Some Cowtown Memories

A lifetime ago, forty-one years to be exact, I sat in my house in Park Hill and heard my then-husband utter an expletive, followed by, “Sleet!  I don’t want to hear sleet!” But indeed, that was what he was hearing.

By early the next morning, Fort Worth was a world of white, streets covered with sleet, snow, and ice. Joel left home at something like 4:30 or 5:00. Not too much later, I bundled up four children, one barely three years old, and we slipped and slid in my ostentatious “doctor’s wife” Cadillac (can you believe I drove that thing?) to the North Side for the first ever Cowtown Marathon. Joel was a founder of the race, and I was part of the publicity team.

At the coliseum, I turned the children loose—to this day I can’t believe I did that or that I even made that drive, but I did. One of my children swears to this day he’s suing for negligence. Fort Worth’s North Side was then not as bad as it had been, an area of derelicts, bars, and who knows what else, but neither was it that relatively safe tourist attraction it is today. The rest of the children assure me that each year at the marathon there was a band of children who stuck together. They roamed the tunnels alongside the river under buildings on Exchange and who knows where else they went. I didn’t see them until late afternoon. I guess they got lunch. I know the older three, ranging from nine to six or seven, looked after Jordan, the baby.

Joel did not run. In fact, he did not get to run his own race until three or four years later. Somewhere I have kids’ T-shirts that celebrate that first marathon, with a caricature of Cowtown Charlie. Joel always thought he was Cowtown Charlie because the cartoon figure had a mustache similar to his. I think to this day it was Charles Ogilvie, Uncle Charles at our house, who was also TCOM faculty and ran marathons into his eighties, always winning his age group (not much competition).

Me? All these years later, I can’t exactly remember what I did all day, but I know I ran my tail off. Some years a radio station brought a big RV to the site, and I had fun going in to talk to the deejays, giving them up-to-date news about the race. Surely, I was at the finish line when the first runner came over, and I remember assisting the race chair at the awards portion that capped the day.

That was the pattern of our marathon days for four or five years, until Joel and I divorced. Determined to prove that I would not be shoved aside, I worked the race one year after the divorce, but it was no fun anymore, and I resigned from the committee. But I like knowing that I had a bit part in the race’s history, and that Joel and Charles had major parts. The organizers, all from what was then the Institute for Human Fitness, were TCOM folks, people I knew well.

So each year the marathon makes me nostalgic. Those were good days, and good memories. Tomorrow it will be better weather, though not perfect—chilly enough in the morning that runners shouldn’t overheat, but it is predicted to get to sixty degrees. Hot for running, but better than sleet. Jordan will host a small cheering party on our front porch—the halfway or thirteen-miles point is just a few doors from our house, and a good friend is running. I’ll join them, and I will cheer for our friend, but I also will cheer for a lot of people who have now passed out of my life and for a time of happy memories.