Long Road to Boston. Mr Mark Sutcliffe
100,000 people lined the roads and filled the stadium where the marathon would finish. Spiridon Louis of Greece won the race in just under three hours, capitalizing when the early frontrunners went too fast and eventually dropped out or even collapsed. He even had time to stop for a glass of wine in a village along the route, in what passed for an aid station in the nineteenth century. The win gave Louis the only gold medal for Greece at the Olympics and made him an instant national hero.
It also launched the marathon as the ultimate test of human endurance. It would take a long time before it became so popular that tens of thousands would attempt it at a time, in events around the world. But other similar races were soon being planned. And it was only a year later that another marathon was held in Boston.
CHAPTER 3
Were it not for that epic finish to the first Olympic Games and the heroic efforts of a few New Englanders during the American Revolution, there would be no Boston Marathon on the third Monday of every April.
Only fourteen Americans competed at the 1896 Olympics, and the majority of them were from Boston. Several were students from Harvard University, but a few were members of the Boston Athletic Association.
In 1887, only nine years before the Olympics, the Boston Athletic Association had been founded with the goal of promoting “physical culture” and encouraging “all manly sports.” The specifics about gender turned out to be a bit of unintentional foreshadowing of an event eighty years in the future, when a BAA official tried to tackle an unwelcome woman on the Boston Marathon race course.
The original BAA clubhouse was built on the corner of Exeter and Boylston Streets, on the site where the Boston Public Library’s modern expansion is located today and only a few yards from the current finish line of the Boston Marathon. The club’s facilities included a gymnasium, tennis courts, and a bowling alley. In 1890, the association launched its first track-and-field competition, a program which yielded some of America’s first Olympians.
John Graham, a member of the BAA, was the manager of the first U.S. Olympic team. Tom Burke, a Boston University law student, won gold in the 100 meters and 400 meters in Athens. The two men were among those who watched the Olympic marathon on the final day of the Games, and they returned from Greece with the inspiration to launch a similar event in Boston.
In September of 1896, just a few months after the Olympic marathon, the Knickerbocker Athletic Club held its annual fall track- and-field competition. While other athletes competed in the usual events, about thirty long-distance runners took a train to Stamford, Connecticut and then ran back to the Columbia Oval in the first marathon held on American soil. The course was muddy, and even the leaders walked at several points on the course. The winner was John McDermott, in a time of three hours, twenty-five minutes and fifty-five seconds.
Only two years before the Olympics, the governor of Massachusetts, Frederic T. Greenhalge, had declared April 19 as Patriots’ Day. Greenhalge was a native of Lancashire in the north of England who had moved with his parents to Lowell, Massachusetts when he was a teenager. He studied at Harvard, fought for the Union side in the Civil War, became a lawyer, and was eventually elected mayor of his adopted hometown.
The date was chosen in part to mark the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first clashes of the American Revolutionary War, which occurred on April 19, 1775. On the night before the battle, Bostonian Paul Revere famously rode from town to town, warning of the approaching British army.
In other words, if Pheidippides had owned a horse or Paul Revere hadn’t, then there probably wouldn’t be a twenty-six-mile race every April in Boston.
Boston Athletic Association officials decided to hold the first American Marathon, as it was initially called, on Patriots’ Day. In 1897 that happened to be on a Monday, but the tradition of Marathon Monday was more than seven decades away. Until 1969, Patriots’ Day was always on April 19, no matter what day of the week that was. The marathon was always run on the holiday, unless it fell on a Sunday, in which case the race would be held on the Monday. In 1969, just months before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, the holiday was fixed as the third Monday in April, and the marathon has been held on Monday ever since. So while most major marathons are held exclusively on Sunday mornings, the Boston Marathon has occurred on every day of the week except Sunday.
In 1897, Boston was approaching the end of a century of explosive growth. The city had struggled during the revolutionary war, as Britain first blockaded its port in response to the Boston Tea Party and then laid siege to the city when they were driven back from Lexington and Concord by the revolutionary militia. The effects on Boston’s economy and population were damaging. But during the 1800s, the city doubled in size roughly every twenty years.
With the end of the century approaching, Boston was bustling, one of the largest, busiest and most prosperous cities in America, with a population of half-a-million. The main downtown thoroughfare, Tremont Street, was routinely congested with a combination of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, trolleys and electric street cars. The solution, the first subway tunnel in North America, was almost finished. It wasn’t quite the Big Dig that would dominate Boston headlines a century later, but the tunnel was a stunning example of modern infrastructure when it opened on September 1, 1897. In its first year of operation, it served fifty million passengers.
On the day of the very first Boston Marathon, cries of “play ball!” were heard, just as they are when the marathon is run today. But Fenway Park hadn’t yet been built, and there was no Citgo sign for the runners to pass. On Patriots’ Day in 1897, the Boston Beaneaters baseball club played their first game of the season, losing 1-0 to the Philadelphia Phillies. The Beaneaters struggled in April, earning only one victory in their first seven games. But, led by five future Hall of Famers, they went on to win ninety-three games and capture their fourth National League pennant of the decade.
The Beaneaters played at South End Grounds, about a mile to the southeast of where Fenway stands today. It would be another four years before the Boston Red Sox, now considered one of the oldest and most established teams in baseball, would begin playing in the newly formed American League.
The Red Sox and Fenway Park are just one of many modern-day sports and cultural institutions predated by the Boston Marathon. In 1897, the first World Series was still six years away. The Stanley Cup would not be awarded for another twenty. It would be another two decades before the National Football League was formed, another seventy years before the first Super Bowl. The game of basketball had only just been invented, and games still featured peach baskets from which men on ladders would retrieve the ball after points were scored – which wasn’t very often.
William McKinley, the twenty-fifth American president and the last to have served in the Civil War, had just been sworn into office in March 1897 to preside over a union of forty-five states. Local prospectors had recently discovered gold in northern Canada, but the news had not yet reached America. When it did, in July 1897 in Seattle, it would spark the Klondike Gold Rush. Also that year, Mark Twain announced to a New York newspaper that “the report of my death was an exaggeration.” The first patents for automobiles had only just been awarded. Orville and Wilbur Wright were still making bicycles.
There are few things about life in 1897, in Boston or anywhere else in North America, that are consistent with modern-day existence. But one thread stretches through the years, connecting the late nineteenth century to the present day. In April of 1897, the Boston Athletic Association launched a race that has been run, following almost entirely the same path, every single year since.
CHAPTER 4
At 12:15 p.m. on April 19, 1897, Tom Burke scraped the heel of his boot across the narrow dirt road in front of Metcalf ’s Mill in Ashland, Massachusetts to create the starting line for the American Marathon, as the inaugural edition of the Boston Marathon was called. As a reporter described it at the time, Burke called for the contestants and fifteen men answered.
Burke was the son of a Boston undertaker and still in his early twenties. According to historian and author Patrick Kennedy, when Burke was growing up he was a tall, skinny