In March, 1914, a 71
year old named Dan O’Leary was given a letter from the Mayor of Portland,
Oregon to deliver to his counterpart at City Hall, San Francisco. O’Leary took
the mail, put it in his jacket and then walked the 650 miles that separate the
two places. By the time he’d reached
California, newspaper reporters had got wind of his exploits and when they sat
him down, he dismissed the fuss about his latest jaunt, pointing out he’d
walked an estimated 101,874 miles since 1874. Nobody quibbled with the number because
they knew that in his younger days, O’Leary was known as “the champion walker
of the world”.
“I always keep my feet
in first class condition,” said O’Leary, explaining the secret of his success.
“I don’t let any callouses grow on the bottom. By using a little sandpaper, I
file off any growth and the result is my feet are soft and smooth as glass. I
never use one pair of shoes two days running. In fact, I used up six pairs
coming down from Portland.”
Born in Carrigroe,
County Cork on June 28th, 1842, O’Leary left the family farm in
Ireland to find a new life in Chicago, where things seemed to go well enough
for him until the day in October, 1871 when the city caught fire. Hundreds
died, tens of thousands more lost their homes and their livelihoods. Perhaps alone
of those suddenly unemployed, O’Leary
decided to try his hand at competitive walking, then an enormously popular professional
sport.
“O’Leary was a small,
tough Irishman who had lost his job and savings in the great Chicago fire and
had decided there might be a living in the pedestrian game,” wrote Walter
Bernstein in the Virginia Quarterly Review. “He started off by doing a hundred
miles in 23 hours. The following month, he did 105 miles in the same time and
challenged Edward Weston (the most famous name in the sport) on the strength of
it. Weston refused, saying O’Leary did not have a big enough reputation.”
Like any West Corkman,
that was motivation enough for O’Leary. Using his own money, he rented a venue
and duly smashed Weston’s record of 200 miles walked in 40 hours. That caught Weston’s
attention and the two eventually squared off in Chicago in a six-day event in
1875 where O’Leary prevailed by clocking 501 miles in 143 hours. Weston later
claimed the result had been unfair because his opponent had benefitted from the
“home” crowd in his adopted city. He alleged the locals had been threatening to
shoot him and hurled rolled up balls of paper in his face during the race.
The billboard for the
return six-day match, which started on Easter Monday, 1877 at the Agricultural
Hall in Islington in London (Weston was a big star in England), put the prize
money at 1000 pounds and declared it, “The Largest Amount Ever Walked for in
the World”. The size of the cash on offer demonstrates how big walking was at
that time. Gamblers bet huge sums on the races, newspapers ran coverage on the
front pages and the biggest events were held at storied venues like the old
Madison Square Garden in New York.
“Races were brutal endurance events, lasting many days; one of the central
tactical questions the competitors had to face was when, and for how long, to
pause for sleep,” wrote Brian Phillips on Grantland.com. “Walkers would push
themselves to cover 400 miles in five days, or 500 miles in six days, often
suffering bloody feet — think about doing 3,000 laps in mid-Victorian footwear
— swollen joints, and nastier injuries. There were deaths on the track. Because
of the influence of gambling, top competitors faced a constant danger of
attacks intended to stop them from spoiling a bet; big matches often involved
heavy police protection. Most hauntingly of all, to my mind: The crowds were
kicked out at night, but the races kept going, hours and hours of
exhausted men passing in silence around enormous, empty halls, judges noting
their progress as they went.”
This was the world then conquered by O’Leary. Having put Weston in his
place in London where 70,000 people paid to watch over the six days and
Westminster adjourned to watch the closing stages, he became what some headline
writers dubbed “the champion pedestrian”.
When Sir John Dugdale Astley, an English politician and promoter, tried
to make the sport more structured by creating an official championship of the
world for “The Astley Belt”, O’Leary won the first two editions of that before
runners started to infiltrate the sport. He continued to compete though and
went all over the world to race.
After his own best days
had passed, O’Leary remained involved. He sponsored an event at which the
world’s best competed for “The O’Leary Belt”, also designated the official
“Championship of America”. In perhaps the bravest move of his career, he also
financed and coached Frank Hart, a Haitian immigrant who went from working in a
Boston grocery store to earning $17,000 for winning a single race. Hart’s
success was all the more remarkable because the colour of his skin meant many
of those walking against him refused to speak with him or to shake his hand
before events. The relationship between the protégé and O’Leary was such that
the Haitian’s nickname in the sport was “Black Dan”.
Later in life, O’Leary was
still renowned. At 80, he reportedly hatched a plan to walk to every state
capital in the United States. No official results were available for that quest
but when he died shortly before his 92nd birthday while wintering in
Los Angeles, most of the obituaries mentioned he failed to reach but a handful
of those cities. Six thousand miles from
California, in Rathbarry near his native Carrigroe, the townspeople got
together a while back and built a stone monument to the man who went away and
found a strange kind of fame so far from home. “Dan O’Leary – World Champion
Walker” reads the inscription. What else is there to say?
(First published in the
2012 Holly Bough)
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