Race across America: Eddie Gardner and the Great Bunion Derbies

By Charles B. Kastner

2020 Peace Corps Writers Paul Cowan Award for the Best Book of Non-Fiction
On April 23, 1929, the second annual Transcontinental Foot Race across America, known as the Bunion Derby, was in its twenty-fifth day. Eddie "the Sheik" Gardner, an African American runner from Seattle, was leading the race across the Free Bridge over the Mississippi River. Along with the signature outfit that earned him his nickname—a white towel tied around his head, white shorts, and a white shirt—Gardner wore an American flag, a reminder to all who saw him run through the Jim Crow South that he was an American and the leader of the greatest footrace in the world.

Kastner traces Gardner’s remarkable journey from his birth in 1897 in Birmingham, Alabama, to his success in Seattle, Washington, as one of the top long-distance runners in the region, and finally to his participation in two transcontinental footraces where he risked his life, facing a barrage of harassment for having the audacity to compete with white runners. Kastner shows how Gardner’s participation became a way to protest the endemic racism he faced, heralding the future of nonviolent efforts that would be instrumental to the civil rights movement. Shining a bright light on his extraordinary athletic accomplishments and his heroism on the dusty roads of America in the 1920s, Kastner gives Gardner and other black bunioneers the attention they so richly deserve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Jan 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780815654421

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

Race across America

Sports and Entertainment

Steven A. Riess, Series Editor

SELECT TITLES IN SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT

Abel Kiviat, National Champion: Twentieth-Century Track & Field and the Melting Pot

Alan S. Katchen

The American Marathon

Pamela Cooper

Beyond Home Plate: Jackie Robinson on Life after Baseball

Michael G. Long, ed.

Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1902–1931: The Negro National and Eastern Colored Leagues

Michael E. Lomax

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

Charles B. Kastner

(Re)Presenting Wilma Rudolph

Rita Liberti and Maureen M. Smith

Running with Pheidippides: Stylianos Kyriakides, The Miracle Marathoner

Nick Tsiotos and Andy Dabilis

When Running Made History

Roger Robinson

For a full list of titles in this series, visit https://press.syr.edu/supressbook-series/sports-and-entertainment/.

All maps are courtesy of Joseph Stoll, SU Cartographic Lab.

All tables created by the author, Charles B. Kastner.

Copyright © 2020 by Syracuse University Press

Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

All Rights Reserved

First Edition 2020

20 21 22 23 24 256 5 4 3 2 1

∞ 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 https://press.syr.edu.

ISBN: 978-0-8156-3577-2 (hardcover)978-0-8156-1099-1 (paperback)

978-0-8156-5442-1 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019948330

Manufactured in the United States of America

supported by grant

Figure Foundation

a marathon to life

To my grandmother

Augusta Katherine Kastner

(1890–1966)

One stormy day when I was a little boy, my grandma said, Chuckie, I have a present for you. I ran to her, expecting to receive a piece of candy or a toy. Instead, she pointed to the window and said, Look outside and watch the rain dancing on the pavement. Her words color my world to this day.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.A Desperately Serious Affair

2.Into the Unknown

3.To the Top of the World

4.Out of the Clouds

5.Homecoming

6.Mud, Snow, and Fear

7.Decision Time

8.Chasing the Rabbit

9.A Gathering of the Departed

10.Long Miles in the Old Northwest

11.The Last Push

12.The End of the Rainbow

13.One Last Shot at Glory

14.Leader of the Pack

15.In a League of Their Own

16.Wearing the Flag

17.Legacy

APPENDIX A

1928 Daily and Cumulative Mileage

APPENDIX B

Eddie Gardner

Finishing Time and Pace for the 1928 Bunion Derby

APPENDIX C

1929 Daily and Cumulative Mileage

APPENDIX D

Eddie Gardner

Finishing Time and Pace for the 1929 Bunion Derby

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figures

1.Arthur Newton, 1928

2.Eddie the Sheik Gardner in Seattle, ca. 1926

3.Tobie Joseph Cotton Jr., ca. April 1928

4.Samuel Robinson, ca. April 1928

5.Phillip Granville, ca. 1925

6.Opening ceremonies in Ascot Park, March 4, 1928

7.Official race program cover, 1928

8.Red Grange and Charley Pyle, 1926

9.Tom Young and Andy Payne

10.Pete Gavuzzi, April 1928

11.Eddie Gardner, April 1928

12.Andy Payne, April 1928

13.Eddie Gardner and John Gober running on Route 66

14.Eddie Gardner running across the Free Bridge

15.Bill Bojangles Robinson crossing the finish line, ca. 1939–40

16.Johnny Salo, Bill Kerr, and C. R. Brown wearing the American Legion emblem, 1928

17.Mike Joyce with Arthur Studenroth, 1928

18.Johnny Salo finishing in New Jersey, May 25, 1928

19.Official race program cover, 1929

20.Johnny and Amelia Salo during the 1929 derby

21.Eddie Gardner crossing the Free Bridge

22.Eddie Gardner after finishing 1938 Lake Hike

Maps

1.1928 bunion derby route

2.Race route in California, 1928

3.Race route through Arizona and New Mexico, 1928

4.Race route through Texas and Oklahoma, 1928

5.Race route through Kansas, Missouri, and Illinois, 1928

6.Race route through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, 1928

7.Race route in New York and New Jersey, 1928

8.1929 bunion derby route

9.Race route through New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, 1929

10.Race route through Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, 1929

11.Race route through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, 1929

12.Route around Lake Washington

Tables

1.Gardner’s record of finishes in Washington State Ten-Mile Championship

2.Gardner’s seventeen first-place stage finishes in First Transcontinental Foot Race across America (1928)

3.Gardner’s cumulative finish in First Transcontinental Foot Race across America (1928)

4.Gardner’s solo fifty-mile run around Lake Washington

5.Gardner’s six first-place stage finishes, Second Transcontinental Foot Race across America (1929)

6.Gardner’s cumulative finish in Second Transcontinental Foot Race across America (1929)

7.Gardner’s finishes in annual fifty-two-mile walking race around Lake Washington

Acknowledgments

This book represents the culmination of twenty years of effort I spent on learning and writing about Charley Pyle’s two great footraces that crisscrossed America in the late 1920s. Three mentors supported me over this twenty-year time span: Rich Benyo, the editor of Marathon and Beyond Magazine ; Martin Rudow, the editor of Northwest Runner Magazine ; and Dr. Quintard Taylor, the founder of Blackpast.org , the world’s largest website on African American history. These men gave me a place to publish my work and offered me valuable feedback to make me a better writer. Sadly, both Marathon and Beyond Magazine and Northwest Runner Magazine have ceased publication. I am also grateful for the support I have received from the ultramarathoning community, especially from two trans-America racing legends, Marshall Ulrich and David Warady, and from the children and grandchildren of bunioneers who contacted me after reading my books.

I owe a special thank-you to my longtime attorney and friend Eric Fahlman; multiyear ironman finisher Gary Theriault; filmmaker and long-distance runner Kevin Patrick Allen; my boxing coach, Jeremy Smith; and English writer Rob Hadgraft for their steadfast support of my work. I am also thankful for the reviewers who read my manuscript and gave me valuable feedback that made the end result a much stronger book and for the editorial assistance of Dick Lipsey, who helped me prepare this book and my 1929 bunion-derby book for publication.

Finally, I want to give a special thank-you to my three children, Katie, Brian, and Andrew, for enduring twenty years of my fascination with the bunion derbies. When I began writing, they were teenagers; now they are married and scattered to the proverbial winds, but running still unites us: three have run marathons, and two compete in ultramarathon racing. Through it all, my wife and fellow marathoner, Mary, has stood by me and endured the long hours I spent squirreled away in my office writing my bunion-derby books. I am forever grateful for her love and support.

Race across America

Introduction

On April 23, 1929, the Second Annual Transcontinental Foot Race across America was in its twenty-fifth day. The bunion derby, as the race was informally known, had left New York City for Los Angeles on March 31 with seventy-seven competitors chasing a $25,000 first-place prize, a small fortune at a time when an income providing a decent standard of living for a family was about $2,500 a year. ¹ Each day’s run, or stage race as it was called in the vernacular of the derby, was a point-to-point ultramarathon that typically averaged about forty miles a day. In daily ultramarathon races, the bunioneers had raced down the Eastern Seaboard to Baltimore before they turned west to cross the Appalachians and the vast heartland of America: Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

On that day, Eddie the Sheik Gardner, an African American runner from Seattle, Washington, was leading the bunion derby across the Free Bridge over the Mississippi River that separated Illinois from Missouri. He was flying, blazing over the short (by derby standards) twenty-two-mile course at a sub-three-hour marathon pace.² Eddie was wearing the distinctive outfit that earned him his nickname, a white towel tied around his head and a white sleeveless shirt and white shorts, but he had added something new to his outfit. Below his racing number, 165, he had sewn an American flag, a reminder to all who saw him run that he was an American and, that day, the leader of the greatest footrace in the world.³ He was setting himself up for another collision with southern segregation.

For ten years (1867–77), Federal troops had occupied the former states of the old Confederacy to protect the citizenship rights of the newly freed slaves, but by 1877 enthusiasm for what was called Radical Reconstruction waned in the North and Federal troops were withdrawn, leaving the freedmen to the mercy of their former masters. As southern whites regained control of the statehouses, they set about permanently enshrining their power in the redeemed South. By the 1880s, white-controlled state legislatures began passing Jim Crow laws or segregation statutes that lent the sanction of law to racial ostracism that extended to churches and schools, to housing and jobs, to eating and drinking. These segregation statuses were not unique to the South. Northern and western states enacted similar Jim Crow laws that often predated those statutes passed in the South, but the redeemers used them as the bedrock to control every aspect of the relations between blacks and whites.⁴

The term Jim Crow had its origins in 1828, when a white New York comedian began performing a song-and-dance routine in blackface as Daddy Jim Crow. His act was a parody of a shabbily dressed African American that he repeatedly performed on stages across America.⁵ Jim Crow became a moniker for the lazy, hapless Negro that needed to be controlled and protected by whites.

Either by law or by custom, segregation between the two races gradually extended to all aspects of daily life in the first decades of the 1900s, including sports and recreation. By the time of bunion derbies, this new order of enforced racial segregation was entrenched in the former states of the old Confederacy and in the border states of Oklahoma and Missouri.⁶

In 1928 Gardner had led the derby across the same bridge but heading east from Los Angeles to New York, the reverse of this year’s race.⁷ When Eddie raced across Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri in 1928, he had faced a barrage of death threats and harassment from whites that left both him and his black trainer, George Curtis, seething at the treatment they received and at the dismal conditions that his fellow African Americans had to endure there.⁸

In the relatively relaxed racial climate of Seattle, Eddie Gardner was celebrated for his prowess as a distance runner and made headlines in the sports pages of the city’s daily papers for his victories.⁹ Other African Americans had been competing for decades in elite university track programs at northern universities, and some went on to qualify for the US Olympic teams and won gold medals in sprints, the long jump, and cross-country. Others competed in the Boston Marathon and other marathon races without facing harassment in northern states.¹⁰

In Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, however, a black man with talent such as Eddie Gardner made him a target, for he represented a threat to this new social order. Eddie’s participation in the bunion derby set off alarm bells among its defenders. As the great civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his clarion call for resistance against Jim Crow in 1903, The Souls of Black Folk, a black man such as Eddie Gardner was a problem, an inferior being unworthy of the full rights and protections that white Americans took for granted.¹¹

This book, in part, documents Gardner’s struggle to assert his right to participate in an integrated sporting event in those three states, the price he had to pay to do so, and the example of courage he set for his fellow African Americans. Along the way, icons of the last century such as Booker T. Washington, Red Grange, Will Rogers, and Bill Bojangles Robinson intersected with Eddie’s journey along the dusty and mostly unpaved roads of America in the last two years of the 1920s.

The book also provides a history of the two bunion derbies, unique events in this history of sports that challenged the traditional understanding of what a human being was capable of enduring. When 199 men toed the line for the start of the first derby in Los Angeles, few observers thought any of the men would survive daily ultramarathon racing along a grueling thirty-four-hundred-mile course and that those runners who did risked early death by overstressing their hearts from the strain of such exertion.¹²

The bunioneers would run the length of US Highway Route 66, the mother road, from Los Angeles to Chicago and then on to the finish in New York City. In 1928 Route 66 was mostly an unpaved dirt road that crossed the Mojave Desert and ascended and descended the Rocky Mountains in Arizona and New Mexico. The route then took the men across the muddy Texas Panhandle, the rolling red-dirt hills of Oklahoma, and the ancient, eroded Ozark Mountains in Missouri before reaching the Mississippi River at St. Louis. From there the men would reach better hard-surfaced roads from Illinois to the race’s end at Madison Square Garden in New York City. There had never been anything like it before—they would be making the playbook for trans-America racing as they went.

The men who took up this challenge were not graduates of elite university track programs who raced as amateurs for loving cups and medals. They were mostly blue-collar men who saw a chance to grab a lifetime’s worth of salary by racing across America. They, both black and white, left families and jobs such as farmhand, factory worker, and shipyard worker, often to head-scratching naysayers of family members and friends to follow this dream of winning the bunion derby and its $25,000 prize. The survivors of the first race had a chance to repeat the process the next year, when Charley Pyle’s second and last derby left Columbus Circle in New York City for Los Angeles on March 31, 1929. The returning veterans of the first race had perfected the art of trans-America racing, and they turned the event from a test of survival into a true sport with a cadre of superstars pushing the limits of speed and endurance.

Two other extraordinary African American runners, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy from Los Angeles, Tobie Joseph Cotton Jr., and a thirty-three-year-old army veteran, Smiling Sammy Robinson from Atlantic City, joined him on his first derby in 1928. In addition, Gardner would compete against a cadre of remarkable white and Native American competitors, including Johnny Salo, the Finnish-born and down-on-his-luck shipyard worker from Passaic, New Jersey; Andy Payne, the part-Cherokee farm boy from Oklahoma whose father called his dream of entering the race not even good foolishness; the trilingual cockney Pete Gavuzzi, from England; and the England-born South African Arthur Newton, who looked more like a middle-aged banker than the greatest long-distance runner of his day.¹³

The bunion derbies took place in the waning years of the 1920s after a decade of profound social change and economic growth. After the carnage of the Great War, the nation had emerged relatively unscathed and turned away from the sorrows of the world to absorb a host of new technologies that transformed the country and brought its citizens closer together. From motion pictures, radio, and rural electrification to the airplane and the automobile, Americans were in the midst of unprecedented technological change.¹⁴ None of these technologies had a more transformative effect than the automobile. Starting with a few thousand cars in the early 1920s, American industry had mass-produced millions of affordable vehicles by the end of the decade that put the American middle class on wheels. The federal government rushed to develop an interstate highway system to give drivers someplace to go, which set off a boom in road construction and oil production and refining.¹⁵ During the decade, women abandoned their Victorian garb of the prewar years and adopted more form-fitting and freer-movement clothes. These flappers, as they came to be known, became voters at the start of the decade, and they were pushing the limits of what was considered acceptable female behavior in sports and society.¹⁶

By 1928 incomes had risen by 30 percent, and the stock market was hitting stratospheric levels.¹⁷ As Americans had more leisure time and income, the nation became obsessed with sports. From the King of Swat, Babe Ruth, to the Galloping Ghost, Red Grange, of collegiate and professional football fame, Americans followed their sports heroes in the newspapers that proliferated in towns and cities across America.¹⁸ The year before, Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic from New York to Paris, an event that rivaled Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon in 1969. Lindbergh’s achievement seemed to formalize American exceptionalism and a rock-solid confidence in the country’s future. Barriers seemed there to be broken. From flagpole sitting to marathon-dance contests, Americans became obsessed with breaking barriers.¹⁹

Charles C. Pyle, the wily director general of the bunion derbies, tried to capitalize on these trends when the first derby left Los Angeles for New York City on March 4, 1928. He did so with the support of the Route 66 Association, a group of businessmen in cities and towns along the newly designated US Highway Route 66 who were looking to advertise the fact that a new twenty-four-hundred-mile highway stretched from Los Angeles to Chicago.²⁰ Even though it was mostly a cobbled-together patchwork of former frontier trails, the association turned to Pyle to make it known to the world by holding his bunion derby. Charley Pyle was the king of ballyhoo, that oft-used word to describe sensational advertising. Nothing seemed out of his reach: from owning his own National Football League (NFL) team to establishing professional tennis in America, Charley seemed able to pull off the impossible.²¹

With promises of monetary contributions from the association’s members, Pyle set about organizing his great race.²² He received endorsement fees from companies marketing everything from oranges to coffee to foot powders.²³ He had a bus that ferried a cadre of syndicated sports reporters to ensure they filed daily reports about the race.²⁴ He had Red Grange as his second in command, a man who in his time had as much star appeal as LeBron James of modern-day basketball fame. Red was ready to sign everything from a scrap of paper to a football when the derby pulled into town. Pyle also brought along a traveling carnival with such freakish exhibits as an embalmed Oklahoma outlaw that the bunioneers nicknamed Oscar and a troupe of artistic female dancers who were banned from performing in some cities because of their allegedly dubious morals. Pyle was doing everything he could to make his footrace a moneymaking engine that would bring him and his backers a sterling return on their investment and pay for a traveling city carried by a fleet of twenty-five trucks and the $48,500 in prize money that he promised to pay at the end of the race in New York City.²⁵

There were, however, storm clouds on the horizon as Pyle began his derby parade: the stock market crash and the nation’s spiral into the Great Depression were about a year and a half away, but, fueled by Prohibition alcohol and dancing to the beat of American jazz, the party of economic expansion went on. In Harlem, a black enclave in New York City, W. E. B. Du Bois published the Crisis, the monthly magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). From its pages, he railed against the inequalities faced by blacks in American society and the brutal reign of segregation in the South.²⁶ C. C. Pyle’s integrated traveling road show was about to throw a spotlight on the dark underbelly of American society as he and his blue-collar bunioneers crisscrossed the country in 1928 and 1929. The bunioneers were off on their quest for the pot of gold at the end of the long transcontinental rainbow.

1

A Desperately Serious Affair

In the summer of 1927, race director Charles C. Pyle placed ads in newspapers around the country announcing that the First Annual International-Trans-Continental Foot Race would leave Los Angeles for New York City in March 1928. ¹

For those who thought they were tough enough to complete the thirty-four-hundred-mile course across America, a bevy of fabulous prizes waited at the end of the transcontinental rainbow at the finish in Madison Square Garden in New York City: $25,000 for first place, $10,000 for second, $5,000 for third, $2,500 for fourth, and $1,000 each for the fifth- through tenth-place finishers. Winning the first prize meant financial security for the recipient. This was enough money to pay off a mortgage, buy a new house, and make a better life for the winner’s family.²

To enter Pyle’s great race, all an entrant needed was $125: a $25 entry fee and $100 deposit that would be returned to the runner when he dropped out or completed the race—to ensure that a runner was not stranded in some isolated town if forced out of the contest. For the $125, Pyle promised to feed, house, and care for the participants as they raced across the country.³ He had purchased sleeping tents fitted out with iron bed frames, mattresses, sheets, and pillows, which would be disassembled and hauled to the next town along the course and reassembled by the time the runners finished the day’s race. He had a travel commissary, a hospital tent with doctors and nurses to care for their medical needs, a traveling shoe-repair truck, and a race patrol.⁴ Directed by Red Grange, the patrol was staffed with off-season professional players from Pyle’s football team, the New York Yankees. The men would drive up and down the course in high-powered cars to attend to the needs of the runners and to ensure that no one accepted a ride from a passing car. The derby even had a Maxwell House Coffee truck with a giant coffeepot bolted on the back that would provide water and coffee to the men along the course.⁵

Map 1. 1928 bunion derby route.

By the last week in February, 275 men had taken Pyle up on his offer and assembled at his training camp at Ascot Park, a venue for motorcar racing set among the rolling arid, dirt-brown hills just east of the city.⁶ The most respected man among them was Arthur Newton, a forty-four-year-old England-born South African who had more experience in ultramarathon racing than any of the other would-be bunioneers. This lanky, mild-mannered, pipe-smoking man was a groundbreaking force in distance running. He had shattered the course record in South Africa’s grueling fifty-five-mile Comrades Marathon by two and a half hours—finishing in six hours and fifty minutes—and went on to win the event six times during the 1920s.⁷ He had ignored the conventional wisdom that running beyond thirty miles a week strained the heart and often ran thirty or more miles a day when training for a race. He developed what he thought to be a perfect stride length for a long-distance runner—three feet, seven inches—and his own sports drink by mixing lemonade and salt. By 1927 he had set world records for the thirty-, thirty-five-, forty-, forty-five-, fifty-, and one-hundred-mile runs.⁸

1. Arthur Newton, England, 1928. (Rob Hadgraft, private collection.)

When Newton arrived in camp, he saw fifteen to twenty men walking or running around the track as, he wrote in his autobiography, Running in Three Continents, the fancy took them and learned that the rest were off training on the roads. After a little investigation, however, he discovered that most of the men were quite unaware of the magnitude of the task ahead of them. He wrote that he could count on the fingers of one hand the men who had run more than fifty miles in a single day. A few days later, he had a chance to address the assembled bunioneers. He warned them in the strongest terms possible that they would soon be engaged in a desperately serious affair and that only those runners with remarkable good luck and thorough preparation would have any chance of winning prize money or even completing the thirty-four-hundred-mile trek across America.⁹ Newton’s dire warning caused scores of men to reconsider their decision to enter the contest. By race day on March 4, only 199 men remained to toe the line for the start of Charley Pyle’s bunion derby.¹⁰

Derby physician John Baker had an equally bleak assessment of those men who remained. Baker, a Philadelphia physician, had agreed to serve as the race doctor to study the effects of sustained exercise on the human body. He was not optimistic about the prospects of any of his patients finishing the contest. He noted that just six had run more than twenty-five miles a day on a regular basis and that few had competed in long-distance running events. Baker added that he believed only forty of the starters seemed fit enough to withstand the stress of running daily ultramarathon races, while the rest suffered from a host of ailments, ranging from emphysema to orthopedic problems with their legs.¹¹

The trans-America route only added to the daunting odds against the bunioneers. There would be no honeymoon period for the men, with several weeks of relatively low-mileage daily races on flat terrain. The first fifteen days of the derby would be a brutal test of survival that would have challenged even the most fit modern-day ultramarathoner. The men would race on average thirty-seven miles a day. The first three days took the bunioneers over California’s coastal mountains, which they would crest at thirty-four hundred feet before descending to the western edge of the Mojave Desert, where superheated winds would blast the men as they headed east. Here the pavement ended as the men trekked eastward across the desert until the ninth day of the contest, when they would reach the town of Needles on the California side of the Colorado River.¹² Along the way, passing cars would kick up huge clouds of dust, coating the men with grit as desert mirages danced in the distance.¹³ Once the bunioneers crossed the Colorado River into Arizona, they would climb into the Rocky Mountains, a region still locked in late-winter conditions. There they would follow a dirt road crisscrossed by snowmelt streams as the course gradually took them higher and higher into oxygen-starved and freezing air. By the fifteenth day, the men would reach Flagstaff, at seven thousand feet, where the altitude limits oxygen consumption to about 80 percent of what it would be at sea level.¹⁴ This is what awaited the men for the first five hundred miles of the bunion derby, with twenty-nine hundred miles and two months of daily ultramarathons still to go.¹⁵

No one, not even Newton with all his training and experience, had faced such challenging conditions on a daily basis. This was a first-of-its-kind event, fifty years before the running boom of the 1980s introduced large numbers of Americans to the challenges of completing the marathon distance—about two-thirds of what the bunioneers covered each day. In 1928 there was no body of literature about hydration, necessary food intake, and race support. These bunioneers would be making up the rules of racing across America as they went. Most would run in primitive gear. Some raced in bulky tennis shoes, others in logger boots, and still others barefoot. They donned wool sweaters to ward off the cold and covered themselves with grease as protection against the desert sun, and some smoked cigarettes as they raced.¹⁶ Everything seemed stacked against them. To most observers it looked as if few if any of Pyle’s recruits would survive the first two weeks, let alone two and a half months of daily ultramarathon racing. Among the ranks of the starters were five African Americans. They, like their white competitors, had come to Los Angeles to race for Pyle’s prize money and grab their share of the American dream.

Nine months before the derby’s start, Eddie Gardner was at the height of his amateur career—a three-time champion of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s annual Washington State Ten-Mile Championship run on the streets of Seattle. The event had grown in stature with him. Since 1922, when Gardner first competed in the event, it had become a much-anticipated Seattle tradition, a kickoff to the city’s Independence Day celebrations. The chaotic scenes from the early years of runners dodging through uncontrolled traffic were gone. In 1927 the runners raced on blocked-off streets with a flying wedge of police motorcycles protecting the lead runners throughout the course.¹⁷

Gardner, who had put in six months of intense training for the 1927 race, ran through thousands of cheering fans along city streets until he emerged onto the cinder track at the University of Washington’s Husky Stadium. There a roar erupted from packed stands as this supremely trained athlete powered around the track in a final victory lap and broke the state record by five seconds to win his third state championship.¹⁸ His victory was celebrated with banner headlines in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer sports section: Gardner Sets Record to Win Marathon.¹⁹ The Post-Intelligencer did not insert colored runner or Negro into the headlines. Eddie, in spite of his race, was celebrated as the champion and simply that. He was Eddie the Sheik Gardner, Seattle’s long-distance running star and three-time state champion.

Throughout the 1920s, Gardner became a familiar sight to thousands of fans who watched him train on Seattle’s streets in his peculiar kind of outfit, a white towel tied around his head, a white sleeveless shirt, and white running shorts.²⁰

To many, he looked like the desert sheik made famous by the silent-screen idol Rudolph Valentino, whose 1921 film The Sheik and 1926 sequel, The Son of Sheik, had turned Valentino into America’s first movie sex idol.²¹ Eddie’s fans would call out, Oh, you Sheik, and the name stuck.²² Gardner’s dark skin, seemingly effortless running style, and trademark white outfit made him the most easily recognized runner in the city. At five foot five and about 145 pounds, with long, elegantly muscled arms and legs, he moved with a fluidity and grace that caught the eye of anyone who saw him run by. Track-wise observers knew that they were watching an athlete with exceptional skills and potential.²³

His wife, Mabel, did not hold a similar view of Eddie’s athletic success. Throughout his adult life, Gardner had had a difficult time forming relationships. His first marriage ended in divorce, and in 1925 he married Mabel, a widow with two young children. By day, Eddie worked for the local power company servicing steam engines, and in his free time he trained for the next race. To Mabel, all his medals and trophies, all his local adoration and fame, had done nothing to improve her life or her children’s. While he worked and trained, she sat in their small rented house tending to her young family.

2. Eddie the Sheik Gardner wearing his trademark outfit in Seattle, ca. 1926. (Seattle Post Intelligencer Collection, Museum of History and Industry.)

She wanted something tangible for her husband’s efforts, and she hoped she had found it when she read about the planned race in the local paper.²⁴ Eddie was clear about why he entered the derby: My wife pushed me into the contest. Mabel told him bluntly, "All you’ve gotten out of your