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Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:46:05 -0400
Starting Lines 55: The Career
RUNNING COMMENTARY 786[This is the final chapter of my memoir, titled Starting Lines. A second volume, named Reruns and picking up where SL leaves off, is well underway and will began appearing here later this year. Photo: The now-empty King home in Coin, Iowa, with "my" tree's trunk in the right foreground.]
DES MOINES, IOWA, March 1967. You never know when a new year begins just where it might take you before it ends. The path through those 12 months usually has little or nothing to do with your resolutions made in early January. In 1967 only my first marathon, at Boston, would go roughly as planned. And even it would hold surprises that I couldn't have imagined a few months earlier.
Fateful forces, as yet unknown to me, were at work in early 1967. I owe the working life I've been lucky enough to lead to the U.S. Army. It set me on the path I've followed ever since. My good fortune came because someone else wasn't so lucky.
Military service wasn't often voluntary in 1967. Two years earlier I'd lucked into a slot with the Army Reserve and avoided being drafted. I'd exchanged a long stretch of weekend warrioring for the freedom to live and work wherever I wanted. Another draft board was about to pick off a young editor and free up the job of my dreams.
Early that year I lived in Des Moines and worked for the city's newspaper. This was my first fulltime job in journalism, but I was looking for a way out of it. I'd been accepted into a grad-school program at Drake University that would lead to a teaching credential, which would qualify me to coach. Classes were due to start in the fall.
Meanwhile the lowly staffers like me answered the phones at the Des Moines Register. We heard from coaches and parents demanding more coverage for their kids, from readers complaining about our errors, from drunks begging us to rule on their bar bets. So when the phone rang one March night, I wondered which type of hell it would bring. It brought the opposite.
Dick Drake, the managing editor of Track & Field News, said, "My chief assistant, Craig, just got his draft call. I need someone here right away to replace him. Are you interested and available?" Without hearing, or asking, anything about pay or working conditions, I answered, "Yes, and yes!" I was back going back to dreamland.
The next morning I quit my first and last non-running job in journalism. The next week I packed up (with all I owned not even filling a Volkswagen Bug), waved good-bye to my sad-faced parents (who knew better than to believe me when I said, "I'll only be gone for a year or two"), and drove toward a career that would never feel quite like work.
(Dick Drake would never get to read how much he meant to my career. He would die of AIDS in 1988.)
UPDATE: FAMILY TREE
An old home is often more a memory than a building. The last time I visited my old hometown of Coin, Iowa, I no longer had anywhere to call home here. The place that had housed our family the longest -- the last one where I'd ever spent a night, eaten a meal, written a diary page, started and finished a run -- was about to fall.
This was the King house. My mother, along with all eight of her siblings, were born here. Mom was its final resident, before age and illness took her to Des Moines to live with her son Mike. Out of respect to Mom, a venerated figure in town, vandals had spared this house. (They hadn't treated so kindly Grandpa and Grandma Henderson's last home, taken by arsonists' matches after it went empty.)
Old age, emptiness and neglect finally made the King house risky to enter, as well as painful for me to see when I came to say good-bye to it. This house was now a hollow and crumbling shell. Long gone were the furnishings, including the dining-room table where Grandma King wrote her weekly family newsletters for almost 60 years and hosted meals for crowds of a dozen or more. Long gone were the voices of delight and despair, from five generations of this family.
A neighbor had now bought this property, with plans to remove the house so he could expand his yard and garden. The house, dating from the 19th century, would burn down quickly as a training exercise for the volunteer firefighters. They could destroy the place but never the memories housed here, or elsewhere around this town that no longer exists physically as I once knew it.
Everything I would become had started here in Coin. I was born to run and write, but never was told I should do either. The support from this family of runners and running fans, of writers and readers was mostly passive. No relative ever coached me or ran with me. None ever assigned me writing or edited anything I'd written. The Kings and Hendersons simply put me on this path of a lifetime and let me follow it my way, wherever it might take me.
Townspeople used to peek out their windows and wonder, "Why does that boy run all the time?" When I came back this time, they looked out and asked, "Why is that old guy still running?" No Henderson or King ever wondered why I started or when I would stop.
In smalltown Iowa of mid-last-century people labored with their hands. They worked the soil, worked with animals, worked on machinery. They couldn't see the sense of daydreaming on paper. Yet no one from my family ever asked, "When are you going to get a real job?"
What I've done has met the approval of the people whose views count the most to me, which is why I've keep doing it for so long. So subtle was the early support that I once thought this was all my doing. Only much later did I view the root system fully exposed.
In the 1950s, I planted a tree in the King yard. Grandma instructed me to protect the locust twig from destructive winds (and children) with stakes and ropes. The tree quickly outgrew its supports to thrive on its own, withstanding all threats of time. When I came to say good-bye to the two-story house, that tree now stood taller than the structure. The firefighters would take the house but spare the tree. It would remain as a living symbol of the people and the place that gave me the support to stand and the freedom to grow.
[The complete memoir appears in the "New Books" section of this website, http://joehenderson.com/startinglines.]