This time last year I just delivered the newspaper, now I read it cover to cover. I was poor before I got a paper route, now I have almost five hundred dollars in the bank. Now I’m Gordy Braun, pronounced brawn, not Gordon Braun, pronounced brown. I’m a track star, a wrestling champion and the uncle to a beautiful niece, when before I was none of these things.
Gordon Braun charms his readers with tales of adventure, adversity and heartache in this “cute, poignant, funny” coming of age memoir. Welcome to Shoreline, a town that isn’t even a town. It’s 1968-the year a thirteen-year-old paperboy discovers a talent that changes the trajectory of his life. It’s the year “the world got smaller; danger suddenly less abstract.”
That’s from Amazon. Shared here because it is completely accurate and I don’t even remember being thirteen. Started becoming a complete screw-up at age twelve and so by 1968, when I turned twenty-two, the only newspaper I saw was the Stars & Stripes. Don’t think we were getting the whole story of what was happening Stateside.
I realize now I should have done it Gordon’s way. I was the slowest boy in the class, so maybe not running. But something.
I offer – with permission, for a change – an excerpt and a snippet from The Boy From A Town That Isn’t Even A Town.
Fall 1968. Eight grade PE class.
The day I discovered my talent for running.
I was disappointed and perplexed that Jim Ryun lost to Kip Keino in the metric mile. An American and a world record holder, whose picture I woke up to every morning, lost to a Kenyan? My hero went out so slowly in the first three laps of the race that it looked like he wasn’t even trying. And by the time he started trying, it was too late because the champion had too big a lead and just wouldn’t quit.
A Kenyan?
I’m going to imitate a Kenyan today.
My plan is to hang back but stay near the leaders through the first half of the race like Keino did at the Olympics. Then I’ll take the lead and push as hard as I can for as long as I can. Hopefully everyone else will give up or at least forget about trying before I make a complete fool out of myself.
Trying is a risky business.
I wonder if Kip Keino or Jim Ryun ever worried about making fools of themselves?
We’re milling around under the basketball rim on the outdoor court like always before the start of a cross-country run. Mr. Searle blows his whistle and off we go, all thirty of us across the asphalt toward an imaginary left field foul pole on the baseball field. I go out just hard enough so as not to get stuck in traffic when we leave the outfield grass and funnel onto a rocky trail.
I’m in fifth place, just where I want to be, when the path narrows. I’ve never been this close to the front before. A few quick steps up a short incline and we’re heading west, parallel to the third base line along the side hill. I can feel the strain in my ankles as I struggle to move straight ahead while gravity tries to pull me sideways down the slope.
We turn left behind the backstop, and I pass two guys to move into third place. The course slips behind a long stretch of blackberry brambles and Scotch broom where it zigs, zags, dips, and rises so that I lose sight of the leaders for a few seconds. I’m right on their heels when I see them next. So far so good. We’re coming to the halfway point and an easy left turn leading toward a long, flat straightaway.
This is it.
I picture Black Power protesters Tommie Smith and John Carlos coming off the turn in the 200-meter race at the Olympics as I ease past Joe Knutson and pull up onto the shoulder of Peter Anderson, giving him a sideways glance.
And then I blast ’em!
I come off the turn, and I’m sprinting down the straightaway as fast as I can. I’m thinking about Kip Keino and Bill Toomey as I put distance between me and my competitors. Fifty yards later I’m sure I can’t go any faster, but I feel like I can run at this speed forever.
And then . . . suddenly everything hurts! My legs feel like lead. My heart is about to leap out of my chest. My lungs are on fire. And it feels like someone stuck a knife in my belly and twisted it.
Dead ahead looms the big hill.
I think about the Quinn Martin television production of Twelve O’Clock High and how B-17 bombers got all shot up over Germany during World War II. And about how they limped back to England with three engines ablaze and just barely enough air speed to clear the white caps of the English Channel.
I feel like a shot-up B-17 when I get to the bottom of the hill and start my ascent. This is all about survival, and I’m not sure if I’m going to make it. There is a good chance I’m going to crash, but just like in the song from Man of La Mancha, I’m committed to the impossible dream. I’m not giving up because Don Quixote, Kip Keino, and General Savage on Twelve O’Clock High would never give up.
I shorten my stride and lean into the hill. Pumping my weary arms, I reach for the stars and run where the brave dare not go. In a dozen torturous steps, I make the summit, turn left, and head to the finish line a hundred and fifty yards away.
Reed Mayer became a teammate of Robbie Perkins at Duke University.
At the Washington State Cross-Country meet in the autumn of 1971, I found myself standing on the podium next to a familiar face—the eleventh-grade version of a cross-country runner from seventh-grade PE class at Cordell Hull Junior High. He had the label “MAYER” printed on the front of his t-shirt with a fat-tipped felt pen when I’d seen him last.
Reed Mayer, whose family moved north to the town of Snohomish after seventh grade, got first place in the mile run and I won the two-mile title at the 1972 State Track and Field Championships held on the blisteringly hot, rubberized asphalt oval inside Martin Stadium in Pullman. As far as I can tell, it was the first time in state history that junior class athletes won gold medals in both distance races.
Our senior year, Reed beat me at the state cross-country meet as we both shattered the old 2.5-mile course record at Evergreen High School. The following spring, I returned the favor by breasting the tape ahead of him at the Rose Festival two-mile. It was on this day in June of 1973 that he and I became the first schoolboys from Washington to break the nine-minute barrier in the same eight-lap track race—a memorable achievement for a couple of kids with roots in an easy to forget place like Shoreline.
TBFATTIEAT is a book about running that is not a book about running. Not about running. It is better than that.
Back cover: The Boy From A Town That Isn’t Even A Town is Gordon Braun’s first published work. He attended Cromwell Park Elementary, Cordell Hull Junior High, and Shoreline High School in his hometown of Shoreline, Washington. After a record-setting track and cross-country career as a schoolboy, he was rewarded with an athletic scholarship to the University of Washington where he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees. Gordon is a retired business executive, consultant, teacher, and coach. He lives in Bellingham with his wife, Carrie Gaasland.
Gordon Braun’s first book! I think he missed his calling.
Told him, if he could use that amazing recall to compose a memoir about his high school and college running career, he could easily become a hundredaire.
In Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner wrote, “My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.”
Gordon Braun told it right.
Paperback editions are available at Village Books (in-person and online), Amazon and on the Barnes & Noble website.
eBooks are readily available on Barnes & Noble, Amazon and elsewhere.