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

11. The End of the Rainbow: Los Angeles, June 16, 1929

161 The End of the Rainbow Los Angeles, June 16, 1929 Day 78, 19 Men The bunioneers had reached the end of the long transcontinental rainbow in Los Angeles as they rested for the night in Huntington Park. They had been chasing Pyle’s “pot of gold” for the last seventy-seven days. All that remained was the seventy-eighth and last stage race, the 26.2 mile marathon finale at Wrigley Park—131 laps around an outdoor track.1 The front-runner, Pete Gavuzzi, held a hairbreadth lead over Johnny Salo, just nine minutes and fifty-six seconds after 552 hours and 3,523.4 miles of running, but that tiny margin made the Englishman the oddson favorite to win the twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize.2 If Gavuzzi had not ruptured his Achilles tendon as Newton claimed, and if he had had the leg strength to race, his stylish, almost effortless form should have allowed him to hold off any charge Salo might make in a marathon footrace . Sportswriter Braven Dyer of the Los Angeles Times concurred, writing that if the Englishman “doesn’t win tonight’s wind-up over the marathon distance and thus become the 1929 distance champion we’ll be very much surprised.”3 At about 7:40 p.m., the men received the starting command and began the four-mile run to Wrigley Park. At that moment, the clarity of events ended and a shroud of bitterness descended upon the 1929 Bunion Derby that remains to this day. The standard view of what happened next comes from three sources: Newton’s 1940 autobiography, Running in Three Continents; interviews 162 • 1929 Bunion Derby given by Gavuzzi, in Bruce Tulloh’s book, Four Million Footsteps: Los Angeles to New York—The Famous Runner’s Account of His Record Breaking Marathon , published in 1970; and Harry Berry’s 1990 self-published history of the 1928 and 1929 races, From L.A. to New York, from New York to L.A. Johnny Salo and Charley Pyle might have collaborated on their story or given their own version of events, but both died in the 1930s and did not leave any written account of the race. In Newton’s and Gavuzzi’s renditions, the referee called the roll at 7:30 p.m. at Huntington Park and reiterated that the four-mile run would determine only the starting position for the marathon run and would not count toward the cumulative time total. Once all nineteen men had arrived at the park, the men would line up in their order of finish in the four-mile race and then begin the 131-lap race.4 Once the referee gave the starting command, Johnny Salo bolted across the start line in company with Abramowitz and Richman.5 The latter two might have been motivated to race by Pyle’s purported offer of additional prize money to the top finishers in the last leg of the race.6 Three mounted motorcycle officers, with sirens blaring, cleared a path through the mass of traffic for the three lead runners—a pocket of speed as the traffic closed in behind them.7 “Once started off,” wrote Newton, “Salo moved at . . . a tremendous rate actually well over ten miles an hour.”8 With almost a ten-minute lead, Gavuzzi started out slowly, not wanting to waste energy racing for the sake of the few seconds’ advantage he might gain from a good starting position at Wrigley Park. He jogged in the center of a four-man box of bunioneers—Granville, Umek, Simpson, and Hedeman—who ran to protect him from a race-ending accident on the traffic-jammed street.9 In an interview with Bruce Tulloh, Pete said, “They told us the race would start when we got down there, so I didn’t hurry meself.”10 Without the police escort, Gavuzzi and his four companions had to fight through traffic and then were stopped for several minutes while a freight train crossed the road.11 In the meantime, the three Americans, Salo, Richman, and Abramowitz , reached the stadium and were surprised, wrote Berry, to see an official waving them onto the track to begin the marathon race.12 Abramowitz The End of the Rainbow • 163 reached the stadium first, with Richman close behind and Salo just behind Richman in thirty-two minutes, forty-five seconds, running at about an eight-minute-per...