The 1929 Bunion Derby: Johnny Salo and the Great Footrace across America

6. Heading to the Promised Land: Chelsea, Oklahoma, to Dallas, Texas, May 4–May 10, 1929

95 Heading to the Promised Land Chelsea, Oklahoma, to Dallas, Texas, May 4–May 10, 1929 CHARLEY PYLE’S day of reckoning was coming closer. Each stage race brought the derby a bit nearer to Los Angeles, where he would be called upon to pay his bunioneers their hard-earned prize money. With a month and a half to go, Pyle was a man with few options: his follies had contributed nothing toward covering the debt, he had no money left of his own, and he could not borrow the prize money with his history of lawsuits and attachments for unpaid debts. He had to earn the prize money, but the math was not working in his favor. When Charley began the derby, he had brought along a three-thousand-seat show tent and planned to hold at least two performances a day.1 He had, in effect, been counting on six thousand paying fans a day to generate the sixty thousand dollars he would need when he reached Los Angeles. Once Pyle abandoned the tent in Baltimore, he had to rely on local theaters, which typically held no more than a thousand seats.2 Even with two sold-out performances a day, which seldom happened, his revenues were drastically lower than what he had envisioned when he launched his show in New York City. No matter what he did, he could never escape the inevitable: Charley could not pay his bunioneers their prize money, and he hid that fact from them. In the face of impending doom, Pyle clung ever more tightly to his vision, looking for better times over the next horizon. He abandoned any hope of making money in Oklahoma and turned his sights south to Dallas , Texas, and the oil-rich cities and towns sprinkled along the 467-mile road to Pecos at the end of the west Texas plains. These were isolated Map 7. 1929 Bunion Derby route, Chelsea, Okla., to Dallas, Tex. Heading to the Promised Land • 97 places with vaguely familiar names like Breckenridge, Sweetwater, Big Springs, and Midland, where cowboys and roughneck oil workers might pay to see his follies and where town fathers might make a monetary contribution to bring his derby show to town. Pyle’s promised land of Dallas was still four hundred miles south of Chelsea, and he wanted to get there in a hurry. In a series of brutally long runs, averaging fifty-six miles a day, he pushed his men to the brink of physical and mental exhaustion and shamefully used them as pawns in his desperate attempt to keep out of bankruptcy. Goodbye to Eddie Day 35, 27 Men The first day began with a 73.4-mile run to Muskogee, Oklahoma, a distance , Arthur Newton wrote, that “was greatly in excess of a reasonable figure.”3 This race followed the fifty-five-mile run to Chelsea that had left most of the bunioneers leg sore and exhausted. Pyle’s official starter, his burly football star Steve Owen, gave the starting command and the tired men started down the road to Muskogee.4 Third-place holder Guisto Umek seemed unfazed by the long distance . He had just passed Gardner to assume third, and now he set his sights on Salo in second, fourteen hours ahead of him. Umek opened his campaign in spectacular style by setting a new standard for speed and endurance: nine hours and forty-two minutes for 73.4 miles, or seven minutes and fifty-six seconds per mile. In effect, Guisto ran almost three successive marathons, each in under three hours and thirty minutes.5 No one had ever run that fast over such a long distance before, and few, including Gavuzzi and Salo, believed he could sustain that effort for very long. The two front-runners were content to lose an hour and a half of their lead and let the Italian have his victory.6 The extreme distance was the death knell for Eddie Gardner. He fought back the aching pain in his leg for twenty-five miles and refused to listen to George Curtis’s pleas to drop out of the race. Finally, though, as his pain built to a crescendo, he stopped and sought treatment from a physician in 98 • 1929 Bunion Derby Muskogee. He returned and started again, but after a few strides he found it impossible to continue. “I’m through,” he said...