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.


Links:

• Frank Merriwell's Races at Project Gutenberg
  http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/21958
  
  
• Stewart H. Holbrook, "Frank Merriwell at Yale Again and Again and Again"
  http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1961/4/1961_4_24.shtml
  
  
• "Mucker Merriwell," Red Smith's expose of Frank Merriwell
  http://harvardmagazine.com/1998/05/mucker.html
  
  
• Patch, a considerably better piece of running fiction for young readers
  http://troubleafoot.blogspot.com/2009/01/patch.html
  
  

No runners among "True Blood's" brooding vampires

HBO's vampire soap opera, True Blood, is in its third season and has just been renewed for a fourth. The series is based on Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire series of novels, with the usual differences between the written version and the video version that drive fans crazy. I'm more of an athletics fan than a fang fan, though, so I've been wondering--where is Kevin Pryor?

A character in Harris' books, Kevin Pryor is a sheriff's deputy in (don't look for it on a map) Bon Temps, Louisiana. More interestingly, Pryor is a distance runner. Harris describes him in Definitely Dead as "...a thin young patrol officer who always won the 4K race at the Azalea Festival." A four-kilometer race is unusual, but Louisiana has always been different. An Azalea Festival seems less unlikely; there are azalea festivals across the south.

On True Blood, though, there is no Kevin Pryor. There is a Kevin Ellis, played by John Rezig, who seems to fill the same role. Kevin Ellis, however, isn't much of a character. During the run of the series he has appeared in maybe five episodes, where he's portrayed as an amusing bumpkin that you hope isn't trusted with live ammunition. Nothing is ever mentioned about his life out of uniform, particularly nothing about running.

So True Blood has no Kevin Pryor, and nothing much of athletic interest, other than a season two scene of some Fellowship Of The Sun recruits doing a training run at boot camp. But I'll keep monitoring Harris's Southern Vampire books and report back when I find out Pryor's winning time at the Azalea Festival 4K.

Links:

• Charlaine Harris
  http://www.charlaineharris.com/
  
  
• HBO's True Blood
  http://www.hbo.com/true-blood
  
  
• Deputy Kevin Ellis
  http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0118078/
  
  
• Harry Pottter and the Trial of Miles
  http://troubleafoot.blogspot.com/2009/01/harry-potter-and-trial-of-miles.html
  
  

Patch

Back in the twentieth century when I was doing time at August Raa Middle School, I went through the card catalog in the school library looking for books about running. What good, after all, is a library if it doesn't have any books about running? As it turns out, the Augusta Raa library wasn't much good, but it did have a copy of Patch by C. H. Frick.

Patch is a charming novel about high school track and field (I found this particularly attractive because middle school athletics didn't exist, so as a runner I was just marking time till high school). The book is set in Crescent City, a thinly-disguised Evansville, Indiana. Sherrill Jones, quickly nicknamed Patch, transfers to West High from a rural school. Accidentally, he discovers the track team. Like Glenn Cunningham or Kip Keino, Patch has already spent his childhood running everywhere--to school and back, after the local freight train, around the family farm. Based on this background and his love of running, he becomes a miler. However, there's a lot that Patch has to learn about training, pacing, competition, and being a member of a team. Coach Anderson, a pipe-smoking veteran track coach, struggles to help him through those lessons. Patch has an additional mentor in fellow West High miler Benny Chapnik, a Latvian refugee. Unfortunately, Patch also had adversaries on the team, Grover Godwin and Sax Warner, middle-distance runners who feel threatened by the outsider.

Although not flawless, the book gets most of the track and field right. Frick was either an avid track fan or did a lot of research. This also shows in all the historical references--characters often mention athletes such as John Landy, Arne Anderson, Gunder Hägg, Roger Bannister, Wes Santee, Paavo Nurmi, and others when making a point about racing or training. This is especially true of Benny, who is a scholar of the sport. For example, in his discussion with team manager Dirk Ingersoll:

"You can do it in formal practice too," Benny said as if reading Dirk's thoughts. "Zatopek, the Czech who set three new Olympic records at Helsinki in '52, once ran sixty quarters in a single workout--and ran each quarter in sixty seconds. Roger Bannister of England, first man to break the four-minute mile, prepared for it by training several times a week, each time running ten consecutive quarter-miles at the same speed. He started in December, running the quarters in sixty-six seconds. By April he had brought the time down to fifty-nine."

A similar discussion about the shot put even rates a footnote, referring the reader to the 21 March 1955 issue of Sports Illustrated.

Frick also got the local athletic background right. Perhaps you haven't heard of the great Indiana schoolboy miler of the 1930s, Tommy Deckard, but Frick had, and every word she wrote about him was true. She could have just gotten it from a program from a track meet, but she also could have entirely forsaken research and made up a name and a time.

Frick, as it turns out, was Dr. Constance Henrietta Frick Irwin (1913-1995). She grew up and lived most of her life in Evansville and southern Indiana, but 1957, the year she wrote Patch, was her third year of living in Iowa City, Iowa with her husband, Dr. William R. Irwin. The "Crescent City" setting of Patch may have been Frick's way of re-visiting Evansville during her Iowa exile, or it may have just been following the adage "write what you know." Frick also knew high school students, having taught and run the school libary in Indianapolis and Evansville. She also wrote books for adult readers, but Patch was one of four sports novels Frick authored for young readers, the others being Tourney Team (1954), Five Against the Odds (1955), and The Comeback Guy (1961). Of these, only The Comeback Guy also dealt with track and field, being about the senior year of Jeff Stanley, a high-school pole vaulter.

As one might suspect of a book published over half a century ago, Patch is out of print. There are a few copies floating around, though. My copy is one that was retired from the Edgewater High School library in Orlando, Florida, hopefully after a generation or two of high school athletes had a chance to read it. It certainly looks like it has been through that many hands. You could do worse than hunt down a copy for a future read. How can anyone dislike a book with a shot-putter named Moose?


Links

• Patch at amazon.com
  https://amzn.to/2KfkORN
  
  
• Inspired to run a race? Find one on the Trouble Afoot! calendar!
  https://troubleafoot.blogspot.com/search/label/calendar?max-results=1
  
  

The Scranton High Chums on the Cinder Path

In the event that you're looking for something to read while waiting for the re-release of Once A Runner, there's always Donald Ferguson's The Chums of Scranton High On The Cinder Path (or The Mystery Of The Haunted Quarry). This was one of Ferguson's series of four sports-related books for boys:

The Chums of Scranton High (or Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight)
The Chums of Scranton High Out For The Pennant (or In The Three Town League)
The Chums of Scranton High On The Cinder Path (or The Mystery Of The Haunted Quarry)
The Chums of Scranton High At Ice Hockey

Apparently by the fourth book Ferguson had run out of sub-titles, and after that he had run out of sports. These were all published in a flurry around 1919, or about the same time as the Spanish Influenza and the start of Prohibition.

The athletic aspect of Cinder Path involves the "chums" getting ready for a "fifteen-mile Marathon race." Ferguson notes that this is "an unusually long distance for boys to run, by the way, and hardly advisable under ordinary conditions." For fictional characters, though, there is no danger of injury or over-training, so it's okay. Apparently the race has an open course with checkpoints, and the "chums" are out looking for shortcuts between the checkpoints when they stumble into The Mystery Of The Haunted Quarry. Think Scooby Doo in running spikes. Once the mystery is cleared up, though, it's time for the climactic race in which the "chums" triumph for dear old Scranton High.

Track & field fiction is seldom of high literary quality, and Cinder Path is no exception. To be generous, the language is, um, quaint--which is about what you'd expect for a boys' book from the early twentieth century. The trouble is, you want track & field fiction to at least get the track & field right, and Cinder Path doesn't. I'll forgive calling a mere fifteen miles a Marathon, because that did happen back then (and still does). But "cinder path" usually means a track, not a cross-country course. And having an interscholastic race over that distance just isn't credible, especially for a group of "chums" who spend more time chasing ghosts than training. Ferguson obviously created the race not because it was something that high school runners would typically compete in, but just so that he could get the "chums" into the countryside where they would run into the Haunted Quarry.

Aside from the perverse pleasure of discovering one of the rotten tomatoes of running literature, Cinder Path has one other redeeming quality--it is absolutely free. All of the Scranton High chums' adventures are in the public domain now, and Project Gutenberg has digitized each volume. Copies are all over the web, like this one here:

Internet Archive's copy of The Chums of Scranton High On The Cinder Path
http://www.archive.org/stream/thechumsofscrant13251gut/13251.txt

There are also a variety of paperback reprint editions available, no doubt churned out by folks who used the Project Gutenberg files for their typesetting. But stick with the electronic version. Enough trees have already died for the Scranton High chums.

Harry Potter and the Trial of Miles

[ Originally written for publication in the January 2009 issue of the Fleet Foot, the newsletter of the Gulf Winds Track Club. ]


Last year J. K. Rowling released her seventh and final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It set all sorts of publishing records; according to Fortune magazine, Rowling is now wealthier than even Michael Jordan, and without the benefit of a shoe contract. So this year Rowling’s publication of The Tales of Beedle the Bard is accompanied by a great deal of excitement. I’m afraid I’m not going to join in, though. Rowling lost me when she stopped writing about running.


I was never a big fan of Harry Potter, and only read the first book to see what all the fuss was about. I wasn’t that impressed, so I’m not sure why I picked up a copy of the second book. While I was reading, though, I ran across Rowling’s first reference to distance running:

"...someone was patting him on the back as though he'd just won a marathon..." (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, p.84)

Not as if he had scored a winning soccer goal, or as if he'd caught the snitch in the Quidditch World Cup, nor even as if he had won a general sort of race, but as though he had won a very specific sort of distance run. Was Rowling a distance runner? Was she an athletics fan? Did she happen to be writing when the London Marathon figured prominently in the sports news? I would have forgotten this one simile, but as I read further into the series, there were more.

"...he sank into a chair, feeling as exhausted as if he'd just run a mile, and felt his legs shaking." (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, p. 242)
(Thirteen-year-old Harry Potter is apparently not in good enough shape to handle long distances yet.)

"Harry lay flat on his back, breathing hard as though he had been running." (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, p. 16)
(At fourteen, Harry has yet to learn the merits of doing a proper jog-down.)

"'Nothing, Arthur,' said Sirius, who was breathing heavily as though he had just run a long distance." (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, p. 521)
(Apparently the run was not at a conversational pace. Perhaps it was a tempo run?)

"Professor Umbridge was still breathing as though she had just run a race when she strode into their Defense Against the Dark Arts lesson that afternoon." (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, p. 666)
(Dolores Umbridge isn’t in this just for the fitness; she’s also a competitor!)


There are other running references. In Order of the Phoenix, Harry’s uncle describes a noise as “a racket like a starting pistol” rather than like a more generic firearm. In the same book Lucius Malfoy tells Harry, “Potter, your race is run.” Okay, that one is a cliché, but it’s a running cliché. And by the end of the book we’re reading that Harry “wanted to run, he wanted to keep running....”


With so much metaphor devoted to running in four of the first five books, I was certain that in the sixth book Harry Potter would be forming a cross-country team at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and the seventh novel would feature a climactic showdown where Harry and Lord Voldemort enter the London-to-Brighton Road Race. Therefore, soon after the seventh novel was released I ordered copies of both the sixth and seventh books, hoping to finish reading before someone told me who won the final race.


There was nothing. In all 1,411 pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Rowling fails to mention competitive distance running even once. After four volumes of using distance running as a metaphor for fatigue and glory, she seems to have moved on to other images.


So I’m not that enthused about The Tales of Beedle the Bard. I still wonder, though, why so much running crept into Rowling’s work from 1998 to 2003.

Herb Wills

Postscript: Some time after I wrote this, I discovered this passage on page 304 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

"He strode up and down the tent, feeling that he could have run a mile..."

So there are running references in five of the seven Harry Potter books. It's still not enough to make me to rush out and get a copy of Beedle the Bard, but I'm still wondering if there's any real connection between J. K. Rowling and running.