Walter Young
1937
 A
week before the Boston Marathon of 1937 Walter Young sat in a
barren Boston hotel room with his trainer, Pete Gavuzzi, and
came to a depressing conclusion. He had no choice but to
return home to Canada. The question was how. On the dresser
sat a sheaf of telegrams from members of the Castor Athletic
Club in Montreal, each promising money that had never come.
Young was broke and Gavuzzi was down to his last couple of
dollars. Their rooms in the Technology Chambers, a hotel for
men near Copley Square, rented for a dollar a night, four
dollars and fifty cents by the week, and neither could see any
way to stay. The hotel manager, T. D. Daley, had made clear
that credit was out of the question
In his hands Young
(a) held the one thing of
value remaining in his possession, a handsome Waltham watch
won two weeks earlier for running second in a twenty-mile race
at North Medford, Massachusetts. The race had given Young
considerable optimism. Although John Kelley of Arlington had
beaten him in the closing yards, Young had come away certain
that the same thing would not happen on Patriot's Day.
For reasons he could not quite
explain he felt he was destined to win the Boston Marathon.
Now it looked like he was about to be defeated by the absence
of a week's expense money. Gavuzzi's two dollars was pitifully
inadequate and neither of them knew any place in Boston to
turn for more.
Gavuzzi, a small wiry man five
years the senior of his twenty-four-year-old protégé, puffed
his ever-present pipe and suggested a bleak solution.
"Kid, you've got a watch," he
said. ''Pawn it and go home and see if you can get funds to
come back.''
''What will you do?'' Young
asked.
"Never mind me,'' Gavuzzi said,
''You get home." (56)
Young set off down Irvington
Street in search of a pawnbroker, thoroughly discouraged. All
through the long Quebec winter, with its cold and wind and
swirling snow, he had trained faithfully for Boston,
supplementing the rigors of hundred-mile training weeks with
punishing workouts on snowshoes. That January in Hull, Quebec,
he had set what was recognized as a world snowshoe record for
ten miles — one hour, six minutes and twenty-three seconds.
The record had pleased Gavuzzi as much as it did Young.
Gavuzzi was an unusual trainer.
He believed in lots of long gentle runs. ''Three hours slow is
better than two hours fast,'' he often said. The place to run
hard, he thought, was in a race. Gavuzzi also differed from
other trainers in that he ran with his athletes, loping
tirelessly alongside each mile they logged and showing no
apparent effect of his pipe. One day, in the month he and
Young had been in New England preparing for Boston, they took
a bus to the last stop west of the city, ran the remaining six
miles to Hopkinton, the marathon starting point, and then
turned and ran the full distance back to Boston, a total
workout of thirty-two miles. Young trusted Gavuzzi completely,
convinced that his guidance was sound despite the fact that
his methods were sometimes questioned by other trainers.
The one thing aside from money
that weighed on Young's mind as he prepared for Boston was the
plight of his wife, Muriel, and their three-year-old son,
Stanley. They were alone at home in the Montreal suburb of
Verdun, living on welfare. The Youngs depended on "the dole"
because Walter was unemployed, one of the countless victims of
the Depression. Except for odd jobs, Young had been out of
work for several years, and though it freed him to train at
will, he sometimes felt guilty about devoting his energies to
footracing — a pursuit that was looked upon as frivolous. Not
many thought he stood much of a chance of winning the Boston
Marathon, his wife included if the truth be told. He had run
Boston twice previously with little luck, finishing
thirty-third in 1934, when Dave Komonen of Sudbury, Ontario,
had won the race, and twenty-sixth in 1936. Only one person,
outside of Gavuzzi, thought Young might actually win in 1937.
After watching him run in the North Medtord race against
Kelley, the venerable Clarence DeMar ventured the opinion that
the Montreal runner could well lay claim to the laurel wreath.
DeMar's remark, quoted in a
Boston newspaper, had given Young a boost and it had also
nurtured another hope he had carried with him through the
winter. If he could win the Boston Marathon. Young thought,
someone might provide him with a full-time job.
That had been the dream, at
least until now as he tramped the streets of Boston, silently
cursing the Castor Athletic Club. The dream at this point
seemed as doomed as his chance of running in the marathon.
Finding a pawn shop, not far from the Boston Athletic
Association Clubhouse and marathon finishing line, Young
pulled the watch from his pocket and asked for ten dollars.
"That's impossible," the man at
the counter said. "We don't allow more than five dollars.''
Young's heart sank. Bus fare
back to Montreal was seven dollars. All he could do was tell
his story. The pawn broker listened as he related his tale of
woe.
"I'll do you a favor,'' the man
said finally. "I'll give you the seven bucks.''
There was one piece of luck.
Bus fare totaled only six dollars and forty-five cents. Young
was grateful for the few cents it left him in change. He
departed Boston, leaving Gavuzzi to hitchhike to New York
where he planned to stay with a friend, Harry Richman.
Home in Verdun, Young took his
case to Herve Ferland, the city mayor. Verdun had recently
established an athletic commission, an idea borrowed from
Montreal, and Young hoped it might help him out. What he did
not know was that Ferland would welcome him with open arms,
the mayor having landed in political hot water because funds
invested by the commission had produced few visible results.
The suspicion among Ferland's political opponents was that he
was using the commission to funnel public money into his own
pocket. Ferland looked upon Young as someone who might silence
the critics, especially if he did well in the marathon.
"We'll support you,'' Ferland
said.
The mayor gave the destitute
athlete fifty dollars and, wishing him every success, inquired
almost as an afterthought whether the city could do anything
else. Young thought of an application he had filed sometime
earlier with the Verdun police force.
"One of my goals, if I win the
marathon, is to find work,'' Young said.
"If you do win," said Ferland,
"you'll have a job on the police force."
Young walked out of Ferland's
office amazed, taking the good news home to Muriel and
notifying Gavuzzi by telegram that he was heading back to
Boston.
Walter Young was born March 14,
1913, to English-speaking parents in the Eastern Townships
hamlet of Lime Ridge, a place so tiny it disappeared from the
map when he was a small boy. He was raised on a farm in nearby
Greenlay and walked to school at Windsor Mills, a round trip
of six miles. His mother was an industrious woman who put
hearty meals on the table and his father was a Canadian
patriot who fought overseas during the First World War. Young
grew up milking cows, cutting hay, chopping wood and doing all
the other chores required of a farmer's son, developing into a
tall, strapping lad nearly six feet tall. At the end of grade
eight, the first year of high school in the Quebec of the 1
920s, Young struck out on his own, heading for Montreal.
"In those days it seemed to be
the only place that one could find work,'' he recalls.
Hired as a steel mill laborer,
Young spent a year checking pipe threads, attaching couplings
and doing whatever else his limited skills allowed, leaving
when a job as a carpenter's apprentice became available at a
wire works plant in St. Henri. Nearby on Church Avenue he
discovered a police gymnasium and became acquainted with a
group of boxers, soon joining them in the ring and trading
punches with the best of them. He boxed as a welterweight and
middleweight, classes with upper weight limits of one hundred
and forty-seven and one hundred and sixty pounds respectively.
In all he fought more than forty bouts, winning a majority of
them.
"I thought I was going to make
it as a professional boxer. I did turn pro and took part in
three professional bouts. That was enough. I won one. I lost,
and was knocked out, in the other two."
Part of Young's training as a
boxer was running, an activity he decided in the end he was
better suited for than the rigors of the ring. The miles on
the road that seemed such a burden to many boxers passed
easily, even pleasantly, for Young. In time he exchanged the
company of boxers and the big bag of the gymnasium for the
companionship of runners and the lure of the race. He lost his
job along the way, called home to look after the farm for a
period when his father fell ill.
When he returned to Montreal it
was to the reality of the Depression and temporary jobs like
the one he held for a couple of summers at Redpath sugar,
slinging hundred-pound bags about. It was during these
difficult years that Young met and married Muriel Smith of
Montreal. The couple found it difficult to cope financially
and problems became worse when their son, Stanley, was born.
Yet it was during this period that Young came into his own as
a runner, racing regularly and eventually coming under the
influence of Pete Gavuzzi.
"Walter had the tendency of
practically every youthful runner," said Gavuzzi. ''They all
want to use a long stride. In this way they throw away much of
their power to win. A short stride is what is needed, plus
condition." (57)
Young's first race was in
Windsor Mills. He ran a ten-mile relay race with a partner who
dropped out before the half-way mark. Not knowing what else to
do Young finished alone, taking third place. Under Gavuzzi's
guidance, years later, he also became an accomplished snowshoe
racer, once piling up a string of ten consecutive victories
including the ten-mile record in Hull. His stride was powerful
and striking.
"There was quite a trick to
it,'' he recalls. "You had to run leaning very much forward
and have the feet spread, bringing the snowshoes from behind
without stepping too far to the front. You had to get the
knack. Otherwise you'd get the damn things tangled up."
(b)
Snowshoes provided valuable
resistance training that Young believed was the key to many of
his victories on the spring roads. But Gavuzzi never allowed
him to neglect the long rambling runs. In the months leading
up to the Boston Marathon of 1937 they logged nearly seventeen
hundred miles together.
The first thing Young did back
in Boston was call on the pawnbroker and redeem his watch. The
man was happy at Young's change in fortune, as was the staff
at the Technology Chambers when he checked back into a room.
Young thought Gavuzzi might already be there, but there was no
sign, and he still had not arrived by the morning of the race.
Young wondered if something might have gone wrong. Gavuzzi
eventually turned up at the Lucky Manor in Hopkinton, a farm
given over to the BAA each Patriot's Day as a staging area for
marathoners and organizers.
The farm, which belonged to a
family named Tebeau, was overrun by close to two hundred
runners and half again as many reporters, trainers, automobile
chauffeurs and others drawn by the race. They milled about
chaotically, dressing and undressing, spilling liniment on the
furniture, reading newspapers, ignoring the bawled commands
for order from frazzled BAA personnel. Grandfather Tebeau,
manning a barricade on a staircase to preserve two rooms for
the family, surveyed the scene with his usual air of grim
acceptance.
Clarence DeMar was there, no
longer a threat to win but a lordly presence. Seven times a
champion, he was the author this year of his just-published
life story, Marathon. Also present were lesser lights like
Johnny ''Cigars'' Connors, conspicuous in pink-striped shorts,
green shirt and orange tam. His cigar, he was told, must be
extinguished before the start.
In deference to his sometimes
sensitive stomach, and in keeping with Gavuzzi's advice on
diet, Young had eaten his last meal five hours before the
race. It consisted of steak, salad and tea. He avoided bread,
potatoes and other starchy foods that Gavuzzi thought served
only to slow a runner down on the day of competition.
Normally, Young would have worn
the colors of the Castor Athletic Club but this day, with
Herve Ferland in mind, he put on a singlet with the word
"Verdun" emblazoned in large letters across the chest.
Cyclists were assigned to each runner, Young drawing an eager
young man from Revere named Humbert Cerafice. As the noon
start neared the runners vacated the farm for the starting
line.
Young shook hands with Johnny
Kelley, the 1935 champion, and Les Pawson, whose winning time
of 2:31:10 in 1933 still stood as the course record. Others in
the field included Dave Komonen of Sudbury, the 1934 winner,
and Gerard Cote, a fellow Quebecer from St. Hyacinthe. The sky
was clear at the gun with temperatures in the sixties.
From the outset Young followed
a simple strategy, trying to maintain a comfortable pace
without letting Kelley and Pawson, the favorites, slip beyond
reach. Within ten miles the pattern of the race was set.
Pawson dropped from contention and when Kelley forged to the
front Young went with him, an estimated half million
spectators watching along the route as each struggled mile
after mile to shake the other. Kelley was the crowd favorite
although some mistook Young for Jimmy Clements of Somerville,
Massachusetts, and applauded him with equal fervor, the result
of a racing number pinned to one side of his shorts. It looked
from one angle like 49, Clements' number, not the 149 assigned
to Young.
By one count Kelley and Young
exchanged the lead sixteen times before the race was decided
with only two miles to go. Much of the drama occurred in the
Newton Hills where Kelley broke briefly away when Young
stopped to grab a sugared drink from Gavuzzi who was waiting
at the roadside. It looked for a moment like the decisive
break but no sooner had Kelley pulled ahead than he stopped in
his tracks and doubled up like a jackknife, retching onto the
macadam road. He attempted to continue, then stopped and
vomited again, allowing Young to catch him and sweep past into
the lead. One minute the race had seemed to be Kelley's; now
it seemed to belong to Young. But Kelley demonstrated
otherwise. The crisis past, he regained his stride and began
to close the gap, throwing himself into a furious assault up
the last of the three hills.
First pulling even with Young
and then inching past, Kelley was cheered over the crest by
frenzied throngs. Descending the other side into Boston and
heading into the last long stretch he pulled twenty-five,
fifty, then a hundred yards ahead. But the effort had taken
its toll and the roar of all the crowds that shouted his name
was not enough to carry him on to victory. In front of the
Brandon Hall Hotel, overcome by exhaustion, he slowed to a
walk. Young caught and swept by him for the final time,
unchallenged from there to the finish line on Exeter Street.
The first thing the masses at
the BAA Clubhouse should have seen was Young arriving in
triumph. Instead, two runners rounded the corner together from
Commonwealth Avenue, clipping along at what appeared record
pace. Crowds screamed, then groaned as they passed,
identifying them as intruders, from advertising slogans they
wore on their backs. Boston policemen hustled them off the
course. (58)
Young, a distinctive runner
whose long torso looked out of proportion to his legs, ran
through an unbroken corridor of applause to the finish line,
the dye running in streaks down his shirt from the sweat of
the race. His winning time was 2:33:20. Kelley arrived wanly
almost six minutes later at 2:39:09 4/5, his ability to hold
second a tribute to the lead he and Young had built up on the
rest of the field. Pawson ran third in 2:41:46 and in seventh
place, wearing the Castor Athletic Club uniform that Young had
discarded, was Gerard Cote, timed in 2:46:46. Dave Komonen, a
shadow of the runner he was in triumph three years earlier,
finished twenty-first in 3:02:35 4/5.
Young accepted congratulations
in the BAA Clubhouse, flashbulbs popping as he sat with the
green laurel wreath on his head. Clarence DeMar, fourteenth in
2:52:00 at age forty-eight, was among those who shook Young's
hand, telling the new champion he would send him a copy of his
autobiography.
Young might not learn any new
tricks, DeMar said, but the book would provide another
runner's point of view. Young reminded DeMar of the prediction
he had made following the North Medford race and DeMar
confessed to trying during the race to prove his words wrong.
"I was all right through the
first half but I couldn't keep it up,'' he said. ''I thought I
could but I couldn't. You make mistakes, even at my age."
(59)
Kelley spent half an hour in a
side room, buckled in agony, before he was able to
congratulate Young and speak with reporters. "It was that bad
mile again," he said. I've never been so sick in a race, and I
thought this was going to be my day."
(60)
Gavuzzi was so overjoyed he
could scarcely contain himself, Cote's seventh-place finish
only adding to his pleasure. Gavuzzi had helped train Cote as
well as Young, the three of them sometimes running together.
Young reacted to the fuss with
his usual unexcitable manner, giving more credit to Gavuzzi
and his cyclist than he took himself. He had particular praise
for Kelley, lauding the spirit of the Massachusetts runner and
his generosity and sportsmanship for sharing water on the
course when Young had needed it. Young dropped ten pounds in
the course of the marathon, his weight registering a mere one
hundred and thirty-five pounds when checked by BAA doctors.
"I felt all along that 1937 was
going to be my lucky year," Young said. ''We went over the BAA
course every day for a week, and if we did not run the whole
course we would run the hills anyway. We got to know the
course like a book, especially the hills."
(61)
Young and Gavuzzi were removed
from their spartan quarters at the Technology Chambers, in
honor of the victory, and placed in the Hotel Kenmore where
telegrams began to arrive, the first coming from a relieved
Herve Ferland. "Heartiest congratulations on your magnificent
triumph," the mayor cabled. "The entire city of Verdun pays
you tribute."
When Young ordered breakfast
the following morning, a big meal of bacon and eggs, an
inordinate number of waiters flocked to his room, lingering
after the meal was presented. Young realized that winning the
marathon had made him a celebrity. The waiters wanted to get a
good look at him. Being champion of the Boston Marathon was
satisfying, Young thought, but he knew the real prize waited
in Verdun.
His train back to Montreal was
met at St. Alban's, Vermont, by a delegation from Montreal
that included W.W. Shipley, the president of the Canadian
National Recreation Club. Shipley gave Young honorary
membership in the club and invited him to preside at the club
field day at Lachine in July. Also boarding was Mrs. Young,
holding young Stanley by the hand. She apologized for ever
doubting Young's chances and they rode the last happy leg of
the journey to Bonaventure Station.
A noisy reception awaited when
Young disembarked, one of the first stepping forward to
congratulate him being Edouard Fabre, the Boston Marathon
champion of 1915. (c) A
parade wound its way to Verdun where a large banner hung
across main street welcoming Young home. He was taken to a
studio and asked to tell his story on radio. Mayor Ferland
called him the pride of the Verdun athletic commission and
handed him the keys to a hotel suite.
"Relax with your family,'' he
said. ''Stay as long as you want.''
Young stayed a single night,
then went to Ferland's office the next day to remind him of
the promise that victory would mean a job. Ferland kept his
word. Young became a police constable, the first ever to join
the Verdun force without a medical examination. His salary was
twenty-six dollars and fifty cents a week.
Young remained with the force
four years, then joined the Verdun fire department, which
allowed more flexibility for training and traveling. But the
flexibility was something Young never used. When he retired in
1978, after thirty-seven years as a fireman, he had never
missed a day of work.
Young never again equaled his
triumphs of 1937, a year in which he logged almost five
thousand miles training and racing, and recorded a string of
victories. Six weeks after Boston that year he went back to
Massachusetts for the Salisbury Beach Marathon, run May 31 in
wilting Memorial Day heat. Young won in 2:50:52, the legendary
Clarence DeMar placing second in 2:55:35.
Young bypassed Boston in 1938,
leaving his title undefended, to represent Canada at the
British Empire Games in Australia. The top, with boat stops in
Hawaii, Fiji and New Zealand, was one of the most memorable of
his life but he ran poorly, finishing seventh in 2:59:05.
Young's last big race was in
1939, again in Boston, where he ran third in 2:32:41 1/5 on a
cold, wet Patriot's Day, leading a Canadian team composed of
himself, Gerard Cote and Lloyd Evans of Montreal to the team
championship. Cote ran eighth, Evans fifteenth.
Young ran competitively until
1947, entering an estimated one hundred and fifty races and
winning about a third of them. When he put racing behind he
continued to run for health and fitness, often covering the
four miles morning and night between his home and the Verdun
fire station. He ran regularly until age fifty-eight.
"It made me feel good. It gave
me what we'd refer to now as a high, the high you're supposed
to get with marijuana or some dope. Many times my feet hardly
touched the ground. I felt that proud and that light. That was
a high, wasn't it?''
Young, who lives in retirement
in LaSalle, a Montreal suburb bordering on Verdun, believes
his athletic success was based on a sound lifestyle.
"Our foods of that day were
better than today. l don't think we had any pizza parlors then
and there weren't french fries on every corner and that sort
of thing. It was home-cooked food. These things, I do believe,
made quite a difference. And you'd go to bed at night. No one
else was up at eleven o'clock at night so I'd go to bed too."
Young estimates that he has
consumed perhaps ten glasses of beer in his life.
"It tastes so terrible, beer.
Each glass will be two years apart. At New Year's I might have
a hard drink, and I'll hope it will be a small one. That's
enough for another year.''
Young's weight has climbed
upward from his days as a champion runner. It held at about
one hundred and eighty pounds while he continued to run for
fitness, increasing to about two hundred when he stopped. He
was a smoker for about ten years, picking up the habit while
hunting with a friend in the 1960s, but he stopped as suddenly
as he started, simply throwing his cigarettes out one day.
Young became an expert marksman
during the years he spent as a member of the Canadian National
Recreation Club, winning the Canadian open title in 1964 for
accuracy with a .22 rifle from a hundred yards. Today he is an
avid bowler, competing in six suburban Montreal leagues. His
home is a showcase of his life as an athlete and sportsman. A
large basement cabinet is filled with trophies and the laurel
wreath he won at Boston is preserved under a sheet of glass.
So is a second wreath, made of foliage from the Plain of
Marathon in Greece, and presented as a separate memento in
1937 at Boston.
Plaques line the walls of
Young's home. Mrs. Young, a practical woman, has removed the
brass figure of a runner from atop her husband's old Salisbury
Beach trophy and filled the base with flowers. It sits in
their living room.
Most people acquainted with the
retired Walter Young either don't know or have forgotten that
he once reigned as champion of the Boston Marathon. A modest
man, he rarely mentions his days in the spotlight. Nor does he
complain that his chapter of Boston history has been reduced
to relative obscurity by Gerard Cote, four times the victor at
Boston in the 1940s. But occasionally the telephone rings and
he is invited to attend a road race as guest of honor, usually
to fire the starting gun or present trophies afterward. It was
on one such occasion in the late 1970s that it struck him how
much things had changed. The race was a full-length marathon
and the field was sprinkled with women.
"I never could have believed
that a lady would ever run a marathon, just would have refused
to believe it. Yet there I was watching them.''
What surprised him most was
that the best of them were close to being as fast as he had
been in his prime.
Footnotes
(a) Portions or this
chapter are based on an interview with Walter Young at his
LaSalle, Quebec, home on Janualy 19, 1982.
(b) Regulation snowshoes
were a minimum of ten inches wide, twenty-eight inches long
and three pounds, ten ounces in weight.
(c) Fabre was felled days
later by a crippling stoke. Young visited Fabre at hospital
and helped in a cave to raise funds for the Fabre family. |
