All american sports, and it seems to me, it may not be a good correlation, but a lot of questions they asked about gay athletes were essentially the same questions they used to ask about us. Absolutely. Black athletes. Absolutely. You know . [ applause ] isnt it a simple situation . We have laws in this country and we try to abide by laws. We have different denominations. We have different races. Gender. If youre a law abiding citizen and trying to do the right thing, then how can anyone else judge you . I mean, i think its that simple. You know, i dont cant get into the religious aspect of it to the sexual aspect of it. I look for the as you said earlier, the character of the person, and thats good enough for me, because ive got my own things ive got to deal with. Yeah. I dont have an answer for everything. We are getting pretty close to the end here, and typically at this time, you know, is when the moderator will ask how do you want to be remembered and one thing or another, but i i have researched that and i looked at 31 people who said how they wanted to be remembered and then when i actually read the followup, not one of them was remembered the way they said they wanted to be remembered, so we wont waste our time with that bit of morbid wishful thinking, but i do have i do have i do have a couple of last questions for you. Weve gotten pretty serious here. I think that this wonderful audience deserves a little chocolate shake with their broccoli so let me ask first, bill, you, a question ive been wanting to ask you for the last 45 years, just between you and me, and, i mean, 11 nba championships in 13 seasons. I mean, i looked at this thing where lebron james came out and said when he put his mt. Rushmore players up he left you off, and i didnt have any problem with that because its really not mt. Rushmore, its Mount Russell and the faces he hangs on it, who cares. I mean, he can put anybody he wants to up there, but i do have a question. 11 championships in 13 years. Its 13 seasons. Its mind boggling. The question ive had for you for the last 45 years is what happened with them other two . Well all right. My team were in the times 12 times and one year i had a severely sprained ankle and i wasnt able to play and we lost. Okay. But i very rarely bring that up. Ill tell you why. Thats a team game and my team lost, and of course you can go to the other side and say, my team won. So i give them credit for beating us. Okay. So them last two you just lost . Yes. Okay. All right. Let me let me its hard to talk about yourself, but i can talk about you. You know, 11 championships were preceded by two college championships, two of them. The common denominator in a team sport was you. Team sport means that you are a team, everyone having a responsibility, and you win together. Not Michael Jordan being acrobatic or any other, lebron james being a freak of nature, but, bill, your contribution made the difference. To the success of the team. It is your contribution. We dont have to deal whether youre the greatest thats ever been and all of that, we know youre the greatest contributor. Yes. And the objective of a team is to win championships. There should be a picture of bill russell next to the word winning, winner in the dictionary. There you go. There you go. Absolutely. Thats my man. Let me let me in the two minutes theres never been a greater contributor in any sport. In the two minutes ive got left. Ive got a question from thats a friend of mine. I know. I know. I know. What bill is essentially telling you, jim, you dont have to pay him that money you owe him. Let me let me i have a question here. Jim, you are an actor. You produced a number of very successful musical groups. Of course, you understand the politics of of the Entertainment Industry and how much mileage you can get out of the form of football and that. I have a question for you because i really value your judgment on that. President barack obama leading up to his First Campaign went famously went to the university of North Carolina and played basketball. They had it all over the tv with the team, championship basketball team. He leading up to his second election he famously channelled al greens, im so in love with you. It became the number one phone ringer across the country after that. I have a question for you. Do you think he would have projected the same cache, charisma, and cool, say, if he had been into bowling and had and had and had channelled glenn campbells the wichita lineman . Just as a guy who understands the entertainment part of this thing. Im speechless. [ laughter ] i think everybody else would have been, too, if he had sat up there and sang the wichita lineman. I dont know how to answer that. I wont answer that, and i almost dont know what youre talking about. We are down to the last 15 seconds so i want to Say Something to you. Please. Im sitting between on the left hand my best friend and a guy that ive known 50 years. Ive got a bit here. But i started with such an honor to me to be invited because all ive ever tried to do in my adult life is make my father proud of me, and we were my father died a few years ago, but on the eve of 75n m[ . n he s, you know, i love you. That was the first time he had ever said that. And he says, and im proud of you. And that was the first time he ever said that. He said, im proud that youre my son and im proud just as proud that im your father. And that was my hero. You know, ill tell you a quick story. Weve got zeroes on the clock. Youve got to be quick. I got my first hundred thousand dollar contract and i called my father and said, you dont have to work anymore. I make enough for both of us. And his reaction was, i dont want your damn money. I got my own money. And hes working the projects. And i said, thats a terrible job. Why wont you give it up. He says, listen. Ive given these people 35 of the best years of my life, now im going to give them a few of the bad ones. [ laughter ] it has been it has been a tremendous honor for me to share this stage with two of the greatest men, i wont say basketball player, football player, those are things that you just happen to be the best in the world at doing, but two of the greatest men, two of the greatest citizens of this country that ive ever had the pleasure of a being associated with. Let me [ applause ] thank you. Thank you very much. American history tv normally airs on the weekends but with congress on recess, were featuring highlights. Coming up, looking at the history of competitive walking and its popularity in the late 19th century. Then the kansas monarchs of the negro leagues and their impact on professional baseball. Lbjs discussion on racism in sports. Tonight American History tv explores the Overland Campaign. A series of major battles that took place in virginia in 1864 between union forces under ulysses s. Grant and robert e. Lee. Watch this marking the beginning and the conclusion of the Overland Campaign as well as the battle of cold harbor, thats all tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern here on cspan 3. Next on American History tv, author Matthew Algeo talks about pedestri pedestrianism. During the 1870s and 1880s competitive walking became the most competitive sport in many major eastern cities including new york and philadelphia. Mr. Algeo talks about how the sport came to be, some of its most famous athletes. The New York Public Library hosted this hourlong event. Its a pleasure an an honor to be here at the New York Public Library, and i thank them for the invitation. Also nice to have cspan here who will be recording the event. As christine mentioned, i live in mongolia. Is there anybody else here from mongolia tonight . Do we have yeah, a couple. So i wrote moist of this book while i was living in mongolia. By way of background, give you a little background about myself and kind of how this book came about. I went to college in philadelphia. Im originally from philadelphia. And i went to university of pennsylvania and majored in english for a semester. I found out i didnt really like to read fiction. Ive always preferred nonfiction so since i didnt like to read it, i wouldnt read it, and i got a d in freshman english and decided, well, maybe thats a sign i should try another field. And so i switched my major to folklore. Any other folklore majors here today . Folklore actually was a great training for writing books. It really involves research and interviewing and paying attention basically. But when i graduated in 1988, it may surprise you, but back then there werent nearly as many folklore jobs as there are today and so i ended up going out to seattle, just moved to seattle, and thats where i kind of drifted into public radio. Back then it was more like a Welfare Program for people with folklore degrees. And it was very helpful as well in teaching me how to write and how to research and how to write clearly and concisely. And so i bounced around a bunch of different public radio stations. I worked in minnesota. Worked in st. Louis. Met my wife there. We were married and we moved to maine. In 2003 i moved to los angeles and worked for marketplace. Coincidentally 2003 is when allyson took the Foreign Service exam to become a Foreign Service officer and passed. She was put on a hiring list. It was almost two years that we were in los angeles when allyson got an email one morning saying, if youd like to join the Foreign Service you need to move to washington in two weeks. We had a deat the time. I had a good job at marketplace. Allyson was still looking for work so if we took the job, she would have a job and then i wouldnt. And this department bother me in the least. We took a vote, and it was one to one, about whether or not i should quit my job. Eventually though she came around and it enabled me to start writing these books. I tend to write books about very obscure events in history. Somebody recently told me, you wrote the definitive book on pedestrianism. And i thought, you know, i guess thats my niche, is i write the definitive books about things that probably dont need to have definitive books written about them, but its been a lot of n fun. Its been extremely nonlucrative and it has given me something to do as we travel about. Usually im able to do the research in washington. Were based in washington between our foreign assignments and so i can, you know, get all the Research Done at library of congress and elsewhere, and then when we get to post i can concentrate on writing the books. Its a very portable nonlucrative profession at least, and the first book, the first book i actually wrote in west africa. The first book i wrote was a book called last Team Standing and it was about the 1943 merger. They were so short of players that because so many had gone off to war that they had to merge the steelers and the eagles and they became the steagles in 1943. They were sort of a misfit b bunch. One was blind in one eye, yet against all odds they had a successful season. You can buy the book, its in paper back. And it was while i was researching the steegles book that theyre back to spectator sports in the United States. I was always interested in that. Sports are kind of a cultural its like a its like the sports Industrial Complex today. Multibillion dollar business. Cities build hundred, 200, 300 million stadiums often funded by taxpayers just to keep these teams in town, and i knew it hadnt always been like that and i was kier yous how it got to be that. That was when i learned about the strange sport called pedestrianism. It was popular in the United States in the 1870s and 1880s. And it really began in 1860. There was a guy named Edward Weston. He was a doortodoor book salesman in boston. He made a bet with a friend in the autumn of 1860 on the outcome of that years president ial election. Weston voted that lincoln would loose. Spoiler alert. Lincoln wins. To fulfill the terms of the bet, they had to walk from boston to washington in ten days and arrive in time to see the inauguration. This was an arduous undertaking in 1861. Im sure its no walk in the park today, either. I wouldnt recommend taking the interstate, but he walked from boston, set out on february 21st. Of course, the roads were terrible, it was the mid 8 of the center. In some places you barely had more than a dirt palt to tell you where to go. There were no reliable maps to speak of. But this attempt to walk from boston to washington really captured the publics imagination. It fascinated people. In 1860, 1861, not good news in the papers. Some states are seceding, civil war is immy nept. His walk was a feel good, huge crowds would turn out in new york, trenton, philadelphia. Just to watch him turn out. People would wait hours in the cold to wait to see weston on the horizon to see him turn out. He had made an agreement with the soda company to hand out the flyer along the way. He got them to sponsor his trip. He would hand out the flyers and make go on his 34er ri way. The unfortunate end to the story is he didnt make it on time. He was four hours late. Nonetheless, he finagled an invitation to one of lincolns areas. The civil war intervened and it wasnt until 1867 that weston attempted another walk and this time it was a walk from portland, maine, to chicago. He made a 10,000 wager that he could walk from portland to chicago in less than 30 days. Again, this was considered practically impossible at the time. He succeeded. He won the bet. Again, along the way huge crowds in buffalo, eerie, cleveland. When he got to chicago an estimated 25 of the population was waiting to meet him. Another celebrity athlete. Weston the walker. The name weston became synonymous with walking. He was a clever guy, then take it indoors. In the early 870s. It was a fad really. 0s. It was a fad reall80s. It was a fad really. Towns began to build roller rinks. Places you could skate. Weston would stage walking exhibitions inside these roller rinks. Walking against time. He would attempt to walk 100 miles in 24 hours and hed pull into a town and hire a band and do these walks. And thousands of people would come and pay ten cents apiece just to watch weston walk in circles on the floor of these roller rinks. Sometimes the lap was so small it was 50 laps to a mile, but he just walked continuously. He hadwy amazing endurance and alsokx[rx . n h very little sleep. These proved lucrative. Competitors popped up. The most famous was an irishr immigrant, daniel oleary. He had been a doortodoor salesman until the great fire in 1871 in chicago. That really reduced the demand for edged ends of the bible or dictionaries. This is hard to sell books. This is quite a reputation of what weston was doing. Oleary rented a rink in chicago and walked 100 miles in 23 hours. And then weston walked 100 miles in 22 hours. Soon it became apparent that these were the two leading pedestrians and it was time for a showdown. I call them the ali and frazier of their age. Weston was the ali. Hed like to perform wearing velvet shorts. He intwo i 2i68ly understood. He was there to enter tan the crowd. Oleary would have none of that. He wore traditional tight cotton pants and a cotton shirt and just liked down at the track. He was kind of the joe frazier in the comparison. But in november of 1875 it was finally decided that we need to have a competition to determine the worlds champion pedestrian. Never mind that it was between two americans but we still call it the world series. Thats never stopped us from deciding that we had the world champion. It took place in chicago. Interesting venue. The chicago exposition building, and it was erected right after the great fire. And it was the largest public venue in the United States at the time. The ground covered five football fields inside the expo. Since it was so big it was decided this was the logical place to hold this great walking match. And the rules were pretty simple. Six days was as long as any athletic contest could take because at the time there were blue laws that prohibited public amusements on the sabbath. You couldnt walk competitively on sunday. I dont know whether this was a good thing or not, but thats the way it was. The races would begin right after midnight sunday night monday morning and then they would continue pretty much nonstop right up to midnight the next saturday night. Sometimes they began a little late. 144 hours. Generally it was six full days. In this match in 1875 between oleary and weston, oleary won. Weston, who had been the most famous pedestrian in america up to that point was not gracious in defeat. He complained that oleary had a Home Field Advantage because the race took place in chicago which is where oleary had come from. He said somebody threatened to shoot him. None of these reports never panned out. He was chagrinned and decided to take his act to london where he staged the walks against time. They were fascinated by weston the walker and watch him walk for hours or days at a time. Ee eventually this format of the sixday race was formalized. There would be large competitions staged between all comers. The entry fee was 10. Later it was raised to 100. You would have 15, 20 competitors taking part in a sixday race and, again, the same moves, sunday night, monday morning they would take off. Its 1 7 of a mile or 1 8 of a mile. A team of judges would keep track of the results. One part of the foot had to be on the ground at all times. This was walking. Some of the most famous matches took place very close by here, first Madison Square garden, 23rd and 5th maybe. This was built by p. T. Barn number in 1874. Barn number when he built it named it in his typical low keyway, the grand roman hipadrome. It was neither grand nor roman, pa dome. There were 10,000 seats and sometimes barnum would cover it with one of the big tops from his circus. I thought 1876 it was covered. It was 1877 i believe that one of the vanderbilts that owned the property took it over and he decided to name it after the nearby park, Madison Square, and hence we have Madison Square garden. This is the first Madison Square garden. The one open now is the fourth. They keep calling it Madison Square garden even though it keeps moving farther and farther away. The races in Madison Square garden were the most pop pew layer sixday races. Really 1879, 1880, 1881 Madison Square garden seated about 10,000 people, and it sold out every night. And since the races were continuous, people would set down. Its possible they might have had them come through the turn styles. People were constantly coming and going. That was one of the appeals of the sport, actually. It was continuous. You had millions of people moving into the cities. Industrialization, migration of people from the countryside, immigrants, especially irish and german immigrants all pouring into the city, especially new york, but there wasnt much for them to do. There was an entertainment deficit in the 1870s and the 1880s if you can imagine that. I would say we probably have an entertainment surplus now, but back then there was an entertainment surplus. Most was life, a musical play. An average person would be lucky to make 1 a day, maybe 50 cents was lucky. There wasnt a lot for the working people to do. A ticket to the great walking matches might cost 10 cents or a quart tir. Not only that, because it was continuous, if you worked a shift and got off at 7 00 beers and watch it for a couple of hours. There was no restriction. In fact, if you wanted to you could buy a ticket on monday and stay all six days. And a sandwich costs 10 cents. So basically for a dollar you would have a warm place to stay all week and at least one sentence a day. They also sold beer. Walking match, everybody says it must have been so boring. Must have been so boring just watching people walk in circles for days at a time. The only thing i can think that would be more boring would be listening to somebody talk about people walking in circles for days at a time, but i will not talk for six days, i do assure you that. But these events look, we have had some really boring super bowls. I think we can all agree on that. Weve had some really boring super bowls, but everybody watches. You dont always watch for the footballs, you watch for the halftime show. Something unusual will happen, that sort of thing. Pedestrianism really pioneered this. There were brass bands at each end of the arena that were playing songs. There were 1re7bdors selling everything to that, raw oysters. Wouldnt recommend buying that apart from just walking the guys walk. For working people especially, it was a rare opportunity to take part in something that was this spectacular and that was this famous that was on the front page of every newspaper the next day. There were other things to do at the walking match. I went to a phillies game. It occurred to me that the new baseball stadiums are really designed to give you something to do besides watching a baseball game, you know . They have ar kads for the kids, restaurants, bars. Its basically theyve admitted, its a boring sport. Well give you something to do. That was a little bit case with pedestrianism. From the upper class. You might see celebrities at a great walking match. Chester arthur, hiej fun. Stop me if you recognize any of these names. Tom thumb was a big pedestrianism. I guess was fairly easy to spot in the crowd. I dont know how. Word would get around that tom thumb was in the arena. There was a great riot in 1880, 1881 where they over sold tickets to the match and people were still gathered outside trying to get in at midnight sunday night and they heard the roar of the crowd inside and they began storming Madison Square garden. You can deduce from that he had to beat back these people who are trying to invade the garden. It turned into a rye off the since the civil war draft. The pedestrians themselves became the first celebrity athletes in the United States. Their pictures appeared on the early trading cards. Daniel olerie, the irish immigrant from chicago, was the spokesman of a brand of salt. Dont know what the connection was but apparently he liked that salt. There were corporate sponsorships. I noticed that weston would sell adds. Many people compete with the logo of the newspaper emblazoned across the front of their shirt. An early example of advertising on an athletic uniform, a tradition that i have to say so far Major League Baseball to its credit has resisted though for how long i dont know. It also had struck a chord with people not just because there wasnt anything else to do, though that was a big part of the appeal. There was so little entertainment, but the idea of walking to the average american in the 1870s and 1880s is very different than today. Everybody walked. The average horse was expensive. There was no public transportation, especially in new york and philadelphia. But by and large people walked, and they had always people had had to walk long distances in the middle of the night to fetch a doctor or maybe on a snowy sunday morning to get to church, and so i think people really related to the competitors, to the pedestrians. There was a kind of empathy. They were doing this ordinary activity in a very extraordinary way. And also they were admired for their endurance. In a typical race pedestrian might be on the track walking for 21 out of 24 hours. They would sleep about three hours usually in 15 to 30minute increments. There would be small tents placed inside the track and there would be a could the t in and thats where they would rest. A lot of them had trainers. They would throw cold water on them or even beat them with sticks to try to get them up and back on the track. A lot of times the trainers were financed by gamblers who wanted gqrn that their guy stayed on the track. And so it really was an exercise in sleep deprivation as much as athletics. I have a theory that i go into in the book in glorious and amusing details about how sleep patterns affect all of us. Most of us are monophasic sleepers. We just sleep once a day, you know, 6 to 8 hours. Some of us are biphasic. Margaret thatcher says, i only slept four hours a day, but, yeah, you took a twohour nap every afternoon. Some of you who are asleep right now are biphasic sleepers. The pedestrians were mostly poly phasic sleep injuries. Th sleepers. You can train yourself to sleep 45 minute inkrempts. If youre able to fall in rem sleep quickly youre as rested as if you slept six to eight hours a night. If it was a physiological quirk that some of these guys had, that they were able to function on very little sleep. Every time you went to you laid down to take a nap everybody else on the track was making more laps and either catching up with you or extending their lead, so you didnt want to sleep very much when you were in a sixday race, so there were all kinds of strategies. It was interesting. By the fifth or sixth day thats when the attendants got excited. The competitors were bedrag ld, they didnt have the diet generally consisted of mutt ton, which ive had a lot of in mongolia now that i think about it, and also like raw beef steak. One guys favorite was greasy eel broth. I asked allyson if she would try to make this and she said, no. And also they thought champaign was a stimulant that would help them so they were drunk and dehydrated suffering from sleep deprivation. You get tunnel vision, actually, apparently when you dont have enough sleep and so later in the race they would take a chalk, chalk dust and mark a line along the middle of the track so that everybody can look at that line, stay on that line, dont go anywhere else. And often competitors would collapse. Their bodies could not endure what they were asking their bodies to do. At the end of a race often and dan oleary was one, he would be so utterly exhausted he was unable to walk. They would carry him back to his hotel. Weston, on the other hand, when he ended a race he usually was in pretty good shape. In fact, the races would end saturday night and he usually went to church the next morning so it affected different racers in different ways. The sport also opened doors for women and africanamericans in ways that had never been done before. Africanamericans could compete with the white competitors. It was academic. Whoever walked the farthest was the winner. The rules were simple. If you were able to do it, you were given a chance to do it. Frank hart was a very famous black pedestrian, for a time he was the most famous black athlete in the United States. Women raced, too. There were six day womens races. The women, they had a special problem because the victorian gilded Age Convention of the time demanded that they wear a full length skirts or dresses usually of kind of a heavy velvet. You know, god forbid we see their shapely calves seems to be the reason for that. And so while they did race, the womens races were quite popular as well, they were at a disadvantage, lets just put it that way. In 1880 it looked like the history of pedestrian that pedestrianism would last forever. It really was de facto americas pastime but several things happened that led to its demise. One, there were gambling scandals. As it became more popular in the public, pedestrianism became popular with the betters. Who would finish last. So many different ways. And so some of the lesser pedestrians would collude with gamblers and fix races. Agree to be the first one to drop out, bookie takes the bets on it and then splits the winnings with the pedestrian. This began to erode public confidence. There were also drug scandals, performance enhancing drugs. Its so good that we eradicated that from modern sports but in 1876, Edward Weston, the famous pedestrian, was actually caught chewing coco leaves while he was walking on the track, a still mu lanlt to apparently keep him awake. He said he only did it on his doctors orders, which is a pretty standard excuse these days. I didnt know what i was taking basically was his excuse. But the biggest downfall, two things really contributed to the downfall of pedestrianism and one was in 1885 there was an english man named john starlly. He invented a machine he called the rover which is the modern safety bicycle. Before that bicycles were the Penny Farthing with the ginormous front wheel and tiny little back wheel. They werent very nimble. Hard to operate. Not very fast. The safety bicycle which is the one we have today with the two same size wheels and the chain drive shaft. Well, these were fast and these were nimble and they were a lot more fun to watch race for six days than people walking. And it was almost instantaneous that bicycle racing replaced people walking as the most popular racing. The bicycles at the end of six days when they were all out of it, they would be crashing into each other. This was very spectacular. A lot of fun. Nobody goes to races to see crashes anymore either so a lot of this a lot of these innovations were really kind of pioneered what we have in modern sports. Corporate sponsorship, spokespeople. The monetization. It was monetized instantly as soon as people saw there was some interest in it, promoters jumped in, owners of the venues jumped in and really turned it into a moneymaking machine. At its height in 1879, 1880 a pedestrian could win and usually they got a percentage of the gate receipts. There was a guy named Charles Rowell who won 20,000 for winning a race at Madison Square garden which would be about 400,000 a day. In the bad for six days work. It was very cluk klucrative fory brief period of time. Many of the pedestrians died broke. Pedestrianism set standards both good and bad. Really by 1890 pedestrianism was all but dead. It was also killed by baseball. The National League was founded with other teams. The teams would quit the season halfway through if they knew they werent going to win the pen nept. Why take the road trip to st. Louis. That sort of thing. If they got fogt they decided they needed to organize this. The first thing they did was to impose a salary cap of 2500 a season. They also imposed the notorious reserve clause. This was a clause in every players contract that bound him to his team in perpetuity. You could never be a free agent. You could only be traded or released, and this persisted until about 1975, the reserve clause. It was a controversial thing, but it solidified baseball. By 1890 the National League had eight teams and only one of those eight teams is not still with us. The cleveland spiders, unfortunately, it would be nice to have the spiders, but the other teams, and i have to write them down. Braves, cubs, dodgers, giants, phillies, pirates and reds. Many of those franchises have moved around a lot over the years, but they were all in they were all in the National League in 1890 and theyre all in the National League now. Baseball really bicycle rating. Big new wooden baseball stadiums were built. Baseball suddenly became a fad and eventually became engrained in the american consciousness as a National Pastime as they like to call it. I talked a little bit about, you know, the empathy that people had with walkers. I did a little research. I mean, it was on the internet so it has to be true. Recently there was a study that the average american takes 5170 steps a day, mostly i assume going to the copy machine. Thats about 2 1 2 miles and thats about half whats recommended. Its recommended 10,000 steps a day, about five miles for good health. In North Carolina a housewife would walk half a mile a day just fetching water. It showed you how much people wau walked and why they had to walk. Walking was essential. It was the only way to get around and the only way to fulfill your basic needs. Food, water, and employment. And so were not a walking nation anymore. I doubt that competitive walking will make a grand comeback, although it still exists in the olympics. We have race walking matches, 30 kilometers, 10 kilometer, i think. But its funny, the modern race walking, the rule is that one foot must be in contact with the grouped at all times as observed by the human eye so just like before, they have a team of judges where everybody is looking at the feet making sure the foot is in contact with the ground. If you do it in slow motion you can see all of the best competitors have two feet off the ground for an instant, but the idea is to not be caught and to not have it be visible to one of the judges. So in that way its very much like old pedestrianism was. I think competitive walking was in the very first modern olympics in 1896, was it . 1896. And its one of the few sports, it may be the only sport thats been in every single olympics there has been race walking. So you can really see a direct line from old style pedestrianism. You can still see the direct line from the idea of sport as entertainment and sport as spectacle to today with the super bowl i mentioned and baseball. The idea that people attend a sporting event not just to watch the event but to see the fireworks, watch the squcoreboa, the music all the time is so loud. I dont know why its so loud in stadiums today. You cant even talk. But thats thats just my thing. But you really do see kind of a direct line between pedestrianism and modern professional sports. And most of the pedestrians tried to switch to bicycles, but they werent very good at it. Two of the pedestrians, Edward Weston and oleary. They werent very good at it. Weston walked from new york to San Francisco in about 1907 and, again, sold one of these pamphlets along the way. He did another walk from new york to minneapolis and sealed a pamphlet. The major sponsor was the Packard Car Company which said you could go 300 miles a day. He did not like cars. Weston did not like cars just because he felt they made people walk less. Ironically, weston in 1927 was crossing a street in manhattan and wasa left crippled and never walked a day again and died at the age of 90 two years later. Oleary would stage walks. He would challenge the fastest runner to run around the bases twice faster than he could walk around the bases once. He would pass a hat collecting nickels and dimes. This is basically how he funded his retirement. In the book i have a scene where he imagined he performed between the white sox and the as in 1927 and i imagine the players in the dugout who were born well after that, they had never heard of it. This olds man Walking Around the bases as fast as they could. They would have been blown away to realize that 50 years earlier he had made in six days more than any of them had made in the entire season of 1927. So it was a sport that flashed very brightly for a very short time and then disappeared almost as quickly as it came on the scene. And i have written the definitive history of it. [ laughter ] thats all i have to say. If anybody has any questions, id be happy to take them. [ applause ] i dont know if we have a microphone. No microphone . Well just yeah, speak loudly. Ill repeat. What is the name of your book . Oh, what is the name of my book . Youre a plant, arent you . Youll get your 20 afterwards. Pedestrianism, when watching people walk was americas favorite spectator sport. Would you look at that . Its on sale right over there. What a coincidence. What are the odds . Yes. Right there. Two questions. Did the women walk amongst other women or against other men . And also did any of the walkers suffer from Bad Health Conditions . The questions were did the women ever compete against the men, and as far as i know, they did not. Womens race sz were usually held like at Madison Square garden there would be sixday womens races, but as far as i know, women did not participate in any of the major mens races. Now having said that, there would be club races. It was i mean, the sport was so popular clubs were organized all over the country. There was a Department Store league in new york that the Department Stores competed against each other and this would be a team affair where accumulative mileage left with the team. Women participated but generally not the major sixday races. The other question you asked was about the longterm Health Effects and i have to say that weston and oleary who lived to be 87 and 90 were really the exception. You hear many stories of guys who died very young in their 50s. Frank hart, very famous africanamerican, as i mentioned probably the most famous black athlete in america. After he won his major sixday race, 1880, 1881 he suffered a complete collapse. Really dont know what happened. Actually sent, you know, what i could get from the papers to a couple of what do you call the doctors who diagnose you . Path path pathologists . Pathologists. And their their consensus was either he had contracted encephalitis or suffered a stroke. So it took a huge toll on these. You know, you would think that walking would make you healthy but, you know, walking for six days straight for 500, toward the end they were walking 600 miles in six days. That i wouldnt recommend as a health regimen. Yeah. Did they use special shoes . Did they use special shoes . Early on, no. Many of them would walk just in their work boots, and there are many stories of toenails falling off after two or three days and serious injuries to their feet and legs. As it became more famous and more lucrative and as the competitors could afford it, they would go to they would go to in fact, there were several competitions in london, and apparently they went to the most famous shoemaker in london that actually specialized in making shoes for pedestrians, which were really kind of a soft leather that was bound very tightly to their feet, but this definitely improved. But the equipment they worked with was pretty rudimentary. You know, i dont think the clothing was very comfortable. A lot of wool shirts, bad boots. You know, the conditions werent great. They did not have any of the advantages of modern endurance athletes in that regard. No nike. I was wondering about the inspiration behind the book. This gentleman talked about how he thought my book Harry Trumans excellent adventure, what did you say, greatest book ever written . Greatest book. I think you said greatest book ever written. Im writing that down for a blush. Harry trumans excellent adventure is the story of harry and bess truman in the summer 1953, about six months after they left the white house. They took a road trip. They lived in independence, missouri, just outside kansas city, and harry had to give a speech in washington, and their daughter lived in new york, and so they decided to just drive their chrysler from missouri to the east coast and back again. I think it took about 2 1 2 weeks, but at the time expresident s had no secret service protection. They had no pensions, and harry was not a wealthy guy by any means. A lot of the expenses of the
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