Monday, August 16, 2010

Frank Merriwell's Races

In 1994 Ken Burns released his documentary Baseball, 23 hours of film. Or 18-1/2 hours, accounts differ. Whatever the figure, it is a mammoth production, one of the few docummentaries longer than Ken Burns' The Civil War. No one was expected to watch all of Baseball in one sitting; Burns broke the film up into nine separate programs which he called "innings," each covering a different period of baseball history. Now that an additional sixteen years of baseball history have gone by, Burns is releasing a tenth inning covering that period.


There was a companion volume to Baseball, a coffee-table book for very sturdy coffee tables. The pictures are wonderful. In the chapter on the 1900-1910 period there are some reproductions of covers from Tip Top Weekly featuring the baseball exploits of the fictional Frank Merriwell. If baseball was featured in the dime novels, surely other sports were as well? Perhaps even track, cross-country, or marathon running? Because of my interest in running fiction, I was curious enough to investigate. It turns out that Frank Merriwell himself was a track man.


Frank Merriwell was the creation of Gilbert Patten, who under the pen name Burt L. Standish wrote about 200 "novels" featuring the character for Street & Smith's Tip Top Weekly from 1896 to 1914. Merriwell was from a well to do family of the right stock, attended Yale for most of his literary existence, excelled as a scholar, and as an athlete won just about every contest he ever entered (I haven't had a chance to survey all 200 novels to find out if he ever lost anything). Outside of class and the playing fields Merriwell and his friends had marvelous adventures and solved mysteries. He always got the best of his enemies. I don't think I would have been surprised to learn that Merriwell was actually from the planet Krypton. In fact, it would have explained a lot. After Tip Top folded, Merriwell perhaps performed his cleverest trick yet by living on as a character in comic strips, comic books, radio, and film. He never made it to television. I don't expect he ever will. The time for such a flawless character has long passed.


At Yale Merriwell competed (and of course won) in baseball, football, basketball, fencing, rowing, and track. During the course of 200 novels he must have found time to try out most of the events, but in one of the stories that has made its way online, Frank Merriwell's Races (1903), Merriwell is a miler.


Races is not really a running book. There are a good 28 chapters of horse racing and wrestling and rowing and whatever before anyone even talks about running. But in chapter 29 conversation turns to an upcoming track meet (they call it a "tournament") at Madison Square Garden. Merriwell's friends are convinced that Merriwell is the man for the mile, but Merriwell himself is skeptical:
"I know I have a record as a base runner in a ball game, but the best base runners are not always able to make good showings in races. Besides that, base running is dash work, and this is a case of running a mile. There is a vast difference."
Some of the other characters also have doubts, and I did, too. It's a fast-twitch versus slow-twitch muscle fiber thing. Nevertheless, Merriwell is prevailed upon to try out to represent Yale in the race. He starts by mauling one of his schoolmates, Paul Pierson, in a five-mile time trial. Then he beats Yale's current miler, Duncan Yates, in an impromptu race to the train station. After that he actually begins training.


Naturally, some folks resent Merriwell's easy success (I wasn't that happy about it myself). Some of Merriwell's enemies play on Yates's jealousy and get him to fight Merriwell. In gentlemanly fashion, Merriwell tears Yates apart. Finally, on the eve of the big mile race, Frank's enemies hire a gang of ruffians to kidnap Merriwell and hold him captive till after the competition. Somehow they actually succeed in capturing Merriwell, but when he discovers that they're holding him because they're being paid, he offers them a greater sum of money to let him go. Freed, he shows up at Madison Square Garden just in time for the mile, which he wins with a dramatic kick in the closing yards of the race.


I find Merriwell's success in the absence of training a bit irksome, but the story takes place in an era when the world amateur record in the mile was 4:15-3/5. Merriwell and his Ivy League rivals wouldn't have been running have been running even that fast. And it is fiction. Readers of Frank Merriwell's baseball exploits were expected to believe that he threw a pitch that curved in two different directions--I have a much easier time swallowing that he could beat four other Ivy Leaguers in a one-mile race after a few weeks of working out.


As an author, Patten isn't dependable on conveying the necessity of hard work and training as a foundation for athletic success. Can we use him as a source for historical detail from the period during which he was writing? It would be great if we could. For instance, when Pierson takes Merriwell on a run off the Yale campus, Patten writes: "Along the streets of New Haven they went, attracting but little attention, as it was not an uncommon sight at that season to see some of the college lads taking a night run in that manner." I thought that this was exciting evidence that nearly eight decades before the running boom there was a place where runners were not regarded as freakish. But then I learned that Patten had never been to Yale, had never in fact attended any college, and only put Merriwell at Yale on the direction of his editor at Street and Smith.


But there is one bit of literary history that we can get from Frank Merriwell--that novel-length running stories were appearing in print during the run of Tip Top Weekly. John L. Parker, Jr., and Once A Runner were far in the future, but the genre of athletic fiction had been born.


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Posted by Herb Wills at 9:32 AM
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