The 1929 Bunion Derby: Johnny Salo and the Great Footrace across America

By Charles B. Kastner

On March 31, 1929, seventy-seven men began an epic 3,554-mile footrace across America that pushed their bodies to the breaking point. Nicknamed the "Bunion Derby" by the press, this was the second and last of two trans-America footraces held in the late 1920s. The men averaged forty-six gut-busting miles a day during seventy-eight days of nonstop racing that took them from New York City to Los Angeles. Among this group, two brilliant runners, Johnny Salo of Passaic, New Jersey, and Pete Gavuzzi of England, emerged to battle for the $25,000 first prize along the mostly unpaved roads of 1929 America, with each man pushing the other to go faster as the lead switched back and forth between them. To pay the prize money, race director Charley Pyle cobbled together a traveling vaudeville company, complete with dancing debutantes, an all-girl band wearing pilot outfits, and blackface comedians, all housed under the massive show tent that Pyle hoped would pack in audiences. Kastner’s engrossing account, often told from the perspective of the participants, evokes the remarkable physical challenge the runners experienced and clearly bolsters the argument that the last Bunion Derby was the greatest long-distance footrace of all time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9780815652816

Charles B. Kastner

Charles B. Kastner lives in Seattle, Washington, and has published numerous articles in Northwest Runner and Marathon and Beyond magazines. Bunion Derby is his first book.

Book preview

Editor’s Choice

Our Editor’s Choice program is an opportunity to highlight a book from our list that deserves special attention. This remarkable account of human endurance unfolds against the backdrop of America’s swift decline from the heady Roaring Twenties to the devastating Great Crash, and is precisely the kind of underdog story that university presses continue to bring to light.

Suzanne E. Guiod

Editor-in-Chief, Syracuse University Press

Copyright © 2014 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2014

141516171819654321

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit our website at www.SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-1036-6 (cloth)978-0-8156-5281-6 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kastner, Charles B., 1955–

The 1929 Bunion Derby : Johnny Salo and the great footrace across America / Charles B. Kastner. — First Edition.

pagescm. — (Sports and entertainment)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8156-1036-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8156-5281-6 (ebook) 1. Running races—United States—History. 2. Salo, Johnny, 1893–1931. I. Title.

GV1061.2.K369 2014

796.42′4097309042—dc23

2014001413

Manufactured in the United States of America

To Eddie the Sheik Gardner (1897–1966), bunioneer and unsung hero in the battle for racial equality in America.

Charles B. Kastner is a Seattle-based writer and financial manager. In 2007, the University of New Mexico Press published his history of the first footrace across America. He has also contributed chapters to two books dealing with his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer as well as writing about the Bunion Derbies for blackpast.org as well as Marathon and Beyond and Northwest Runner magazines. He holds advanced degrees in business, history, and environmental biology. Kastner is an avid distance runner. He has run more than twenty marathons and one ultramarathon.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.Race Day

New York City to Elizabeth, New Jersey, March 31, 1929

2.Down the Eastern Seaboard

Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Baltimore, Maryland, April 1–April 5, 1929

3.Six Days of Hell—Crossing the Appalachian Plateau

Baltimore, Maryland, to Wheeling, West Virginia, April 6–April 11, 1929

4.Fast Times in the Old Northwest

Wheeling, West Virginia, to Collinsville, Illinois, April 12–April 23, 1929

5.On Familiar Ground

Collinsville, Illinois, to Chelsea, Oklahoma, April 24–May 3, 1929

6.Heading to the Promised Land

Chelsea, Oklahoma, to Dallas, Texas, May 4–May 10, 1929

7.Under Western Skies

Dallas to Pecos, Texas, May 11–May 22, 1929

8.West of the Pecos

Pecos to El Paso, Texas, May 23–May 27, 1929

9.Across a Rough and Unforgiving Land

El Paso, Texas, to Yuma, Arizona, May 28–June 10, 1929

10.Overcoming the Killing Distances—The Last Five Days to Los Angeles

Yuma, Arizona, to Los Angeles, June 11–June 15, 1929

11.The End of the Rainbow

Los Angeles, June 16, 1929

12.Searching for the Pot of Gold

Appendixes

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Photos

1.Cover from Official 1929 Program

2.Johnny Salo commissioned as a Passaic city police officer

3.Johnny Salo being sworn in as a Passaic city police officer

4.Andy Payne, from Official 1929 Program

5.Pete Gavuzzi wearing his Bunion Derby race number

6.Arthur Newton, England

7.Arthur Newton and Pete Gavuzzi racing together in Canada

8.Unidentified man and Leonard Lewis #39

9.Official race bib, Leonard Lewis

10.C. C. Pyle’s Cross Country Follies

11.Frank Black Dan Hart

12.Charley Pyle, 1926

13.Charley Pyle, 1929

14.John Stone

15.Eddie the Sheik Gardner

16.Eddie Gardner crossing the Free Bridge into Missouri

17.Jim Thorpe

18.Eddie Gardner on Route 66, Oklahoma, 1928 race

19.Runners finishing in Breckenridge, Texas, Photo 1

20.Runners finishing in Breckenridge, Texas, Photo 2

21.Muddy road in Texas

22.Johnny and Amelia Salo, Superior, Arizona, 1929

23.Johnny Salo’s legs

24.Arthur Newton, final competitive run, England

25.Director General Charley Pyle

Maps

1.1929 route, New York City to Los Angeles

2.1929 route, Elizabeth to Baltimore

3.US Route 40

4.1929 route, Baltimore to Wheeling

5.1929 route, Wheeling to Collinsville

6.1929 route, Collinsville to Chelsea

7.1929 route, Chelsea to Dallas

8.1929 route, Dallas to Pecos

9.1929 route, Pecos to El Paso

10.1929 route, El Paso to Yuma

11.1929 route, Yuma to Los Angeles

Tables

Table 1.Finishers, 1929: 3,553.6 Miles in 78 Days

Table 2.Top Ten Finishers, 1928: 3,422.3 Miles in 84 Days

Table 3.List of Runners Who Completed Both

Acknowledgments

TO TELL THE STORY of the 1929 Bunion Derby, I reviewed articles from eighty period newspapers from cities and towns along the 3,554-mile course, memoirs from the runners, Works Progress Administration (WPA) State Guides, and many secondary works. I could have never gathered the primary materials without the help of an army of newspaper editors, archivists, and librarians from cities and towns along the course. I want to express my sincere thanks to John Charley Stone for letting me use his treasure trove of photos and primary documents. Charley was born while his father, John Stone, ran the 1928 race and was one of two Bunion Derby babies born during the first derby. I am also indebted to Pete Gavuzzi’s grandson, Guy Gavuzzi, for the use of his photos and to author Mark Whitaker for introducing me to Guy. I owe a special thank you to author and runner Rob Hadgraft for the use of his photos and for his help and support while I was writing this book. I also wish to thank Nicki Leone and Dick Lipsey for their editorial expertise. And, finally, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to my wife, Mary. She never wavered in her support for me during the thirteen years I spent learning and writing about the 1928 and 1929 Bunion Derby races.

Introduction

June 6, 1929, Sonora Desert, Arizona

On a gravel road that had once been the stagecoach route from El Paso to San Diego, an extremely muscular, leather-brown man was flying through a fifty-four-mile course in rough desert country—running at seven minutes and forty-four seconds per mile with the sun beating down and only the howling desert wind to compete with the rhythmic plodding of his feet. His trainer, Bill Wicklund, followed behind him in the well-worn 1921 Ford that had seen them through more than three thousand miles and sixty-eight days of almost nonstop running, averaging almost forty-six miles a day in daily stage-to-stage racing.¹ Just days away were Los Angeles and the twenty-five-thousand-dollar first prize going to the winner of the race—the Second Annual Transcontinental Foot Race across America, or simply the Bunion Derby, as the press had nicknamed the race in 1928. This was a fortune to a workingman when a yearly salary of $2,500 represented a decent standard of living for an American family.²

By now, the two men were a well-oiled machine, with Wicklund giving the runner food and fluids every two miles or so. The runner was Johnny Salo, the flying cop from Passaic, New Jersey. At about five feet, five inches, and 145 pounds, Salo’s muscularity was fit for a statue in ancient Greece. His physique was barely covered under a loose singlet and shorts, with his police-badge emblem embroidered on the shorts.³ Johnny’s style was mechanical and stiff, like a bulldozer that plows its way through mud, rough terrain, lighting storms, and desert sun. He was expressionless, blank in his concentration. He gave off a scent of controlled aggression that he directed fully at the task at hand.

Keeping him in balance at the start and end of each stage of the race was Amelia, his wife. She was a trained massage therapist, cook, counselor, and soul mate. The first woman trainer in this new sport of trans-America racing, Amelia was the glue that kept Johnny going.⁴

Chasing him relentlessly was his old rival, Pete Gavuzzi of England, the trilingual star who had led the first Bunion Derby run from Los Angeles to New York the year before. Gavuzzi had been forced out of the race in Ohio because of an infected tooth, giving the derby to Andy Payne of Oklahoma, with Johnny taking second.⁵ Gavuzzi, at 118 pounds, barely five feet, two inches, and just twenty-three years of age, was the Fred Astaire of the derby—flowing, effortless, and beautiful to watch—and he excelled on flat, open terrain.⁶ He, too, had an efficient racing team. His mentor and partner was Arthur Newton, the stern, middle-aged Englishman who looked more like a tanned bank executive than someone who had held every world long-distance record from thirty to one hundred miles. Shepherding them both across the country was George Barren, their valet, cook, and driver, who followed in their specially built motor home.⁷

When Gavuzzi and Salo had raced in 1928, they were making up the rules of running a trans-America road race as they went along. In 1929, they had perfected them, turning the contest from a test of survival to a true competition of skill that pushed the limits of human endurance to the breaking point.

Directing the Bunion Derby was Charley Pyle, teetering on bankruptcy after having lost much of the fortune he had earned in a wild four-year ride that took him from obscurity to shining star in the development of professional sports in America. In 1925, he had signed the greatest football player of the 1920s, Red Grange, and together they made a fortune, established the short-lived American Football League, owned a National Football League franchise, established professional tennis in America, and directed the first Bunion Derby in 1928.⁸ Pyle proved to be a man of almost evangelical vision, but he was woefully short on managerial skills and bled away most of his fortune as his schemes came unraveled.⁹

In 1929, Charley hoped to rebuild his fortune with one wild grab at glory, staging the second Bunion Derby at the zenith of the Roaring Twenties, just months before the Wall Street crash. In New York City, Charley cobbled together his Cross Country Follies, complete with dancing debutantes, an all-girl band wearing pilots’ outfits, a husband-and-wife acrobatic team, and blackface comedians, all housed under the massive show tent that Charley hoped would pack in audiences and cover the sixty-thousand dollars in prize money that he put up to the top fifteen bunioneers to finish the race in Los Angeles.¹⁰

On March 31, 1929, Charley Pyle, seventy-seven runners, and his Cross Country Follies left Columbus Circle in New York City for a seventy-eight-day footrace across America. This is the story of that forgotten race that took place just months before the nation began its long plunge into the grim reality of the Great Depression.

1

Race Day

New York City to Elizabeth New Jersey, March 31, 1929

Day 1, 77 Men

March 31, 1929. After a decade of peace and unprecedented economic expansion, Americans could look back on the 1920s with an understandable sense of pride. The United States had helped stop the carnage of the First World War and emerged as an industrial marvel. As the decade of the twenties dawned, constitutional amendments gave women the right to vote and outlawed the sale and distribution of alcohol, making Prohibition the law of the land.¹ The country was richer and more prosperous than it had ever been, with annual incomes rising by 30 percent from 1921 to 1929.² Key technologies—electricity, motion pictures, autos, and radios—had spread rapidly and profoundly and reshaped the country. Twenty-seven million cars clogged roads that were quiet at the start of the decade, which set off a boom in road construction and oil production.³

By race day, the stock market had reached stratospheric levels as money poured into Wall Street to purchase stocks, fueled by broker loans where an investor could put down from 10 to 20 percent of the stock purchase price and use the inflated value of his or her stocks as collateral.⁴ The cowboy humorist Will Rogers wrote that it was a great game. All you had to do was to buy and wait till the next morning and just pick up the paper and see how much you made, in print.⁵ President Herbert Hoover had been in office for less than a month. As a self-made millionaire, he symbolized bedrock American values of rugged individualism and unyielding faith in the future. In just seven months, this optimism would turn to despair as the infamous stock market crash started America on its spiral into the Great Depression.

In New York City, thousands of people were unaware of their dark future as they strolled in their Sunday best in and around Central Park on a sunny Easter Sunday afternoon. Spring was in the air. Baseball season would soon begin, and the great Babe Ruth would once again step up to the plate for the New York Yankees.

Many of these strollers were attracted to Columbus Circle on the southwest corner of Central Park, where a seventy-seven-foot granite column supported a marble statue of Christopher Columbus and, wrote syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler, A large number of males attired in underwear of various hues was assembled.⁶ The runners, like the famous explorer, were seeking fame and fortune on their own westward journey as part of the Bunion Derby, the nickname for C. C. Pyle’s Second Annual International-Trans-Continental Foot Race across America.

The wail of sirens from police motorcycles escorting the runners through the city and the large waving flags at the start attracted thousands of New Yorkers to the circle, bringing traffic to a standstill and engulfing Pyle’s seventy-seven runners in the crowd.⁷ A film taken of the start shows Charley Pyle in an open-air car, shouting instructions to his runners through a megaphone as they snake by in a thin line, an artery of runners moving through a mass of humanity.⁸ The curious crowd pushed and shoved its way to the starting line, and the police were powerless to control it.⁹ In this chaos, Charley’s opening ceremonies came unraveled, and he simply screamed instructions to begin the race. Will Rogers, a friend of the previous year’s winner, Andy Payne, had apparently been scheduled to begin the race with a gunshot, but that did not happen.¹⁰

With the race under way, the seventy-seven men began to weave through the crowd, with their police escorts blaring their sirens as they attempted to clear a path to the Hudson River ferries that would take the men to New Jersey. Two unidentified runners broke out of the crowd and crashed into a parked taxi. The rest weaved their way through dense crowds on onlookers.¹¹ At several points along the course, patrons of speakeasies rushed to the doors, holding their steins aloft in a Prohibitionera salute.¹²

1. Cover from Official 1929 Program....

1. Cover from Official 1929 Program. Source: John Stone, private collection.

Harry Abramowitz, a tiny New Yorker and 1928 derby finisher, reached the 23rd Street ferry first, covering the one and a half miles in thirteen minutes, a time, wrote the New York Times, that would have been good for a taxi trip from the circle to the ferry.¹³ The men had to wait until all the runners had checked in before boarding the vessel, forcing them to stand sweating in the chilly winds that blew off the Hudson River.¹⁴ The men were delayed again on the New Jersey side when a head count revealed that derby officials had left Polish runner George Jusnick on the New York side. The head referee, Steve Owen, held the men back until Jusnick arrived on the next boat.¹⁵

Just as in New York, massive crowds, which New York Times estimated at around a half-million souls, jammed the roads to the finish in Elizabeth, New Jersey.¹⁶ Two race veterans, Eddie Gardner and Sammy Richman, burned up the short-by-derby-standards 21.1-mile course, covering the miles at a pace of five minutes and forty seconds per mile, seemingly an impossibly fast pace for trans-America racing since Payne had won the previous year by stepping along at the ten-minute-per-mile pace.¹⁷ The veterans drew in rookies Pietro Marini of Italy and the two Cools brothers from Belgium, who tried to match their furious pace.¹⁸ Most of the fans, however, had come to see Johnny Salo, their home-state hero, win the opening stage of the Bunion Derby wearing his trademark number 107 on his racing bib and his blue American Legion cap. One fan shouted, Come on, Salo. You are going to finish first today, aren’t you? Johnny only grinned and maintained the slow, steady pace he had perfected while logging the brutal miles of the previous year.¹⁹

The crowd was kind to Sammy Richman, a veteran of the first derby, a New Yorker, and a fellow legionnaire, but it vented its anger at fellow derby veteran Eddie Gardner, an Alabama-born African American from Seattle. The crowd yelled racial slurs at him, but the words did not bother Eddie after his trials in the South in the previous year’s Bunion Derby, where he faced a daily dose of death threats and intimidation.²⁰

Johnny Salo had become a household in name in New Jersey, the rags-to-riches, against-all-odds story of a common man who had triumphed by sheer guts and an iron will to finish second in the 1928 derby and who earned a ten-thousand-dollar prize. He had arrived in the United States as a Finnish immigrant in his midteens, served in World War I, and risen through the ranks to become a naval officer after making ten trips on convoys across the submarine-infested Atlantic. In 1928, he left his hometown of Passaic, New Jersey, for Los Angeles to enter the first Bunion Derby as an unknown, thirty-four-year-old father of two and an often-unemployed shipyard worker with just eleven dollars in his pocket and a dream.²¹ He had survived the first terrible five hundred miles of desert and mountain running. Gradually, he adapted to the rigors of trans-America running, and with the financial support of local American Legion posts along the course, he hired a trainer and was able to avoid Pyle’s horrible food and drafty tents that passed for free room and board. By the time Johnny reached Ohio, he was one of the lead runners, racing in the seven-to-eight-minute-per-mile range day after day as he chased front-runner Andy Payne of Oklahoma for first place.²²

On the second to the last day of the 1928 derby, Johnny led the race into Passaic on his thirty-fifth birthday. Passaic’s citizens had decorated the town in red, white, and blue bunting. Newspaper stories about his race across America had become daily reading in every Passaic household. As he neared the finish line, sirens from the town’s firehouses blew and a mass of people ten deep parted to let him finish. He declared, This is the greatest and happiest day of my life. It almost makes me cry to see what the citizens of Passaic are doing for me.²³

The night before, the town council had appointed him a city police officer as a gesture of thanks for all the positive publicity he had brought the city. His days of unemployment were behind him. He used the second place ten-thousand-dollar prize money to buy a cozy house for his wife and two children on Spring Street and settled down to walk a beat. For Johnny, dreams did come true. He had become the flying cop from Passaic, a local hero, and the odds-on favorite to win the second Bunion Derby.²⁴

As the first day of the 1929 race neared its end in Elizabeth, New Jersey, masses of exhaust-belching cars jammed the roads and forced the runners to weave through them.²⁵ The bus Pyle used to transport his follies cast added to the confusion by trying to get around the jam by weaving in and out of oncoming traffic.²⁶ This forced many of the oncoming cars to pull off to the shoulder of the road. In the chaos, the derby suffered its first accident when a car brushed Charley Hart, the race’s senior runner at sixty-four years of age, and injured his knee, but not severely enough to put this veteran competitor out of the contest.²⁷ Hart had been one of the race favorites in 1928. He had held the world one-hundred-mile running record before Arthur Newton and had survived the opening weeks of the 1928 race before dropping out from exhaustion in the Arizona high country.²⁸

2. Johnny Salo receiving his commission as a P...

2. Johnny Salo receiving his commission as a Passaic city police officer, May 25, 1928. Courtesy of northjersey.com.

As the men passed through Newark near the end of the race, the townspeople welcomed them, and hundreds watched from their porches while firehouse whistles blew in salute. The reception at the finish in nearby Elizabeth, however, was less than cordial.

3. Johnny Salo being sworn in as a P...

3. Johnny Salo being sworn in as a Passaic city police officer, May 25, 1928. Courtesy of northjersey.com.

On Saturday morning, March 30, 1929, the residents of this sedate, hardworking community had been awakened by the rumble of Pyle’s fleet of heavy trucks heading to Sportsmen’s Park, where his work gang planned to erect the massive tent that would house his traveling vaudeville show, C. C. Pyle’s Cross Country Follies, which would accompany the derby across America. Charley planned an exciting finish. For twenty-five cents, fans could watch the bunioneers run the final four miles around an indoor track under the big top followed by a performance of Pyle’s show.²⁹

The editors of the town newspaper, the Elizabeth Daily Journal, were not impressed by the event, claiming that only deranged citizens would come down to Sportsmen’s Park to see the bunioneers.³⁰ The city fathers were even less receptive when Pyle’s representative requested a permit to set up his show. Police Chief Michael J. Mulcahy, citing the city’s blue laws, which prohibited such activities on Sunday, flatly refused to issue Pyle a permit to stage the follies in town.³¹ Charley, who never seemed to bother with such details, began setting up his tent Sunday morning until officers from the Elizabeth City Police Department arrived and ordered his men to pull it down and stop selling programs.³² This left Pyle’s perpetual critic, sportswriter Westbrook Pegler, to quip, Mr. Pyle’s gross receipts for the first day of the tour were, in round numbers, approximately nothing at all, and his net receipts a little less than that.³³

The postponement of the stage show was a blessing for twenty-two-year-old Andy Payne, the 1928 derby winner turned performer. He had sprained an ankle practicing a rope trick and was, in Pegler’s words, now listing sharply to starboard.³⁴ Andy had two jobs in the 1929 race: first, to entertain the crowds with rope tricks and jokes while the other performers changed costumes, and second, to serve on the race patrol, which involved driving the course in one of Pyles’s six bright-red patrol cars to ensure that none of the runners accepted rides from sympathetic motorists.³⁵

Most of the fans who milled around at Sportsmen’s Park were wildly pro-Salo, with a huge contingent from Passaic on hand. Johnny would not indulge them and finished a distant eleventh.³⁶ Gardner finished first with a fast pace of five minutes and forty seconds per mile, with Sammy Richman fifteen

Reviews for The 1929 Bunion Derby

[larryerick · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It is somewhat surprising to know that this was written by a long-distance runner and someone with a graduate degree in History, for it is not particularly good history, and, perhaps more importantly, it does not do a credible job of getting into the details of long-distance running. This is the author's personal enthusiasm made manifest by lots of details that he was able to track down in a less than thorough way. To limit comments to the most egregious faults, first, the author gets very repetitious about what he describes. True, the book is about several weeks of daily running, but the formula he follows is still lacking in variety and imagination. And, second, he fails miserably to mention the details of the runners daily grind, barely mentioning at the fact that the runners had support vehicles, and waiting until very near the end, to describe at all how the support vehicle actually provided any support. What happens when the shoes give out, when blisters developed, when falls occur, when, when, when... How often do they get water? Food? Do they wait around to eat and drink or do so while still running? Why were so many runners hit by cars? And on and on, with no detail, no answers, all of which would be interesting to a runner of even a lowly 5K race. Yet, his most worrisome trait is the way the author gives vivid "first-person witness" terms to events he couldn't have possibly seen himself. How could he know that a particular runner was "a sight to behold", if he wasn't alive yet to see him run and there were no videos available to document the past event? This book may be good at stimulating a middle school student to take up cross-country running, but it is decidedly not professional history, or particularly good literature.