Bowerman and the Men of Oregon Read online

  Our desire to join that lineage was almost demented. I, for one, was so wild to remake myself into a champion that I rolled my eyes at Bowerman’s patient studies of our strides and metabolism, and especially his damn easy days. It felt demeaning to just rest. Work was righteous; rest was weak-willed, ignoble.

  And so I rammed into a classic paradox. “To run a world record,” said Australia’s Herb Elliott, world record holder and 1960 Olympic 1500-meter champion, “you have to have the absolute arrogance to think you can run a mile faster than anyone who’s ever lived; and then you have to have the absolute humility to actually do it.” Elliott was a god to me then. I took him as an example of maniacal effort. But if that sentence urges anything, it urges balance. You must balance the arrogance of your ambition with the humility of your training. If that was a hint to rest more, I ignored it.

  Bowerman understood that paradox—the need for both abandoned effort and ironclad control—because it was his own. He told us of being turned from youthful rebellion by Ercel Hedrick, the Medford School Superintendent, who terrified him into channeling his energies. Bowerman knew and loved and distrusted us as he had been known and loved and distrusted himself.

  When he talked with us about goals and hopes, he asked us, though never in so many words, to balance the hunger that is in all runners with some grasp of what our predecessors had achieved. The thing was not to blindly disregard limits but to understand the odds, even as one refused to accept them. He asked us, then, to leave open a tiny window of possibility. “If you go out to race,” he said, “and know you’ll lose, there’s no probability involved. You’ll lose. But if you go out knowing you will never give up, you’ll still lose most of the time, but you’ll be in the best position to kick from on that rare day when everything breaks right.”

  He said that on May 4, 1964, when my three weeks of tyranny were over and he sent me out to run the two-mile in a meet against Oregon State. He said to begin no faster than 4:30 for the first mile and not to chase after their animal, Dale Story, the NCAA cross-country champion, who ran barefoot and was thirty seconds better.

  Stripping down, our filmy, Bowerman-designed racing shirts and shorts made me feel battle naked. My sharpened steel spikes sank into the cinders with a gnash that evoked Jim Bailey years before. On the starting line, Story’s shirt looked heavy, almost like wool. All of Bill’s care in preparing me hit home, and I gave myself over to his plan. I hit 4:30 for the first mile. Story ran 4:19 and led by seventy yards. Bowerman, on the infield, said, “He won’t hold it. See what you can do.”

  I began to gain, and the crowd, Bowerman’s crowd, 10,000 strong, saw me coming and got up and called. With half a mile to go, I had no real will left. All control had passed to that thunder that would not let me slow. Into the last turn, Story still had ten yards. Then he looked back, his shoulders tightened, and I experienced for the first time the full savagery of my competitive heart.

  I outkicked him by a second in 8:48.1, ripping twenty-seven seconds from my best, finishing in bedlam, crowd and teammates pressing the air out of me, shouting that everything was possible now, the Olympics were possible now.

  Bowerman was there with wild blue eyes and a fiendish grin, and I knew what he would say. “See!” he’d crow. “I told you! You just needed rest!”

  But he didn’t. He whispered in my ear as he had when he strangled me. “Even I didn’t think you could run that fast, Kenny,” he said. “Even I.”

  He had given me his subject. I had found myself. It finally began to penetrate my thick skull that I had to rise above the world’s fixation with sheer work. I had to attend to my own eccentric physiology. I accepted easy days into my life. I stopped counting miles.

  Over the next eight years, the one long run he permitted me every ten days would turn me into the fourth-place finisher in the 1972 Olympic marathon. It was the lesson of my life, and it forces me now to consider—with a shiver—whether anyone besides Bowerman could have gotten through to me.

  CHAPTER 1

  That Wild Yearning

  BOWERMAN MAY WELL HAVE BEEN AN INTROSPECTIVE SOUL, BUT WHO COULD tell? He spent long hours in contented silence, solving a huge range of problems, and he was brutally eloquent when dissecting others’ psyches. Yet he kept the process of himself to himself. As Barbara Bowerman would recall, “I can’t tell you how frustrating it was to love him and trust him, and know he loved me and trusted me, and still he would never tell me what he was thinking.”

  To get across what he deemed worth knowing, Bowerman’s instrument, blunt or pointed, was the story. So it is to his narrative tales—what they celebrate, what they mock and loathe—that we must look for clues to his character.

  In 1983, the editors of The Wheeler County History asked him to write about his family’s founding of the town of Fossil, his boyhood home and the seat of the smallest, poorest county in Eastern Oregon. Bowerman chose to tell the story of his mother’s grandfather, James Washington Chambers, who had grown up in Tennessee.

  Along with his parents, Thomas and Letitia, and his four brothers and two sisters, J. W. Chambers lived at The Hermitage, the plantation near Nashville where General Andrew Jackson bred and trained racehorses. Irish-born Letitia Chambers was Jackson’s cousin by marriage. The future president and his wife, Rachel, had no children of their own, but they took in family like laundry, turning out one starched, pressed relative after another. Bowerman bled for young J.W., subjected to such bark-bound, puritanical authority: “Being a very much younger brother in a family of Scotch-Irish,” Bowerman wrote, “J.W. had plenty of opportunity to vent his rebellion.”

  In 1828, Andrew Jackson was elected the seventh American president and two years later signed into law the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Henry Clay rightly called the act an eternal stain on the nation’s honor, but white settlers cheered and pushed greedily onto tribal lands. By the spring of 1832, the family member hungriest to go was fifteen-year-old J. W. Chambers.

  “What took him,” Bowerman asked, “on his quest for the new, the romantic, the dangerous, to what became the Oregon Territory?” Bowerman could only guess, but judging by the words he chose, he must have felt the answer in his bones: “A wild yearning for perfect freedom.” One day, young J.W. just up and left, saying (as Bowerman loved to tell the tale), “I’m a-headin’ West and just takin’ ma pony.”

  The Chambers kid’s way with horses found him a place among the voyageurs and trappers who mapped the great routes. Every so often a crumpled letter would get back to his family, describing the fish, game, and topsoil beyond the Rockies. Thomas Chambers who had wanted to cross the plains since he’d read Lewis and Clark’s journals couldn’t rid his dreams of the bounty his son described. By the early 1840s he had moved his family to Morgan County, Missouri, where they began assembling a wagon train.

  In 1844, word of it reached the prodigal son. J.W., then twenty-seven, rode hell-for-leather to Missouri to lead the train, only to find a father who didn’t exactly kill the fatted calf in welcome.

  Bowerman put it this way: “As mountain men were wont to do when going to rendezvous, J. W. Chambers joined his buddies in a rip-roaring, trail’s-end wingding. The head-of-clan Chambers, exercising Puritan logic, ’splained to J.W. that he was not fit enough nor mature enough to lead the train.” To test J.W.’s fitness, Thomas asked whether his son’s rebellious habits might accept something short of perfect freedom—namely, the settling influence of a wife. As Bowerman often told it, Thomas had someone specific in mind: “Meet the widow Scoggin,” Thomas said. “And her five children. Husband died back East. Needs a man.”

  One can imagine the poleaxed J.W. taking a long look at the widow’s fiercely bulging eye and hard-set jaw (she did look like Harry Truman) and growling, “By God, I’ll do her.” They married in 1844, and the Chambers wagon train departed on April 1, 1845, with J.W. riding scout beside his father. And J.W. did her well, for eight months and three weeks later, on the banks of the Willamette, Mary Greene Scog
gin Chambers would give birth to Bill Bowerman’s grandmother, Mary Jane.

  But first they had to cross two-thirds of a continent. Half a million people traversed the Oregon Trail between 1842 and 1860, a number so vast as to suggest it wasn’t all that hard. But it was bitterly hard. Men, women, children, animals, and wagons had to cover ten to fifteen miles a day for eight months or risk having a mountain pass named for them because they froze in it, like the Donners. One in ten died—50,000 in all—far more of them from cholera and accident than at the hands of Indians.

  Almost all those who traveled the Oregon Trail were on the only trip of their lives. They’d sold their farms to outfit their wagons and teams. If they made it to the valley of the Willamette, a married couple was entitled to 640 acres, but meanwhile, that acreage existed only in the haze of carnival-barker promises. The land and friends they’d left behind were heartbreakingly real. It was, as one historian put it, “the experience of giving all to gain all.”

  It was a defining ordeal, a winnowing out of the nonindustrious, the nonenduring, the inflexible, the uncooperative. Those who completed the cross-country journey found that it concentrated traits in their new society that would last as long as the wagon tracks themselves, still plain to see today through the sage near Baker City in Eastern Oregon. If Bowerman was stubbornly ingenious, if Bowerman loved to tell a story, if Bowerman gloried in Oregon’s vistas and fertility, well, Bowerman was pioneer stock and had a right to cackle, as he did, that “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way.”

  The 2,000-mile trek took the Chambers family seven months. On October 15, 1845, their train reached The Dalles, on the Columbia. They were less than a hundred miles from the mouth of the Willamette, but the way was blocked. The basalt cliffs where the Columbia Gorge slices through the Cascades north of Mt. Hood were impassable by wagon, and no flatboats were to be found. The family made their winter quarters about two miles from the Methodist Mission.

  After they had built huts and corrals, Thomas Chambers led an advance party, including J.W. and his gravid wife, Mary, downriver by boat to find their promised land. They selected loamy pastures on the Tualatin River, a tributary of the Willamette, near what would become Hillsboro. They filed Donation Land Claim #41 at the new capital, Oregon City, and it was there, on December 22, 1845, that Mary Jane Chambers was born.

  That winter, J.W. built the first flat-bottomed boat to make it through the Columbia rapids known as Cascade Falls and carried the families’ wagons and belongings in a complicated series of ferryings and portages down the Columbia and up the Willamette to their 642-acre homestead on the Tualatin.

  Western Oregon kept its promise. The grass stayed green all winter. The Chamberses were disoriented by the sight of their cows standing fat in the pastures in February. Once the weather cleared in June, the skies were cloudless until October. The Indians had used fire to keep much of the valley in grassland. The settlers’ fields produced so much wheat it was soon being used as a means of exchange. They had given all. They had gained all. They were home.

  Not that much peace crept upon the mind of J. W. Chambers.

  In the Willamette Valley, the Chambers family had come to a place with California summers and English winters. The rivers coiling past mistletoe-clotted oaks and dark, befirred hills were swollen by five months of cold rain. The bone-chilling wet that drove Lewis and Clark to clinical depression on the Oregon coast did the same for J.W. He called the Tualatin area a “swamp” and often rode out looking to find better. Indeed, his father, Thomas, and several family members moved to Puget Sound in Washington.

  But the “settling influence,” as Bowerman put it, of J.W.’s wife and, eventually, seven children “partially took.” For fifteen years, J.W. built warm, dry log homes and barns, helped his neighbors thresh their wheat, and reined in his wanderlust. He made a trip to the gold fields but didn’t stay, returning home instead to raise and race his beloved horses. And he used the profits from the farm to order up a spectacular symbol of making it to the new land without sacrificing the refinement of the old: a grand piano for each of his daughters. “They were shipped around Cape Horn before the Panama Canal was built,” wrote J.W.’s great-granddaughter Patricia Hoover Frank in 1983. “The girls learned to play them at school. Mary Jane played quite well and sang very well too. She often entertained overnight travelers or guests.” (According to Barbara Bowerman, “There’s a story that one of J.W.’s horses, named Foster, won $30,000 in a race. I don’t know if that’s apocryphal, but it would have financed the pianos and considerably more.”)

  In 1864, when Mary Jane was eighteen, she accepted the hand of Thomas Benton Hoover, who had been five when he traveled the Trail with his parents in 1844. A photograph from that time shows Mary Jane to be comely and clear-eyed. Many desired her, even to a deranging degree. “The first night in their own home, one of Mary Jane’s former suitors set the cabin on fire,” wrote Mary Jane’s great-granddaughter, Georgia Lee Hoover Stiles. “Obviously they got out, for we are all here.”

  Barely. They lost all their belongings—except for the piano, which Tom and Mary Jane somehow managed to drag from the cabin to safety.

  By 1869, the Hoovers had two children, Annie and Will. One day J.W., whom they hadn’t seen in a year, burst in and shouted, “Finally, finally, Eden is at hand!” They had heard this before.

  “Horses were J.W.’s life and cattle his cash reward,” wrote Bowerman. “His restless spirit was always taking him back across the Cascades.” On this trip he’d explored the canyons of a river flowing out of the Blue Mountains. The river was named the John Day, for a hapless man who had been captured and tortured by Indians, escaping with his life but without his sanity.

  It was a cautionary tale, but one totally lost on the old mountain man J.W., now in his early fifties. He rode up the John Day with an Indian friend in 1868, returned in 1869, convened a family council, and said he’d seen over a million acres of rich, black loam and rolling hills. There were lush meadows, virgin timber, abundant springs and creeks. Bowerman liked the line in J.W.’s report that made for an equine heaven: “Shoulder-high in meadow grass, knee-high in bunch grass.” Bunch grass endures after meadow hay has frozen. If your hills have clumpy, silvery bunch grass, your stock can last out any winter.

  J.W. had surveyed some ranch-sized claims and ridden for home. Now he asked, who would come across and live with him in a land of milk and honey? The look upon the face of his wife, the formidable Mary Greene Scoggin Chambers, is lost to history, but her reaction isn’t: She declined the invitation. “His wife,” as Bowerman put it, “figured winning one wilderness home was enough.”

  But J.W. talked his daughter Mary Jane, her husband, Tom, stepson Woodson Scoggin, and horse-raising partner William Bigham into joining him in peopling the spreads he’d claimed.

  Their 1870 trek, with covered wagons and livestock, first by boat to The Dalles and then into the interior on Indian trails, took almost three months, lengthened by their lugging along Mary Jane’s piano. One wonders, as Bowerman did about J.W. fleeing westward at age fifteen, what made Mary Jane at twenty-four, her children four and two, so uproot her life. If their Tualatin farm was prosperous, it was also by then routine. The family yearning for freedom must have surged in her, too. She was her father’s daughter.

  They arrived at a crystal stream in a bowl of greening, juniper-dotted hills on April 26, 1870, named it Hoover Creek, and quickly built four log cabins with floors of whipsawed planks. They turned their animals out into the meadows and planted cottonwoods. From a white cliff, they cut slabs of soft rock that hardened in the air and let them make a fireplace in every dwelling. The mud-caulked cabins (all but one with openings for rifle barrels in case of an Indian attack that never came) were snug, durable, and had room for the piano.

  J.W. wrote in his diary, “This is truly the promised land.”

  Sometimes the price of perfect freedom is perfect isolation. Mary Jane wouldn’t see another woman
settler for two years. When a husband and wife driving their hogs to market sought refuge at Hoover Creek, Stiles continued, “The two women on seeing each other broke down and cried, as they were so starved for friendship. They stayed up all night talking.”

  Tom Hoover petitioned for and won a road from The Dalles and settlers filtered in. In 1876, Tom and Mary Jane were sworn in as the area’s first postmaster and -mistress and opened an office on their ranch. But what to call it? In their choice, they linked their lonely outpost with concerns greater than bunch grass and hogs. They seem, now and forever, thoroughly modern.

  Not long after they had settled in, they’d heard a rumbling and had run out to see dust rising from the base of a ridge. Tom rode over and found that a landslide had exposed large bones that looked like nothing he’d ever seen. He sent word to a friend, Thomas Condon, who was becoming an eminent geologist. Condon came, looked, was stumped, and packed some off to New York. Eventually the bones proved to be ossified camels and elephants from the Tertiary period, some 60 million years before. Fascinated by the petrified remains and cutting-edge science, the Hoovers named their post office, and later the town, Fossil.

  The connection with Condon was possible because the Chamberses and Hoovers honored learning in a way unusual in such a speck of a frontier town. Each generation of Fossil families sent many of its young away to good colleges. After seeing the wider world, a healthy number returned to keep the ranches thriving. Much of the land today remains in the hands of the original families.