George running the Masters Mile. So he decided to name their group, it wasn’t a club, the Finger Lakes Runners Club.

Okay.

And it started, I believe, in 1973.

68.

Was it 68? Yeah, it was 68. Okay, well, that’s good then. Because I don’t have the information anymore, as I told you, I went to the Cornell Archives on paper. So that was the reason he started the club. So he had a label for himself and his friends, whoever wanted to run the Masters Mile. And, of course, he brought the idea of the Masters Mile to Ithaca, which is ongoing now.

I was going to say, I’m not wearing that T-shirt today, But yes, Hartshorne Masters Mile still going. We have one coming up on January 17th. But so it sounds like this was almost like he wanted team jerseys almost. So they could all be the same team when they were competing.

What he decided to do was he was president. He made himself president of the club. And there was a reason for that, I’ll tell you in a few minutes. But he also had a secretary. And I forget the woman’s name, but she lived over here on… I can do that. Okay. Anyhow, her husband was part of a laundry service. I can’t think of her name, but she moved to Elmire.

Sharon Petrillose.

Who?

Sharon Petrillose. Sharon Petrillose. She’s from the Petrillose’s family who had Johnny’s Big Red. Oh, yeah, yeah. And her husband was the brother of Johnny’s Big Red. Okay. And the husband, her husband, they were living together, but not quite really by this particular time. He was spending all his time with the food truck down at Cornell. Oh. Okay. And his name was Bob Petrillose. And they lived in the big white house on Pine Tree Road.

Pleasant Grove Road, yeah.

So Jim just sort of like— Pleasant Grove Road. So Jim just sort of like, you know, basically formed all this with, just on his own. Like knowing, not really input or like he wasn’t like, hey, getting a group together is more like I am doing this and it’s now the Finger Lakes Runners Club.

And that was his lifestyle.

Yeah.

Because whatever he did, he was so exact. He was so meticulous about things. I didn’t know anything about his nature, but I was near him because I was interested in running. So I go to his house frequently. And one day, this is the thing that really impressed me. I needed information about tools and I needed some hardware for ideas. And I knew he was an expert or at least knowledgeable about what I needed. So I go into his garage and I ask him for a tool and hardware. And he pulls out this box, this toolbox. And in the drawers, there were multiple dozens and dozens of drawers. He pulled open one drawer, says, this is the item you want. And the screws in the drawer were all lined up perfectly in the drawer. And he searched other drawers and they were all the same. And right there, that made a big impression on me. I thought, wow, this guy is meticulous. He’s exact. He’s the boss. So that was his lifestyle. That’s the way he lived. That’s the way his house was taken care of too. So when he developed the runner’s club, he had himself as president. He labeled himself as the treasurer because he controlled all the money, any money that was used or collected. And he used the woman, Petrillose. She was unofficially the secretary. But she would show up at the meets and she’d help at the desk, register people, talk to people, and socially be nice and make it comfortable.

So early on, how many people are we talking? How many, like, when there was an event, well, I guess what was an event? Was it literally just like a meet to run the mile initially, or were there other things that happened?

It started out with him interested in running and trying to get people to run with him, but he was highly competitive, and people didn’t like that. People wouldn’t run with him much. And he was very interested in physical fitness, first of all. He took classes out in the Midwest. He went out to talk to a swim coach by the name of Councilman, famous coach in swimming out there.

Jim Councilman.

Yeah, Jim. And he came back with a lot of physical fitness ideas. And he was the first person in Ithaca that actually conducted oxygen consumption testing. Oh, VO2 max. Before any of the Cornell or Ithaca College people.

And I can tell you, I took some of those tests and I can tell you some about that too.

Go ahead. Go ahead. I was going to say, I’ve done a modern VO2 max test, but I’ve seen the pictures of Jack Daniels literally driving alongside people while people are like breathing into, you know, through a tube into a bag that they’re holding to be able to measure this stuff back in the day.

Yeah, well, Jim wouldn’t do that. But what he would do is he would put you on an exercise bike and he would have a standard test and he would take you to just about the limit. He’d take you to about what he thought was 95%. And he’s got information on various club members from when they were like 32 years old. But the thing is that I would go to Jim and say, well, show me your results. And Jim would say, well, I’ve got these publishable results, but I don’t have enough of them yet. And he would never give up any of his data to anybody, including the person who had already just taken the test. But he had max VO2s on me.

I wonder if Tom Hartshorne still has all that.

I don’t know. I really don’t know. That would be fascinating stuff. I mean, the next person to interview really would be Tom. Yeah. And that’s one of the things that…

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The other thing about his house, I’ll just share with you along with that. He used to have a room in his house that was a small gym. And when you went in there, he had weight equipment that nobody had in their homes at that time. I mean, this is late 60s. Yeah, people didn’t have computers. They didn’t have weights in their home.

He had a house, which was on one floor, but it really had a basement that basically was his. There’s a long story about that. But then there was also a connected way to go to the garage. And the garage was separate. And so he had this house here. And then he had the garage over here. And then he had this connected segment here. And in this connected segment, he had all sorts of exercise equipment, which he would get on, but then he’d also put us on. Did you ever take his? Yeah. I did this VO2 max test. Wow. And he would have his board meetings, if you will, downstairs in his house. I never got to see the upstairs of his house. until after he died. And the reason for that is because I went over to see if maybe Marianne and I would buy the house. And at that time, houses here were going for $100,000. They wanted $400,000 for the house. And it just wasn’t.

That wasn’t about to happen. And Tom’s still living there.

Yeah. Well, that’s another long story that maybe we’ll get into.

But it sounds like we’re talking relatively few people here. Yes. So like five, ten? I’d like to talk. Yeah. That’s a fair number. Less than ten. Less than ten. Yeah. So, okay. So we’re talking just a handful of people.

We had at one point a 10th anniversary. And I was president then. So it had to be 19. Maybe it was 15th anniversary. I can’t remember. Okay, 93, yeah. So 1980, somewhere around there. And we tried to invite all the originals. And according to Jim, the originals were, the founders were Jim himself, of course. What he would do is he would go out on the run at noontime at Cornell. And if he saw somebody he thought was a really good runner, he’d go up to them and say, we’re forming a club. Do you want to join with us? Okay. So he had Chuck Collins.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

From Nice. I know Chuck. He was not a Cornell. He had George Gavras, the postman from Groton. He had Vern Rockcastle, who was a tenured faculty member, and lived here at Kendal Down, essentially where your in-laws were living. Okay, in the cottage. And then he had a guy named Tom something from Syracuse. And then he had, I think Bob was like number six in the club. Somewhere along that order. And that was by about the year 1970.

Okay.

And I didn’t come here until 73, and that’s why I wanted you to start with Bob.

Interesting. So in those early years, basically, it sounds like we’re putting on, you know, there’s like potentially some board meetings because we’re trying to figure out what goes on.

Yeah.

And then he’s putting on track meets or other runs, group runs?

What he decided to do was establish events. He wanted to have Finger Lakes running events. He went to Ken Cooper, by the way, in Texas before all this started.

Down in Houston. And he spent his own money. Yeah. And he went down to Cooper’s lab a number of times. And he’d come back and tell me about, you know, they dumped him in the water and, you know, how much.

He’s a major exercise physiologist. Oh, yeah. Big time.

So he’d come back with that information. So he was always spirited, always uplifting about physical education, about performance and competition. So this all fit into his scheme. So what he wanted to do was to have regular meets. So he decided to have monthly meets. And the meets started at the Moakley House at Cordell. He used to run on the golf course. That was his favorite place to run. And he got criticized a lot by the Cornell people who ran the golf course. Yeah, the golf people don’t like you.

People did not like runners.

They didn’t want runners on the course.

They still don’t love runners.

It’s still true. Yeah. But he established that and made it happen with Trent Jones, who is now on the name of the Cornell golf course. Oh, Robert Trent Jones. Yeah, they were friend enough to be okay with running.

So that’s how he got the access to the golf course.

So that’s how that establishment went. But the professionals who were members of the club didn’t want the runners there. They didn’t like them. They didn’t want runners on the course.

It may be said that Jim had a difficult relationship with anybody who had any power. Jim would go in and say, I’m going to do this. And they would say, that’s not something that Cornell allows. and he would go ahead and somehow find a way to do it. So how he got Barton Hall, how did he get Barton Hall for monthly meets?

They didn’t want him to use it, but he decided we’re going to need it. It’s a facility. I’m a member of Cornell University as a staff, and he got it, and it worked, and it happened. But that was later.

In point of fact, he was not a Cornell person. He never got a degree at Cornell. No.

Oh, so he didn’t teach it? He wasn’t a researcher?

It’s a long story, and he told it to me one day when we were out on a run. And I’ll be glad to tell you the story. But he came here to study ornithology, and he built these boxes. his question was, do the children, do the fledglings learn language, learn the bird language, or do they have it imprinted in them? Right. Do they show up with it genetically? Nature or nurture. Or do they learn it from mommy? And so that was his question. So how do you study that question? You think about that, and we’ll get back to that. So keep going.

So, okay, so the meets were at Moakley House.

So he started the meets at the Moakley House. He had a monthly event. And what he did was he established, there were different courses. There was a course. Well, actually, no, I’m sorry. He started the meets at Schoellkopf Field. That’s where the meets began because it was an outdoor season.

Right.

And so what he did, he established courses. There was A, B, C, and a D course. Each course was a different distance.

No.

The shortest distance, the next was a two-mile, two-and-a-half-mile, was a three-mile. There was a 4.5, and I think there was a six-mile course. And everybody started together at Schoellkopf. They started as a group, and then people decided as they were running which distance they wanted to run.

Yeah. And they came back, and Jim was there.

Of course, he did everything. Like Tom said, he’s on top of the pyramid. He wouldn’t let anybody else help. He wouldn’t let anybody else.

That’s not completely correct, because the first time I ever came, I walked over to him, and I said, would you like somebody to do something? And he said, yeah, here, take this clipboard and write down numbers.

See, that was his way.

Yeah. So basically these meets, he was doing all the timing and recordings and everything like that by himself. He did the timing and the recording. Totally.

And that’s another set of names I wrote down. Terry Habecker. Oh, yeah, yeah. Was involved in this. Yeah. And Sharon was involved at the desk. She would make sure she got the numbers right and so forth. And by the time I came, I was one of the people involved. Right. But all I did was record times or places.

So once again, it was the timing team that did everything.

That’s right. It was the timing team.

So these meets would be monthly. And they were just somewhat random courses and distances that he made up, right?

He made the courses up, yeah. Let’s go back.

He designed them.

They were monthly meets, but they weren’t every month. There were two or three months of the year when you didn’t have a meet. And we had a picnic at one point, and we would also have a dinner that Jim would finance at the Statler. So you would come to this December event at the Statler. and what Jim would do is he would, you would pay $10 for the year to be a member of the club and Jim then would at the end of the year, he would have Sharon make a list of how many of the meets you came to and he would give you back 50 cents for each meet you came to and you could use that to buy Cornell, not Cornell, to buy Finger Lakes Runners Club swag, all of which had the roadrunner on. So he gave all the money, basically he gave all the money back. Right. And if you needed something, you needed a watch, you needed one of those big timing clocks, you know, those things used to cost, what, $500, $1,000?

Now they cost $3,000.

Yeah, but he’d go out and buy one for $1,000 and he’d just show up with it. Here, put this up for us, Tom, you know, and that kind of thing.

So each each meet a person received a point, one point for each meet that they showed up at. And these points were collected, like you said, at the end of the year, there was the dinner or the meeting where they had food. And then you found out from the list how many points you had. And the more points you had, the less money you had to pay for the clothing.

That’s right.

So you could get a top and you could get a bottom. You could get shorts and you can get a singlet or a long sleeve shirt. Like I said, he paid for all this equipment. He stored it in his house, and he managed it. He brought it to this one single B, and people showed up. How many points do I have? And I remember Chuck Collins, like Tom said, he wanted a low number. He fought for a low number because he thought he was special in the club. So he wanted the lowest number possible. Jim got number one. His secretary got number two. I forget who got number three, but I think Chuck eventually ended up getting four. and he always wanted to show up at a meet, even if he didn’t run. Chuck would be there, get his point, he’d get back in his car and go home. I didn’t know that. Because he had to have that point. You had to have that credit. It was a mental thing.

And so the numbers, did you get those on a jersey too?

No, it was just a list.

Just your club number.

So you got your points. If you got 12 points, that was the highest you could get.

The club number had a lot of cachet. I mean, if you got a low club number, that meant some. And then one year he bumped up my number, and then people started coming to me and saying, well, you got this number, but you haven’t been in the club as long as I have.

It was competition, right? It wasn’t low numbers.

I didn’t realize that, you know, I was getting number 12 instead of number 83.

See, I didn’t have any interest in those numbering things, but I showed up at every meet for sure. Because I want to know who was, who was, I was in physical education school. I was at college and I did school. So I was interested in track and field coaching, running. And so the only thing I didn’t do.

So where’d you go to school?

I did, I think college.

Okay.

But I didn’t, I didn’t do any cross country coaching. I did football coaching.

Okay.

I’m still interested in running. And so, so anyhow, that, I just want to get back to that, that, that point thing. Chuck Collins had number four and I says, okay, I want number six. And the reason I wanted number six is because I knew a six and a nine were the same. You just had to reverse them because a lot of people didn’t show up with their numbers. We had cardboard numbers, by the way. They weren’t mylar like they are now. Right, right. They didn’t last forever. So you show up, but your number would be ripped or torn or it would disappear or would be disintegrated. So I wanted six because I know I could always find a six or a nine or reverse it or a 16 or a 26. See?

So anyhow, so some days- I’m understanding that. So the club number was the bib number for all the meets. All the meets. The same one for the year? Exactly.

For the year. And every year it would change. You got it at the start of the year and sharing it with Andrew. Oh, I see. Now, look at that number. This is brilliant.

It was an honorable thing to have that low number, like you said.

No, I mean, if you just showed up for a meet and you were driving through town, you’d get number 82 or whatever.

Right, right. And you’d bring your own number back to the meet. Your status, yeah. Yeah. Oh, just like we have to do for a meet.

You take your number home with you so you make sure you…

Oh, right. Oh, because he would have it if you didn’t. So if you brought it back to him, you would get it the next meet. Or if you didn’t have a number, you couldn’t start the race.

So you had to get a piece of paper and a magic marker, and you had to put your number six on the piece of paper to run. We still do this on some people. That was precise. That was okay. Yeah. That’s the way his lifestyle was. It was perfect.

Jim was a hard ass. And I mean, I can, again, tell you stories about Jim, but they go away from the club. And I’d like, there’s one of them I really, really need to tell you. But, and I’m happy to tell the story, but not right now. Let’s keep on this. Another thing though, that about this is that you would have these monthly meets and they would be very organized, but they were not just always outdoors and they were not always on show call. In the wintertime, they were in Barton Hall. And Barton Hall had a large gate then at that time, a door that opened up. The entire door opened up. That’s gone now. But Jim would get at the end of—he would do a Barton Hall set of races. And at the end of the Barton Hall races, that’s when we would go outside and we would go through what were then called the plantations through the botanic gardens. And some of those paths are still there. And some of those paths are gone. But you’re right. He had an A course, a B course, et cetera. And one of the course, the longest courses went up into Cayuga Heights. And it came almost up to here. You know, it came down Hancho. It went up Pleasant Grove Road, down Hancho and in that area. And so you could be sitting there waiting for somebody to come in because they had run one hour and 33 minutes for a five and a half mile course or something like that. So that.

Nothing has ever changed with timing. You’re like, oh, man, they had to go run the long one today. Yeah. And now we’re sitting here waiting for them.

We also, I had the interest of running and running in the woods was not interesting. It wasn’t part of the scheme. Trail running. And Jim didn’t want trail running. He didn’t like trail running.

Trail running was not part of the club. No. And Jim thought of everything as competition.

Yeah.

How could you compete if you were going up hills and down hills? Not the same. Yeah, conditions, right. So it was when Joe Dabes, and that part I’ll take over later. Yeah, that comes to mind. When Joe Dabes and Ed Hart came along, I’ve got a couple stories there. Yeah.

So in these early days, how did people find out about these meetings?

That was a good question. Because he didn’t have any officials that were part of a group that conducted the club. He himself really ran the show. That’s the way it worked. And because I knew Jim and I was interested in running and I would go to Barton Hall every Sunday to see who was going to show up for a long run, then that became popular. And eventually the Sunday run became known as the SMAC, Sunday Morning Athletic Club. It really wasn’t a club, but this name came from Jim Miner. Oh, really? Yeah.

We’ll get Jim at some point.

George Gavras was there.

No, Jim came along after I was president. Yeah.

A little later. But John Reppy was there. George Gavras was there on Sunday. Jim never ran on Sunday. He always competed. He always did something on a track or on the road. Jim Hartshorne. Yeah, Jim was not on a Sunday run ever. But that was part of a running group that started the long runs. And people who wanted to run marathons who are now older, they were over 40, many of them at that time, started that group. And George would show up from Groton every year, or every Sunday, and he’d be the slowest guy and the last one out of the locker room and criticize for it. But people showed up. And over a period of time, that group grew. And John would show up and he’d bring hard candy for everybody to eat along the way. And you’d ask John, because you knew he’d be regular, where are we going today? Not sure. He says, how far are we going to go? Don’t know. He knew. You knew exactly where he was going, and he knew the exact distance. So you had to start running before John Reppy would loosen up and give you the right information. And finally, okay, we’re going to do 12 miles, or we’re going to do 15 miles, or we’re going to do 18 miles or 20 miles.

So this is basically just like every Sunday at 8 a.m. or something, everyone would appear. Everybody showed up at Teagle Hall.

Yeah, Teagle. The reason they showed up is because Teagle was always open, the showers were available, the locker rooms and bathrooms were open. And sometimes they’d close, so you’d have to go to another building at Cornell that had showers.

Teagle Hall was really open at that time, as long as you were male. If you were a female, Teagle was actually designated to be a space only for men.

And Helen Newman was for women, right?

Helen Newman was built for women because there was no—women didn’t run. Yeah. Women didn’t—

I was going to say, I definitely want to talk about that because, I mean, as I’ve heard about Sharon, and I’m kind of curious what her role was beyond, like, did she run as well? No. No, Sharon. Sharon Petrillosese. Oh, Sharon.

Sharon did not run.

Oh. So she was just involved as kind of the organization.

And I can talk about when the Hartshorne finally became integrated. Yeah. And there were certain members of the club who told me that under no circumstances was I allowed to do that. It happened during my reign. It did not happen during Barb Booker’s run, believe it or not.

Yeah, that’s like early 80s, right?

That was like, for my reign, was early 80s, 80 through 85, off and on. I’ll explain that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. So when Jim came back from Dr. Cooper in Texas, that’s where he got all of his physiological testing and exercise knowledge. He took his idea that Cooper had. He wrote a book on Cooper’s Aerobics, they called it. And it was really popular around the world. It was a big event. But he brought the idea back that Ken Cooper designed called Run For Your Life. And that’s what the Finger Lakes Runners Club eventually became.

This is sort of a move from competitive to all commerce.

To everybody.

Yeah.

All ages.

Yeah.

But Jim didn’t want kids right away.

Jim didn’t want the Run For Your Life.

No. He wanted all competition.

But suddenly these meets at Barton Hall were attracting 45, 50, almost 100 people. And he was having trouble keeping the records.

I was going to say, having done meets at Barton Hall, one person cannot do that.

And he’s not done with the history. Yeah. But in the meantime, it was at the Run For Your Life stage that Jim started calling it Run For Your Life. But he wasn’t thinking that way.

Right. And Run For Your Life was this national program that was basically trying to get people involved in running. Right. You know, and just like improving physical fitness or exercise.

Yeah, and Ken Cooper was part of that. And George something or another who was a miler down in New York City. I mean, these are all non-local people. Yeah. There was that book. Who was the guy who died when he was Jim? Jim Fixx. Jim Fixx. Jim Fixx, yeah.

He’d been a smoker before he was a marathoner and died of heart attack.

Yeah, but he had a genetic condition. Oh, that’s right. That’s right. He was one of the people, yeah. His father had died at age 40, and he lasted to 45. Hey, that wasn’t long enough or something like that.

So eventually Jim used the meets that he designed on the roads and in Barton Hall when the weather got bad. And he divided it. So there were two groups. One group was the competitive group, of course. That was the first group. But then he eventually let them run second. But the other group was the run for your life group. And he didn’t realize how popular it was going to be until it developed. And more and more people were doing this run for your life thing. The younger people, students, you know, people didn’t want to compete.

People just showed up. Families. Yeah. And that’s when the club became a family club. Yeah.

Right.

And I want to talk about that.

So about what year was that, would you say?

We’re talking 72, 73.

Okay. This is just before you come on the scene then.

Just about the time I came. My situation was I came down from Canada. Mm-hmm. And I figured I’d be here at Cornell for one year. Yeah. because I had a one-year grant, okay? And then halfway through the year, I mean, I had started not really running. I had started jogging. And there was this big thing about jogging, and jogging is different from running. But I was running up in Canada, and the weather was just terrible up there. But then I came down here, and I had never run anything longer than half a mile. But when I came here, a lot of people were running what I considered to be distance. And Jim’s meets, the wintertime meets especially, he would have 400. He would have an 800. He would have a mile. I mean, in those days, everything was not metric. It was English distance.

48, 80.

Yeah. And he would start off with a two-mile or a 5K or three-mile, something like that. And then he would have, because he had so many people, he had to split it into sections. So you would have a run for your life section of the mile. And then he would have a semi-competitive section of the mile. And then he’d have a competitive section of the mile. And he was getting, you know, all sorts of competitors coming in. So the meets just became like three hours.

I was going to say, be nice if ours lasted only three hours now. Yeah, right. But no, I can imagine just how, I mean, it must have been kind of, on the one hand, overwhelming, but also incredibly gratifying to see all these people wanting to come do this.

Yeah, but Jim wasn’t into gratification. No. Jim’s gratification was what was going to happen to him and the five guys who were really good.

Ah. Yeah, by the way.

He’s all in the elites then.

The people that were actually founders of the club, we haven’t mentioned yet, but Vern Rock Castle was one of them. Of course, Jim being the Indian star. Yeah, I did mention this one. The fellow from Syracuse was Tom Walnut. Tom Walnut. He passed away about four or five years ago. He was about the late 80s. Well, I think it was longer than five years ago. And George Gavras. Those five people were actually the founders of the club. Right.

But George was not competitive from what you’re saying. I mean, he wasn’t that fast.

George would run his postal route in Grotman. He was known as the running postman up there.

He ran his postal. My father was a rural carrier, so he drove his.

Yeah, I went to his memorial ceremony, and they asked me to give a little talk because I was president at that time. And George’s philosophy was essentially run for your life, even though he was a member, one of the charter members of the club. Oh, interesting. And his idea was, you never want to get your heart rate up over, say, 120. And he literally said that to me and Yvette DeBoer. When we were sitting in a car at the Finger Lakes Marathon at a water stop, the three of us were the water stop people out on Thomas Road or Ellis Hall of South. And I hadn’t run a marathon at that point. I was like 1980, 1974. And I said, how do you run a marathon? And he started talking about this. And George said, but make sure that you never get your heart up over 120 meters. But he’d run his newspaper. His not newspaper. His mail route.

That’s pretty impressive. I mean, you’re carrying stuff then, too.

That’s right. You got a pact.

And he would come to the Sunday runs every Sunday, of course. He’d be the first one there and always the last one to leave. He used to always be criticized for that. But it was kind of fun. It was a fun person. And at the end of a long run, even a 20-mile run, he said, when you get to the vet school, you got one mile to go, get back to Teele Hall. He says, make sure you do this a little faster. He says, because if you do that last mile, you won’t be as sore tomorrow, and you’ll be able to recover a lot faster. So some people wondered, what the heck is he talking about? And it didn’t mean anything. But he had that belief. He had all these ideas that people had talked to him about. And that was one thing I always remembered, but never participated.

Yeah, Jim had, or George had all sorts of handmade ideas. Yeah. They worked for him. Yeah. He’d test them out, and then they’d work, and so he’d tell you. And that’s how we learn running. It’s like, how do you learn about sex? You learn on the street. How do you learn about running? You learn going out to run with George.

When George ran in Barton Hall because of the weather being so bad, he’d have a lap counter in his hand. And each time he’d go around the outside perimeter, there was no track there. It was just a cork or ROTC. So every time he went around the perimeter, you go behind the bleachers, the one end, and he clicked the counter. I said, George, how do you remember how or when to click the counter? Don’t you forget that once in a while? He wasn’t concerned about it. But that’s what he did. That’s what he did. He’d do 20-mile runs in Barton Hall with a counter.

Once George actually put a little note up on the bulletin board. There was a bulletin board in Barton Hall and basically nothing else. But by this time, they had concocted a track and the track actually had marks on it. And so George went in there and he ran a full marathon. And then he put a little note up saying, I have run the marathon in two hours and 53 minutes. I don’t know, whatever it was. That’d be pretty fast. Maybe it was more than that, but whatever it was. And he had left behind, by mistake, he had left behind some of his sweats. And I picked up the sweats and took them home to him and said to my wife, I’m going to wash these sweats and I’m going to try to find out who owns them. And that’s peripheral to the story. But at any rate, he, George, put up this sign saying, and if no one challenges me after two weeks, I’m going to claim that I have the Barton Hall record for the marathon.

There he is.

So as far as I know, George still has it.

Yeah. I don’t know. Jim Miner might have done it. Probably he has.

So I ran my first five miles on my birthday in 1974 in Barton Hall. Wow. Running that same way. And then I ran my first 10-miler on my birthday in 1975. Wow. The same went 10 miles around that damn traffic. I went to dinner with some friends. It was supposed to be a birthday dinner for me, and I practically put my head down in the soup and fell asleep afterwards.

I mean, it’s sort of hard. In some ways, it’s hard for those who have run significantly over many years to remember those sort of first times you ran something way longer than you’d ever done before. Even if it’s five miles, 10 miles. I remember my first 20-mile run. I’ve only done a couple. I was not a marathoner. I’ve run one marathon. You know, day after Christmas with my friend Frankie Hamer running 38B from Newark Valley over to Main Endwell or wherever the hell it goes and then back.

You’ll be interested. Just looking at that, you don’t have to. Oh, yes.

Oh, a running log from 1979.

Notice the years.

Yes. And it keeps going. It keeps going. Oh, my goodness. This is great. So, yeah. So, any event. But, yeah, it is. And, you know, it was all new. I mean, that was.

It was. We were making it up as we went along. Yeah. So, then, all of a sudden, something I do want to talk about. Yeah, go ahead. Is families. What happened is when the run for your life thing happened, the family thing happened. And it was the Bookers, the Blakeleys, the DeBoers, the Farleys, and the two Rossiter brothers. The parents never ran, but.

Well, there’s three, too. There’s Caleb, David, and Winton. Yeah. I mean, Spider Caleb and Shrock David are still around to this day. I mean, I saw Caleb at Turkey Trot. So, yeah.

And if there’s anybody else you can remember.

So with the families, basically, so it was parents and kids for the most part showing up?

It would be the parents and the kids and one of the bookers. Or some combination, yeah. It was, I still see Jim Booker, Jack’s son, okay, comes here. Now, Jack was never an officer in the club, but Barb was. Barb was, and that’s kind of where we can segue from him to me. When the club got to be too much for Jim, because it really wasn’t what he wanted to do, and he wanted to go out and run with his pals. And so Jim had a meeting where he said, I’m giving up the club. And he said, you folks are going to have to figure it out. And he took us down to his basement. And he didn’t give us any direction. He just said, you figure it out. And so nobody said it. We all sat there. I think you were part of that group. And I can name a few other people who ended up here. Don Farley.

I was going to say, Don was great. So, yeah.

And nobody said anything. And finally, Jim said, well, if you’re not going to do anything, we’re not going to have a club. And so, Jim had another meeting. And this time it was a discussion of how we put together a club. And then we had our first meeting of how the club was going to operate by writing bylaws over at Barbara Booker’s house. And Barb was involved in the writing, and Jack Booker was not at all involved in that. But there were three people who just couldn’t shut their mouths about, oh, we should have our bylaws saying this, and we have that many officers and so forth. And one of the three people, I mean, I’m making this sound like it was really bad, but it was really good. Ann Klein-Sasser had a lot to say about how clubs should operate. And she was a decent runner, but Alan was the real runner. He had been out of Caltech, and he was the athlete of the year for two years in a row out of Caltech. And she was a hanger-on, but she knew how to organize. So she was really instrumental in a lot of this. And then Diane Sherrer.

Becomes a huge figure in the running community.

And Diane, I went to Diane, I can’t tell you how many times, and said, I want you to be my secretary, my vice president, my this or that. She said, I’ll do anything, but if you make me be an officer, she said, I will quit this club. And I was so afraid of that that I just stayed away from her after that, on that kind of thing. But she did everything for all of the club. She could do the work of 10 people. Yeah. And she did that. And the third person who couldn’t keep his mouth shut was me. And so it was three of us who did most of the writing. And there were a couple people who would chime in and say, but what you just said, Tom, doesn’t work. And here’s why. And so we would revise it. So we wrote a first set of bylaws at Barr Booker’s house. And we had an officership. We had put in an officership which had an internal vice president and an external vice president. And the internal vice president was vice president of track, track and field. And the external vice president was kind of somebody who took care of the races on the roads and that kind of thing.

And what was internal or external about them?

Well, it was more like track.

Oh, literally like indoors and outdoors? Short distance. Ah, okay. All comers. Just putting things up. So this is kind of interesting because it sounds like, I mean, Jim, in essence, burns out and sees the club going in directions that he’s not personally interested in.

And he did not go there.

And he quit.

He really quit.

And he had done so much personally before then that everyone else is like, how would we recreate all of this without being him?

Let me tell you a story that will take a little time. But two minutes. But this is really worth it. Okay, so we had this guy nobody has mentioned, Carl Ratzik. Ratzik.

Carl Ratzik.

Carl Ratzik. And he was a student at Cornell. And he went up one day and he put a note on the other bulletin board, which Jim Hartshorn had put up, which was over in Teagle Hall. and the note said, I’m thinking of having a t-shirt run. He specifically called it a t-shirt run, downtown on the comments. And if anybody wants to help me out, be involved in this, call me at such and such a number, sign Coral Radza. So Jim saw it, called up Coral and said, okay, I’m game. Let’s have a rundown on the comments. And so Jim then started to say to Carl, and we’ll do it this way, and we’ll do it with this, and we’ll do that, and we’ll do this, and we’ll do that. And after about two meetings, Jim came to me, and he said, I’m going to have to take over this run because Carl doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Jim didn’t really swear all that much. So then I saw Carl sometime later, and Carl said to me, I wanted that run. He said, but Jim Hartshorn got in my way, and he said, I will never run that race ever. I don’t have anything to do with it.

He had nothing to do with the runners club. He gave up.

Absolutely. He never came again.

Actually, before that story, that’s a good story to remember.

But I’m not done.

I had the idea that there should be a 5-in-10 run because the 5-in-mile and 10-mile were popular then. It was the most popular. You go to Syracuse, you go to Rochester. Everybody had 5 and 10-mile runs. So he said, let’s have one in Ithaca. Let’s start it. And Carl Radzik was at Cornell one day in T-Hall. He says, oh, I’d like to do that. He says, I’d like to have a 5-in-10 in Ithaca. That’s how it started with Carl. But as he said, Carl didn’t know anything about. So I suggested to Carl, I said, you know something? There’s somebody in Ithaca here that would really help you out. Just give Jim Hartshorne a call. I mean, he’s so good about running and people. And he says, okay. And when that happened, like he said, it went from the top to the bottom. And Jim took over and Carl disappeared. And so this run becomes Ithaca 5 & 10.

So, Jim decided that, okay, it’s the 5 & 10. Whoever first thought of the idea, I mean, there are 12,000 people who would tell you they were the first ones. So, Jim decided it would start on the Commons, and you would actually, in the first year, you actually ran the Commons.

Wow. Yep. I was going to say, I ran that in the early 80s. It was one of the first races, not the first, but one of the first road races I did as I was still a high school student. And I remember it starting on the Commons, but I think we just went on the roads. I don’t think it ran on the Commons.

Yeah, you were on the roads. So it was a couple years later. But the first couple were on the Commons, literally, and they ducked through the bank area and all that sort of thing. And Jim’s idea was that all the merchants would come and open up and they would make a lot of money. And none of the merchants opened up or anything like that.

No, nobody helped. You had to go to them and beg them to come and offer donations, and they finally did it. Yeah.

So the merchants got ticked off. Jim got ticked off. Jim decided, okay, we’ll move it. So he did move it onto the roads, onto Cayuga Street. And then he had to get the police to close things off. Well, Jim came to me one day before the race had ever been run. And he said, Tom, I’m going to go out and measure the course. Would you like to come with me? I said, sure, okay. So we went for a walk. He took the wheel.

The measuring wheel, yeah.

And he wheeled the thing. And we’d get to a spot and he’d say, yeah, this is the two-mile mark. And I’d say, well, how do you know that? And he’d say, well, because I already measured this twice before. So this was his third time walking. He said, and I’m going to send away to TAC. But at that time it was AAU. He was going to send away to AAU to get permission to, you know.

Certify the course.

To certify the course. So he went up through the park and through Stewart Park. And, you know, and he had more or less the course. And then there was going to be a second course. But Jim never bothered with having places to change your clothes or anything like that. That just wasn’t the way Jim wanted it. You know, I mean, he did that same thing with the marathon. One of the marathons, he said, well, you can always dress at Teagle Hall, he said, but we’re starting at a tree up on… At Ellis Hollow Road.

There’s this tree. Yeah. You’ll know it when you get there.

He said, it’s a short training run.

Right. Out to the tree. Two or three miles to get there. To get to the marathon.

You can run a marathon. You can run another two or three miles.

He was so meticulous about measuring things. I remember the day he had a steel tape and he took it up to Sapsucker Woods and it had to be a thousand foot tape and it had to be steel. And in order to certify the courses, he had to put that tape down and he had to take his wheel that he used from the beginning of the tape to the other end, a thousand feet, and made sure it was exactly perfect.

That’s how he did things. He was so precise. You had to add 1% in order to get it officially certified. And he would add 1%. Right. Right. Just one half of one percent. Yeah.

So there’s some little sludge factor so they can’t make them.

He finally ended up using the Jones counter, the guy down at Johnson City. Yeah, Alan Jones. He was the president of the Triple Cities Club down there. So Alan, he was the fort runner. He was actually using computers before any of the other clubs. Yes. Alan Jones. Alan Jones. He’s huge.

You’d run the 20K. Well, he had a program that he would sell to people.

Yeah. You could run the 20K. As soon as you crossed the finish line, you walked up to the school 50 yards away, and he had the printout of your certificate coming out of the machine. You could take it home with you with your time all broken down. And 10 minutes later, he started having the sheets there.

This is mid-70s?

Yeah. He worked for IBM.

Yeah. And he had the Chenango Forks 15. Yeah, that controlled, too. And then somewhere around 1980, I became the director of the Five and Ten. And this is the other story. It’s two stories now. One story is that I went to Jim in about 1978. And I said, Jim, you don’t have any place to change. You don’t have any bathrooms. You have a terrible finish line. You just don’t, you know. And Jim said to me, Tom, he was sitting at a table just like this, and he said, Tom, when you’re the president of this club, you can do whatever the hell you want to do. Right now, this race is mine.

He’s the boss, number one, see? He’s always there on top of the pyramid.

And I went home to Marianne, and I said, I think I just got kicked out of the Finger Lakes Runners Club. Well, about three years later then, I came up with the idea that we would have a kind of overhead finish line.

Like an arch, yeah.

Yeah. And then people would come underneath, sort of like the New York City Marathon. Yeah. But it was a New York City Marathon idea before the New York City Marathon. And we’d have computers up there. And we would get the results out right away. And we could have done that if we had the electrical connections and we had connections downtown and so would. Jim might have been able to pull it off, but I couldn’t pull it off. But it was an idea in the back of my head from the late 70s to do that. But the 5 & 10, I mean, we had some good runners for the 5 & 10.

Well, I was going to say, I mean, the 5 & 10, I don’t know, I can’t remember what the times were. But I remember from for me in high school, I’d run the five mile and watching Pete Pfitzinger, U.S. Olympian in the marathon and Dan Predmore racing the 10 mile coming in, you know, 48 minutes for 10 miles because they were world class. And Predmore was beating Pfitzinger sometimes. So, yeah, I mean, it was just.

Well, the thing is, you know, Pfitzinger ran his first marathon here in Ithaca. And I was the race director for that race. Would you like to be the race director for one guy who’s doing a 210 marathon, but he doesn’t even know how fast he can do the marathon. And all these other people coming along at 410. Where is everybody? And we had water stops and going through Cayuga Heights and the Cayuga Heights police actually stopped someone. It was Predmore one year had run through Cayuga Heights and he threw a cup down on the ground. The person who was at the water stop said, I’ll pick up the cup to the policeman. The policeman said, no, that man over there, he threw it on the ground. He’s going to come back here and pick it up. And that’s a true story. And so then I told that story and there was a magazine called Running Times. And I sent a piece to Running Times. And I put it under my byline. Okay, so fine. No problem. Except that Jim then took the Running Times byline, took that story, took it down to the Cayuga Heights police over here at Marchham House, and said, look, they’re making fun of you.

And with my byline.

Yes, he is a character.

So I have to, so Dan Predmore, like, I’m not a big one for heroes, but so Dan Predmore and Pfitzinger left impressions. I was a high school kid when I saw them finishing. And they come in, you know, you’d make that turn into the Ithaca High School at this point in that finishing and starting to finish Ithaca High. And they would be coming in like bats out of hell. Oh, man. It’s just amazing how fast they were running at the end of 10 miles.

Yeah.

Fast forward, move back to Ithaca. I’m running the PGXC Cross Country Series. We have a race up in Utica that Pete Glavin, who’s the organizer of the series, has set it up as a competition between US, sounds a lot like Jim, in fact, a competition between USATF Niagara and USATF Mohawk, the Hudson Valley. Oh, yeah. And so people come from Hudson Valley to race this cross-country race. And I’m warming up. I’m running the course. I’m with John Hylas beforehand, just chatting. And we come up with this guy. And we’re talking about something. And this guy is like, oh, you guys from Ithaca. and yeah and John has to go he runs off and so I’m chatting with this guy and he’s like oh yeah I used to live in Ithaca and you know used to race there and everything and I was like what’s your name? He says oh I’m Dan Predmore You’re Dan Predmore? I’m like I feel like you are you are the closest I have to a running hero I didn’t tell him that I was a little so I was too starstruck but it was sort of like wow

You know I have a story like that too I went to a meeting in God knows where, somewhere in the United States, but way away from here, either in Phoenix or Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon, who cares? Anyway, Pfitzinger was there. And he said, we were just a bunch of us and nobody knew me. And he went, you’re Tom Rishel.

Pete Fitzgerald calling out my name.

He said, you’re famous. He said, you did the first marathon I ever did. He said, that was wonderful. He said, I’m really an admirer of yours.

I mean, it’s just, it is hard to actually, oh man, we got to get Joe Daley to do one of these. Because he, Joe, Joe has a story. Joe Daley was, I mean, used to be super fast. And he has a story about.

But he never broke four minutes.

He never broke four in the mile. But. That’s right. He has a story. I can’t remember if it’s both of them or just one of them, Pfitzinger or Predmore. But like you met them on a run, a training run, like from opposite directions or something like that. And so they turn, don’t say anything. But they know what each other’s are. And the pace just gets faster and faster and faster until the end of this training run, which no one had gone out with the like, even knowing they were going to run together at all. They’re sub five minute pace. by the end of this thing because that was the level of runners they were.

And no one was going to back down one bit.

That’s exactly right. So, wow, this is just… So we’ve got the Hartshorne Master’s Mile, what’s called now the Hartshorne Master’s Mile because that started in 68. We’ve got the Ithaca 5 & 10. The Twilight Run. Twilight. So you started Twilight?

I originated the Twilight Run. but had somebody else be the director. I didn’t want to direct the 5 & 10. Right. I didn’t want to direct the Twilight Run. But I also, of course, did the Turkey Run.

And Turkey Trot is also, because we just did 53rd year of that, I think. Yeah, 53. We’re starting to get confused about the years because of freaking COVID. You know, it’s like messed up our numbers. Yeah. But yeah, so Turkey Trot, so that’s 73.

Yeah. It’s Turkey Run. And then, yeah, those, those three events, like I kind of got started. I didn’t want to direct them and have anything to do with it. But you asked a question earlier about publicity. Oh yeah. I should answer your question.

How people find out about, first things, it’s like people find out on these bulletin board postings.

How did the club find out about the Finger Lakes Runners Club? Yeah. Well, Jim didn’t have any means or thought or idea how to do it. So one day I says, listen, I’ll go around and publicize for you. I’ll just go around and advertise it. He says, okay, go ahead. I says, well, you give me the sheet that you want me to advertise and I’ll take it to the, sources and do it every month. So I literally ran from the Ithaca Journal, from where I used to live. I ran up to WHCU, which is under Commons. Then I ran up the hill to College Town where WTKO was, or I forget. Those three places. That was VBI. So I went to the radio stations and the TV station and Ithaca Journal. I ran to those places every month. It took me a workout. That’s how the publicity got started.

I love the fact that this actually happened while running.

But I was not an official of the club. I was not one of the people that did that. So I just gave myself the title. I said, I’m the unofficial publicity. But I didn’t want to have any responsibility for it. Right. But that’s how it started. Interesting.

That was fun. And there was also Diane Sherrer did a lot of that. Oh, she was good. She had an article.

When did she start with the club? She was pretty early, but.

She was early, probably 75, 76.

It was after you came, but not much.

After I came. And as I said, she never took an office. Yeah. But on the other hand, in fact, another story. She ran the 5 & 10. Now, so that had to be between 75 and 80. And my wife ran the 5 & 10. And I ran the 5 & 10 the same year. And at the end of the race, we saw Diane. And Diane went over to Marianne. Not to me. She went over to Marianne. And she said, oh, you’re a runner too. Oh, this is wonderful. How did you get into this? And she started kind of somewhere between interviewing and, you know, inquisiting Marianne about this. And that’s when Diane told me later on, 5, 10, 15 years ago, she said, she, Diane, said, this is when I got interested in the cops. So that would say somewhere around 75, 76. So then she started writing an article for the Ithaca Journal.

Right.

Yeah. And the Runners Club was always big in that article. But before that, it was Kenny Van Sickle.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I remember that name.

Yeah. And I think there’s a Van Sickle still in Ithaca.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that right?

Yeah, he used to do the columns. Yeah. Steve Lawrence. Steve Lawrence does them now in the Ithaca Times, I think.

Yeah, he’s still with the Ithaca Times. I see him down in Wegman’s all the time.

Yeah. He doesn’t write about running much, but every now and then.

Yeah, he never did much running himself, but he came and interviewed me about the Skunk Cabbage about 20, 27 years ago. So, I mean.

Let me just say something about the kids running, too, because we lost that piece. Jim wasn’t interested in kids running at first. Like we said, he’s a highly competitive person. He didn’t believe or know that kids even ran. He didn’t even know there was high school, the new high school kids were running. His son was a runner. He was an outstanding runner in high school anyhow. But he didn’t want kids part of the runners club to begin with. But then all of a sudden, like he said, family started to come, and the kids were interested in running. So he did start the kids running. And once he started it, it blew up. It just got bigger and bigger and more and more. Kids from high schools around the area would bring a busload of kids. They would come in, and they’d run to meet, and then they’d go back home. Every month, that was a big deal, come to the runner’s club. But then he realized that at the end of the season, the kids were showing up to this event where there was food and people checked their points to get clothing and see what the treats were at the end. And then he realized that, oh, this is really important. So then the next year, Jim started giving a trophy out to every kid that ran the meet. Every kid that finished, didn’t matter where, at the Moakley Club house, end of year meet. Every kid got a trophy. So then he believed in it. So then it started like a real track meet. Then you had the 40-yard dash. Then you had the 400 and the 800. But he still believed that it should start out with the 800 and it should go longer, to the mile, to the two mile. But he gave up. He finally agreed that the kids should run. And if they do, hey, they’re going to build a program.

And that’s what brought the families in, too. Right. You know, because the Bookers and the Blakeleys, they all had kids. And the kids came and ran. And that tradition still goes on. I mean, you know, not to start a cry fest or something of that sort. But Jim… Pizzoni.

Pizzoni?

Pizzoni. Yeah. Pizzoni. Yeah. Seeing him with his grandson running.

You know, about a month and a half before he died. I mean, it’s interesting. We’ve seen in subsequent years, we’ve seen different, I mean, youth participation is incredible now. I mean, literally like over half, my track meets are like 200 to 250 people, over half youth. But what we saw really starting probably about 10 to 12 years ago was it switched from families to clubs and teams.

Yeah.

So basically, we don’t tend to get as many of the parents bringing their kids to the gates. We get a group of teams coming and bringing 40 kids to the gates. The parents are still coming, but it’s a slightly different focus. You did it so well.

You did it so well, like Jim did well. And that’s why it grew to that point.

That actually started around my tenure. Yeah. Because the people from Cortland and not Cortland, the people from Corning and the people from Elmira, they had kids who were like in the 10-year-old age group. And, you know, how do you keep the kids off the street? And one of the parents would, it’s like, you know, how do you get a school board together? You get a school board together because all the 40-year-olds have kids in school, and they want to make sure that—

They care deeply at that moment in time.

Yeah, and so that’s exactly what was happening. And we were having something that we haven’t mentioned yet, but we were having evening meets. I would set up evening meets, and I would come in on Tuesday nights with three or four people. Katie Gottschalk would come and help me out. And we would have track meets in Barton Hall on Tuesday nights. We basically wouldn’t ask anyone if we could do that. And we would have 50 and 100 people come to these track meets. Yeah. And we’d just have open meets. We’d do a 60-yard dash, and then we’d do a half mile, and then we’d do a quarter, and then we’d do a mile, and we’d say, okay, now go home.

And were you publishing the results, or was it just sort of informal?

We published the results.

Wow. Yeah, they’re somewhere.

They’re somewhere in there.

Yeah. One of the things, not so much the littler track meets, but certainly all the real races, the Ithaca Journal used to publish all the results. Absolutely. I mean, literally hundreds of names. And that was so great. And it’s about the main place you can still get that sort of stuff now. But it turns out, like I said, even doing this stuff now, the hard part is results. But, you know, just so you guys know, I mean, the Tuesday night is still happening at Barton Hall. And so we have Tuesday night workouts indoors in Barton Hall from November through March, end of March, end of April. And, you know, I’m getting, I just put 65 people on the track for a time trial, mild time trial last Tuesday. Wow. And we get a lot of people coming to those and we still doing the family thing. Wow. Where we have actually some coaches who handle little kids, like five to 11, where they’re too little to really run. So they’re just playing running games. But that part of it is, and this has probably changed a little bit too over the years, but like parents got so sucked into their kids’ sports that the parents never got to exercise. They were just driving their kids around all over the place. And so that was the whole goal of this was to be able to make it so the parents could bring their kids and both would get to do a workout at the same time. And that’s been super popular. So it’s kind of coming back on the family side.

Well, you know, I’ve got something going on here, the Kendal Marathon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that thing has gotten big. That’s good. Because we’ve got now over 200 entrants. Wow. Good for you. And it’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s a big joke. But it’s wonderful. It keeps these people moving. That’s right. And the people are on walkers. Yeah. And some of them will come to me and say, I’m now off my walker because I- Gee whiz. Yeah. See? Yeah. Like you- So how much is this saving the government? Just by having people walk three-tenths of a mile a day.

The Kendal Marathon is like, it’s a mile, it’s a mile, not a day.

No, it’s three tenths of a mile a day. It’s three laps around the Rose Court.

Right.

Three laps around what we walked in order to get to this.

And you do it between November and Valentine’s Day, you get to 26 miles. You do it between Thanksgiving Day and Valentine’s Day.

I want to tell you something about Jim’s personality that I don’t think anybody knows. He’ll remember. Go ahead. Remember the Red Baron story? I do. I do. I want to tell you a little bit about this one. Yeah, he took the red bear. Jim was so meticulous about whatever he did. When he conducted the marathon that started from Ithaca, went to marathon, then eventually it went from marathon back to Ithaca. It went both ways. He would ride his bicycle the week before the marathon, the entire course. And he would stuff the mailboxes along the route and tell the people there’s going to be a marathon next week on this day at this time. That’s what he would do personally. He wouldn’t ask anybody out, but he would do it all himself. That’s right. So one day he’s on the bike. He’s going by somebody’s house. A dog came out and jumped on his bike. And Jim always carried a leather holster for his starting pistol.

because he was the official starter.

And he pulled that pistol out, and he fired the pistol. And the guy who lived in the house opened the door, and he swore at Jim. He says, And he put the pistol back in his pocket, and the guy came back to the door with a shotgun. This is a true story. And Jim took off.

That is not true.

No, this is true. No, the shotgun part. He took off on the bike. When he saw the shotgun, he took off. That was a story he didn’t tell too many people. The other story was…

He didn’t do that. The Red Baron, by the way, is actually part of the marathon. Well, that’s a different story. That’s a different story.

Yeah, that’s a different story. It was the Red Baron. That’s a different story.

Okay.

So Jim did run one marathon because everybody was running marathons. Everybody was running…

The Red Marathon got big in the 80s.

So he ran the Ithaca Marathon.

This is also wrong.

It was called also the Boston Qualifier because it was just before Boston, just enough time you could still qualify for Boston.

I called it the Boston Qualifier.

And people couldn’t qualify in the course because there was 1,500 feet of climbing. It was too hilly. It was ridiculous. But he ran the course, and I remember him running. And he did everything he did, just like the mile. He started out too fast. And when he got to Turkey Hill, it was about the 15-mile point. Here comes Bob. I passed Jim and said, Jim, how are you doing? He goes, not too good, he says. So I ended up finishing. And when he got back to the finish line, he said, never again. I’m never going to do a marathon. That finished it. That was one and only. He didn’t do it. Because he couldn’t master. He couldn’t be at the peak of the pyramid. But that was okay. Because his event was really the mile. One day they ran the Ithaca Marathon from Barton Hall. They ran Ellis Hollow around 26 miles. They came back to Barton Hall. And they got to Ellis Hollow Road, and they make the corner from Dodge Road. And it was a snowy day, and the runners ran around the corner. And sure enough, a truck came by. They had a big sign on the front of his truck, the Red Baron. And he didn’t want runners on the road. His truck was supposed to be on the road, but no, no runners, and especially more than one, but there were hundreds of runners coming around his corner. He tried to run them down. And he forced some runners literally to jump over the snowbank into the ditch. Jim took him to court. He took him to court and tried to get charges against him. Jim did take him, man. Yeah, he did. Took him to court. But he didn’t have a case. There was no law saying, you know, what happened. Hearsay, yeah.

You know the little pentos.

Oh, geez. But anyhow, that could have been a disaster. And people from then on, look out for the Red Baron. Beware. And this guy, he advertised it. He was threatening people just by going after him with his truck.

Jim didn’t run that race.

No.

But the person who was most involved in that race was the guy who taught Peter. Peter who taught at Cortland. He had a Ph.D. from Cornell in chemistry. He taught at Cortland State. Peter, he was a very good runner.

Yeah, he ran from Cortland to Ithaca just to see Jim Art. Sorry.

And what happened was they were on Ellis Hollow Road.

Yeah, okay.

And so I took the race over the next year. I can’t think of his name.

I know what you mean.

And somebody did this when the truck buzzed. Oh, the runners gave him the finger. So gave him the finger. And the truck came back, turned around, came back. And you can read this in the Ithaca Journal. The truck came back. And that’s when everybody had to jump into the ditch.

I mean, you know, even when I moved back in 2001 to the guy, I remember running with T.J. Pempel, and he had stories, recent stories about trucks, you know, rusty old trucks, you know, thinking it was funny to run the runners off the road.

And what happened in court was that Finger Lakes, Jim, those people lost because they said that this signal was indicating that they started the whole thing. They initiated the whole problem. Got it. Yeah. And therefore, this was not really retaliation. This was just, you know, his.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Drivers are better now, but there are still issues on occasion.

I think of the chemistry fell he talked about in Cortland. I think of his name.

Peter.

Not Pete. Peter. And he’s dead now. He passed. And Jim used to have runners from other cities, other clubs, Binghamton and Syracuse, come to stay at his house. That was another publicity. They take back to their club and information that Jim gave him. And so that was kind of a nice, you know, unofficial publicity as well. But Jim did that often. He had Katherine Switzer come to his home often before her incident with Boston.

Yeah, I was going to say, famous Boston runner. So actually, that’s a good segue because most of the people we’ve been talking about have been men. And certainly early on, running was pretty male-dominated. But, you know, mid-70s is when that starts. Yeah, Katherine Switzer in Boston. I mean, obviously, you know, Diane Sherrer becomes a huge force for women’s running in the community. Barb Booker becomes president. So, you know—

She became president. She was the first post-Jim president. And what they did is they had an election, obviously, set up the bylaws. The bylaws said there’ll be a president, et cetera. There were three candidates for presidency. And three people were called up and they were asked, would you run for president? And they all said yes. And Barb was one of them. And the other two were Tom Dykman. He was a professor in the business school at that time. And his wife was in the dean’s office. And I was the third. And they knew me least. They knew Barbara best. And the family thing. I was told later, you know, it’s the family thing. And it was fine. I said I would run. I remember that Don Farley ran for vice president, one of the vice presidencies. I was named as being the nominating committee the next year. And I had to go around and find people who would. I don’t remember who. He, Don, was going to be the head of the track. and so he would have the bag, the famous bag.

There was this canvas bag which lasted for many, many, many years. That’s right. At the point where I was given the bag when I took over track.

Yeah, and so we did it that way and my successor, I mean, after Barb got ready to leave, then they asked me if I would run and I think I ran unopposed, so I have no idea. Nobody else wanted all the bags.

The presidency is unopposed these days, yeah.

And I couldn’t get rid of the job. And I had it for two and a half years. And then Howard Aderhold, who had been my landlord when I originally came from Canada, Howard agreed that he would take over for me. Well, the day I came back, I had gone on leave to be with my wife in a writer’s colony. in Massachusetts in Provincetown, Mass. And the day I came back, Howard came to my house and he brought the badge. And I said to myself, I know. It’s not a good sign when he brings the badge. Howard said to me, you’re going to do the next meet, Tom. I can’t do it. And then he never. So I had to be president for another year and a half. And Diane Sherrer used to go around and talk about how I was the Grover Cleveland. I guess I would now be, excuse the terminology, the Donald Trump, you know, a president and then not. And then, yeah, it comes back again, whether you want him or not. And then, so at that point, I went to, after another year and a half, I was going to go away again. And Steve Ingham, I saw him, he and I would run together quite often. And so I saw him and I said, Steve, can you do it? Steve said yes. And I think he spent two years as president. And then he got a job somewhere else and he said, I have to leave. So that’s when the Joe Daley and— Ed Hart. Joe Dabes. Joe Dabes. Joe Dabes and Ed Hart. Ed Hart took the club, yeah. So that’s, we’re talking like— We’re talking maybe 80—

80, 81, yeah?

Yeah, 80, 81. And there’s a story about me on that that is relevant, which is that Joe Dabes and Ed Hart wanted to go into distance running. And we were having, as a club, we’re having a problem with insurances. The insurance companies were coming to us and saying, we’re not going to insure you.

So you did have insurance before that?

We had insurance, but we had insurance for things like track meets.

All right.

Or you could do a marathon up to a marathon. They understood a marathon. If you’re going out in the country and somebody has a heart attack or they fall down, who’s responsible? And so I had just bought a house in 1981, and I wasn’t going to jeopardize the house. So I went to some insurance people and said, is this coverable or are we going to have to pay more money? Well, Joe sent me a letter saying, Joe Dabes sent me a letter saying, I was opposed to distance from him. And I called him up and I said, Joe, I’m not opposed to distance from him. Because Joe and I were co-directors of the first Skunk Cabbage, the first two Skunk Cabbages. And, you know, I thought we would get along on this issue, but we didn’t. So at that point, I said, that’s it. I’m out of here too. And so that’s the point where I took my marbles.

And just to sort of, for context, I mean, but distance, I mean, we’re talking ultra distances. Exactly. So, you know, over a marathon and also trail running, which doesn’t sound like it was a thing particularly before. I mean, I know Joe Dabes, he was the trail maintainer out in Virgil for a bunch of those trails. And we ended up with a bunch of races out there. And Ed had Ed’s Ultra. I mean, you know.

That’s right.

So they were.

Michael Turback was involved in it.

Right. So that was a completely different kind of, you know, aspect of the running community, which hadn’t really been here before.

It was an interesting time for another reason. You go ahead.

When he instituted the E course, I said, listen, people like trail running. Let’s have an ecourse, English-style course. He said, what? And what it was, it was A, B, C, D. E was an event where you had to go out into the woods where the Cayuga Trail was, and you had to follow the path around the woods, and you had to cross the water. And they didn’t like that.

Like English was hunting.

So it wasn’t popular then. It didn’t grow like the runners’ club did. But it was still there, and it was still an event. Chuck Collins liked it so much, he decided to do it once a month. So what he did every month for a year, he would cross the creek. He would run that course. Oh, yeah. And, yeah, he did it for one month every month for a year.

And through the ice. I was going to say some of those months. And this is Fall Creek, right?

Flat Rock. Yeah, Flat Rock. Crazy. But Jim did institute two other events, by the way, that you might not be aware of. He had one event called the 24-hour relay. And that was an event which was held on the old grass text track where the new wrestling building is right now. It was one of the first all-weather tracks in the East Coast. It was made of bamboo shoots and asphalt. I can tell you more about that. It didn’t last long, but it broke up quickly. But it was the first all-weather track around this area, even the Ithaca College or Cornell. Yeah, everything was cinders before that. So anyhow, they had that. And what happened was the kids camped out. Many of them were high school students. They were Tommy Hartshorne and his friends. That was a bad choice because you had 10 people on your relay. And these fast kids, they ran fast. They ran four, half, five minute, six and a half minute miles. They got tired and quit. So that meant the other people who were left over, who we were, we had to run more often. We said, we’ll never ask you guys to come back and do that again. But he did institute it for one year.

So that basically everyone ran, basically someone was running on the track for 24 hours.

Continues with 24 hours. And actually our team ended up beating the United States Army team that was outfitted out of California that year. It was kind of interesting. That went in the world as a result. Because he had how far he could go in 24 hours. Yeah, how far he could go. The other thing he did was.

I remember the Marine Corps Marathon beating all the Marines because they had to run with full packs on them.

He also did an event at Schoellkopf when the track was there. It was a senior track. Yeah, yeah. And he did what they called the one-hour run. You know, he did it one year. But I remember when he—

No, they did it many years.

Huh? Did he do it? They did.

Okay. And I did it a number of years.

So what he did was you started everybody on the track, and you ran as far as you could for one hour. And then you had somebody keep track of all your laps. Every mile you ran.

It was a T AC championship.

And then—

We were the national champion, the place you’d go. The athletics conference.

See how far he could run in an hour. So what he did, he had his gun in his pocket again, and he had a public address announcing device. He had a microphone and a big speaker that he could use. And the speaker, by the way, was interesting. Now he couldn’t project his voice to people, but he could also turn and listen to people who are far away he couldn’t hear, which is really neat. But anyhow, that’s a different story. So anyhow, he’d say, you have five minutes left in the one hour run. And he had to count down four minutes down to one. And all of a sudden, bang. And what you had to do, you had to drop a sandbag on the track. And he’d go around with his tape measure. He’d measure the distance of that last lap because you had to add that distance. He was so meticulous. He wouldn’t let anybody else do it. He had to go around and get the exact. And everybody had to have that exact number. That was crazy. That’s how precise he was. Yeah, yeah. So. There you go. Crazy story.

That’s a point to segue into something else, which is that actually the first 24-hour run that I know of was organized by a man named Greg Page, who was an undergraduate student and a graduate student at Cornell. And Greg Foster really started women’s running here. There was no women’s running team. There was not even a women’s running club at Cornell. Right. And Greg said, I’m going to do this. That’s right. And so one of the things that Greg did is he had a 24-hour, what he called a marathon, in Barton Hall. And it was essentially any women who wanted to come. Just for women. Just for Women, and this was about 1974. This is Greg Page, you said? Greg Page. Yeah. Okay. So he interviewed for the job as the first Cornell women’s track coach, and they turned him down. And they chose a woman named Renee something from the Adams Track Club in New York City instead. Okay. So she had a reputation. Well, she would take the runners to a particular event. Now, this is women runners telling me the story. Secondhand, right, yeah. But, you know, as far as I can tell, the story is really true. She, Renee, would take these runners to places like Amherst, Mass., or New York City, or Boston, and she, Renee, would disappear for the weekend. And so the runners were basically on their own as to what to do. So that’s the point where Cornell decided to hire Lou Duesing. Oh. He was running forever. Yeah. Yeah. And Lou was a well-known coach before he came to Cornell. Okay. He’s the one who’s remembered as the first one who had to do with female running here at Cornell. But he wasn’t the first one. I mean, Greg Page really did. Right. Interesting. And one of Greg Page’s people, as a runner, because he would take them to meets at Cortland State or wherever, was Martha Stimson. Martha was the daughter of Harry Stimson, who was a tenured faculty member at Cornell. Now, you were talking about, you know—

Oh, Stimson, Stimson Hall?

Yeah, but that’s a different Stimson. Different part of the family? Oh, okay. I knew Harry Stimson pretty well. So Harry Stimson did not live at Kendal, but he would run with Frank Moore every day. And Frank Moore lived at Kendal. Don Farley lived at Kendal. Vern Rockcastle has to live at Kendal. Jack Booker lives at Kendal. I live at Kendal. So there’s a fair number of us former Finger Lakes Runners Club people who live here. But when you go back to the women’s running thing, it started kind of with a woman named Margaret Betts. Margaret was a national class runner in the female running category around 1970. And she had, I believe, emigrated from Europe, somewhere in Europe, maybe in Switzerland. And this I’m not sure of. But she would come up here and she would run and Barbara Booker knew Margaret. And Barbara was a real promoter of Margaret Betts. And she would call Margaret up. We’re having a run and so forth. So at one point, I said, well, if we’re having a men’s run called the Master’s Mile, not called Hartshorne. Right. Because it wasn’t made yet afterwards. What about if women want to run this? Because I was president at the time, and I was told, oh, women wouldn’t want to run it. And I said, but what if they do? And then, so the first year, we got about four women. There were very few. Some of them said, no, we’re intruding on the men’s event. We don’t want to, you know, just be coming to watch us and, you know, all that sort of thing. But there were some really, really, really good female runners here in the area, women who would regularly beat me. Nan Blakely was one. Joan DeBoer.

I was going to say the DeBoer family were incredible. The entire family are incredible athletes.

Now, Yvette was too young.

Right.

But, you know, she and Claire were in on that women’s running kind of thing. Sue Booker.

Mm-hmm.

Jack’s daughter and Barbara’s daughter. Barbara Booker herself was a very good, she was like me. She came along late into running and she didn’t have that college experience or anything like that. So she had to learn on the fly. And I was a better organizer than I was a runner, to be frank about the whole thing. And I got to be a decent runner, but I was always at that 69 to 70 percentile on that national master’s. On the age grade, yeah. Whereas Barbara was in the 90th percentile. Wow. And Sue Compton. Oh, Sue Compton. Sue Compton was a great runner until she had the eye problem. Yeah. And, you know, she had a surgery where she had to lie in bed and not move her head like this for about three or four months. And when Marianne had her detached retina, then Sue was really wonderful to my wife, to my wife Marianne. But Sue was an exceptional runner. And she’d wait until the end of a race. John Saylor would say to her, now you just go out and stay behind Tom, be on the same lap, and wait till the last lap. He’ll come back to you. That would happen every time. other people that’s sort of the start of women’s one and but the second year that women were involved in the hartshorn mile that year i went around and i i tried to get people sometimes i say things in a way that tries to get people’s attention and they aren’t necessarily completely true but i said to people uh you know last i said we now have more prizes for the women, then we have women entered in the race.

Ah, good. That’s a good incentive.

I thought, this is a way to draw the women, to have the women say, okay, we’re going to show the men what this is all about. But instead, I said that to one of the men in the club, a couple of the men in the club, and they said to me, well, that shows that we shouldn’t have women’s running at all. And I’m not going to name any names on that, but the story is absolutely right there.

Well, we should probably wrap up for now. I mean, obviously, we can do this again. We could talk all day, but we have been going for, you know, over a couple hours now.

But I’ve named just about everybody who’s on the market.

On your list of people to get in there, good.

So the people I haven’t named are Michael Turback. Well, I didn’t name Michael Turback. Yeah, you were thinking in the trail running. Gold. Sam Gould used to give prizes all the time. It was Gould Sporting Goods? Yeah, Gold Sporting Goods. Yeah. And that was the big place around here at that time. Yeah. And, you know, I named everybody else. Cool.

Is Will Burtzart still around? Will Burtzart?

No, Burtzart died a long time ago. Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah, he and I used to occasionally run together. And we’d run from Teagle Hall, and then we’d run down into Forest Home. And there was a water testing area in Forest Home. And he was a professor of engineering, and his specialty was the quality of water. And so he’d say to me, we have to stop. I have to— Check the water. I can show you where this place is. Check the water. Go check the water. Check the water.

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

Terry Habecker’s still around. He’s a, he’s nationally, he is a biking, swimming, and running in his age group. He’s probably, he’s a top, he’s a top.

I still remember he had some issue with Ithaca High. Wouldn’t let him give him time off to go compete in the world triathlon championships. It was a big, big bus 15 years ago or something.

I had trouble with that.

I still remember also I was out running, um, moving, moving along pretty well on triple hump. So, you know, Mount Pleasant road, um, on those serious Hills. And, you know, as a runner, you know, like you will expect a biker to catch you on the flat or the downhills, but bikers don’t go uphill very fast usually. And I’m running up a pretty steep hill and I hear this, ah, ah, ah, ah. And I was like, who the hell is catching me? And then all of a sudden, it’s Terry Habecker on his bike. I’m like, oh, okay, never mind. You know, world-class age group triathlete. He can take me on a hill.

Terry was a decent runner. Yeah. But actually he was the soccer coach. Yeah. And he’d have all his guys running. Yeah. And I talked to a couple of his guys one time, and they said, Terry wasn’t that good a runner. But on the other hand, he’d make us a runner. We hated it so much, we’ll never run again.

He and Will Burtzart and I used to battle each other. It was a trio. But when your wife was in school at Caroline, when I was a phys ed teacher, this is an interesting short story. We used to have that Run for Your Life program. there was a chart on the outside of the gym and people wanted to come in from the bus instead of just winding around doing nothing going to their homeroom and waiting for school to start they come into the gym so i had run laps in the gym every time they every day they did laps they kept track of the number of laps they did and when they got a mile they put their name up on the board and a strip of paper and they got a star for the mile and some kids got 60 70 80 miles over the period every year. And that got a lot of kids interested in running. And then one of the teachers said,

I see my wife walking by the window right there.

And then, and then so, so, so, uh, let’s see what I have. There’s a couple, one kid, uh, let’s see, comes in, comes into school and, uh, says, what, what, what do I do here? I says, you just come into the gym. You saw the other kids run. He just joined in and said, what do I do? Put your name on the board. He came in every day and he kept doing it and doing it over and over. And all of a sudden, the kids loved running. Not all of them, but some of them. And what happened was the lines at the lunch line became too long. Kids had to wait in the hall for their lunch line because the servers were going slowly. So the teacher says, hey, why don’t you get the kids outside and run before lunch? What happened was instead of going to the lunchroom, you had to go out and you had to walk one kilometer around the outside perimeter of the school. And some of the kids walked it. Most kids walked it. Some of them ran it like your daughter. And some of them became outstanding high school runners. They came into lunch. There was no lunch line. They ate. They carried on the rest of the day.

So to this day, Tonya tells that story. She’s like, yeah, we go out every day and run around the field. It was crazy. And that is the reason why she is a runner. Isn’t that something? Doing a simple little program like that, give them something to do.

And the kids got these stars and they thought they were the greatest thing in the world. I thought to myself, this is crazy.

Yeah, yeah.

And we didn’t have kids running at the Runners Club yet. There was no kids running at that time.

Well, that’s the Kendal Marathon story, too. I was walking the hallway one night, and it was not too long after Thanksgiving, and some woman was walking the hallway at 8 o’clock at night, and she was walking slower than I was, and I passed her. And when I passed her, she said, Tom, I didn’t know why she was walking. She could be walking back to her apartment or whatever. She said, Tom, I just want to tell you. She said, I’ve been trying to do this Kendal Marathon. She said, and it’s okay. She said, but I can’t really keep it up. And I said, that’s okay. You now know what your limits are. You can get stronger and things will work better. I said, you’re going to get the T-shirt anyway. There you go. She’s still alive. That was five years ago. She’s still doing this.

And she still finishes it every year now? Yeah.

Amazing.

Yeah. No, it is amazing what people can do. But let me shut off the recording. And we will absolutely do more of these because this has been fabulous. And I am super interested to share it with you.

Thanks for giving me Steve Ingham’s name there. The other guy from Cortland. I can’t think. I’ll think of his name since I get in the car. This is probably my short-term memory.

Peter Renton.

Peter Renwick. Peter.

Oh.

Peter, yeah.