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

7. Under Western Skies: Dallas to Pecos, Texas, May 11–May 22, 1929

107 Under Western Skies Dallas to Pecos, Texas, May 11–May 22, 1929 FROM THE COUNTRY’S EARLY DAYS as a collection of colonies, the western frontier has been a beacon of hope to Americans searching for a better life and a new beginning. “Go west” has always been a hallmark of the American character. In the California Gold Rush of 1849, thousands of easterners quit farms and office jobs to stream west, braving Indian raids and desert heat to reach the gold fields. Legions of pioneers followed, many taking the southern route from St. Louis to Dallas, then west to El Paso and across New Mexico, where they hugged the Mexican border to avoid the towering Rockies before crossing the Sonora Desert to the promised land of California.1 The bunioneers would retrace the southern route to California, first making the 467-mile journey from Dallas to Pecos across the vast, open spaces of West Texas.2 In the late 1920s, the state was rich in natural resources, including more than 50 percent of the proven oil reserves in the United States.3 With demand for gas and oil products skyrocketing, oil money had injected new life into many of the once-sleepy agricultural towns that the bunioneers would pass through on their twelve-day trip to Pecos before they ascended the barren and mostly unpopulated highdesert lands to the west. Pyle hoped these towns had ready cash to spend on his follies show. The bunioneers held no such dreams. Most were exhausted. Newton called them “a listless and fagged out crowd” after a week of brutal racing to Dallas.4 Map 8. 1929 Bunion Derby route, Dallas, Tex., to Pecos, Tex. Under Western Skies • 109 Searching for Pyle’s Redemption Days 42 and 43, 24 Men The men set out for Fort Worth, thirty-three miles to the west. The shorter distance helped cheer them up. Some of the racers had been on the road for eighteen hours on the run to Dallas, and they were grateful for the chance to rest. The front-runners—Gavuzzi, Salo, and Umek—declared a holiday and quietly jogged along together as they ran past orchards and truck gardens nurtured in the rich soil bordering the road to Fort Worth, “where,” the masthead of the city’s Star Telegram proclaimed, “the West begins.”5 Forth Worth had vast cattle stockyards and the world’s largest system of oil pipelines, which connected the surrounding oil fields with the city’s refineries.6 Despite its wealth, the city’s residents spurned Pyle’s derby. His follies played to a nearly empty theater that left Charley even deeper in debt. Big cities such as Dallas and Fort Worth had their own thriving theater scene, and their citizens were not willing to take a chance on Charley ’s traveling road show.7 Pyle pushed on, this time fifty-three miles to the resort town of Mineral Wells across sparsely populated and semi-arid desert country in hopes of finding a more receptive audience for his follies show.8 Salo and Gavuzzi would not lead Charley’s quest. Both men were exhausted and needed rest after racing beyond fifty miles in recent days, spurred on by Umek’s three-day string of victories.9 The Italian, however, had proven himself all too human, and they returned to their singular focus on each other. Each man knew that the key to victory was building a sizable lead over the other, and each was determined to stop the other from doing so. The Chelsea-to-Dallas leg had shown both men that racing hard at the extended distances offered a chance to make lead-changing gains if the runner could recover fast enough to hold off the inevitable charge of his opponent in the following days. The rules of the game were changing as the competition between the front-runners intensified. Guisto Umek led the derby to Mineral Wells as he resumed the frantic approach to racing that he had used on the Chelsea-to-Dallas leg of the 110 • 1929 Bunion Derby derby—run fast regardless of the distance—and finished an hour ahead of the front-runners.10 Along the course, sixth-place Philip Granville had a narrow escape when a drunk driver swerved into him, forcing him to leap over a culvert to avoid being run over. He tumbled down a dry riverbank , breaking...