Fire on the Track Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Roseanne Montillo

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101906156

  Ebook ISBN 9781101906170

  Cover design by Elena Giavaldi and Alane Gianetti

  Cover photograph by ullstein bild/Getty Images

  v4.1

  ep

  To the forgotten athletes of the early Olympics

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: Amsterdam, 1928

  Chapter One: On Track

  Chapter Two: A New Arrival

  Chapter Three: A New Pair of Shoes

  Chapter Four: The Debut

  Chapter Five: Off to the Races

  Chapter Six: Off to the Games

  Chapter Seven: The SS President Roosevelt

  Chapter Eight: Queen of the Track

  Chapter Nine: A New Babe in Town

  Chapter Ten: Welcome Home

  Part Two: Los Angeles, 1932

  Chapter Eleven: Flying High

  Chapter Twelve: Summer Woes

  Chapter Thirteen: California Dreaming

  Chapter Fourteen: Go West, Young Women, Go West

  Part Three: Berlin, 1936

  Chapter Fifteen: The Nazi Games

  Photo Insert

  Chapter Sixteen: Rebound

  Chapter Seventeen: Off to Berlin

  Chapter Eighteen: Phenoms

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes and Sources

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  When Lee Newland spied the plane hovering just above his head that afternoon, he was surprised by how low it was flying. He had heard the growling of its propeller growing steadily louder somewhere behind him, then had looked up to see the glint of a cherry red biplane gaining altitude close to Riverdale’s gritty factories. It was Sunday, June 28, 1931, and just as he’d been doing every Sunday and every other day of the week for the past several months, Newland had been driving his truck through the town, as his job entailed.

  It was not a day of rest for him, or for anyone else. Working hard, if one had a job, was a matter of course—even on weekends. The country was in the midst of a depression, and though most experts already had a hankering for dating its beginning to the infamous “Black Thursday” and “Black Tuesday,” October 24 and 29, 1929, when the stock market had crashed, people had been feeling the pinch of a slumping economy for several years. It was a challenging time for the nation as a whole: 1931 was the second warmest year in all of Chicago, in all of the Midwest; the heat wave that summer killed nearly eight hundred people, though it was only a prelude of the one to come in 1936, when almost five thousand people succumbed to the hot spell. And President Herbert Hoover’s plans for stabilizing the national economy were proving inefficient. At the time Newland found himself in his truck that Sunday, nearly a quarter of the country’s adult population was unemployed, and many of those who worked did so at a reduced schedule. In many towns the situation was even more dire, with nearly 50 percent of their residents out of work, particularly the unskilled workers.

  Newland was one such unskilled worker, and he was painfully aware of his deficiencies. For most of the last decade, he had held a decent job in one of the many brick factories along the banks of the Calumet River, the pay he earned allowing him to own a home, his truck, and some pride. But the company had gone bankrupt, his job had disappeared, his house had been repossessed, and all that remained of his former life was his truck, the payments recurring every month—even though the contraption was virtually run to the ground.

  A tall and naturally husky man in his late thirties, Newland had of late been working for the local funeral parlor, locating bodies that had been left abandoned around the city’s streets and collecting the corpses of those who had died alone. The job was as unsavory and disquieting as it sounded and had earned him the unfortunate local nickname “body chaser.” There was no particular method or talent to what he did, only sheer luck. He stepped into his truck and drove along the ugly sprawl of boarded-up buildings and clusters of uninhabited homes, often finding nothing but a stray dog or two hiding under heaving porches or, in the winter, homeless families huddling over charcoal braziers. If that was the case, he ventured farther afield, searching for the bodies of those who might have gone out of their way to make their death a private ordeal.

  People died alone all the time. In the past few weeks the heat had reduced the members of the community by several dozen, the thermostat inching up to well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit and rendering the air a soupy mess that clutched at one’s throat. And if the weather didn’t kill somebody, the collapsing economy surely could. Those who were already poor tightened their belts even further as their poverty deepened, though their daily lives didn’t change a great deal. The crash came more as a surprise for the wealthy, those who had gone to bed rich one night and woken up paupers. Hustling for work was not in their nature; nor was pleading for food at the corner of a local store, waiting in long bread lines, or scavenging through refuse bins for the next meal to feed their children. They did not know what to make of their new status, and to many of them, death often seemed a more dignified option than poverty.

  That’s when Newland found them. They would wash up along the edge of the Calumet River, where the stench and scum of the waters rose with the heat; or facedown in weed-choked yards where children had once played and women had hung their sheets out to dry; or flat at the bottom of an abandoned brownstone, clutching an old photograph or some other personal item in their cold hands.

  —

  Newland had been driving for several hours that Sunday when he noticed the plane, just a quick flash in the sky leaving a thin trail of smoke behind it, like the long string from a kite. Powered by a standard OX5 motor, it was a Waco 10 biplane, a bright red and very popular model in the area, neither too difficult to fly nor tremendously advanced in its design. It whirled back and forth, its acrobatics not unlike those in a show Newland had seen once in a barn field near Chicago.

  He stopped the truck in the middle of the road and watched the plane. It rose slowly at first, then more swiftly as it reached an altitude he figured was as good as six hundred feet, when suddenly, as it turned left, it seemed to stall in midair.

  He saw the nose-dive and first thought it some kind of fancy maneuver by a pilot feeling too secure in his abilities. He then realized that the plane was in some sort of trouble and wondered if the weather was to blame. It had rained for the past four days, strong thunderstorms accompanied by lightning flashes streaking through the sky and breaking the night slumber. Perhaps the airplane had been hit by lightning, but when Newland scanned the horizon for further thunderbolts he might have missed, he saw none.

  The plane plummeted and disappeared, crashing somewhere in the acreage nearby. Newland pressed on his truck’s accelerator and sped toward the grounds. He would be making a stop by the funeral parlor later, after all.

  —

  The plane had landed in a soggy parcel of land belonging to the Whiting Corporation, between 159th Street and Cicero Avenue in the village of Harvey, some twenty miles from Chicago. Newland waded through the underbrush and reached the spot just as another man, Peter Adamaski, who had witnessed the accident from his porch, rush
ed toward the wreckage. There was a curl of smoke billowing from the plane’s rear, but no flames were visible. It had not exploded, most likely because it had landed with its nose deep into the wet terrain, blunting the impact and embedding itself several feet into the soil. Inside the shambles were wedged two youths: a young woman still buckled into the front seat, and the boy who had been the pilot sitting in the rear open cockpit.

  The girl wore goggles and a small leather helmet the likes of which, reports would later detail, Amelia Earhart had worn on her flight across the Atlantic. She was outfitted in a silky ensemble that was now soaked in blood and that to the rescuers did not look appropriate for flying. Both of the boy’s legs were twisted at an unusual angle, his right ankle appearing to have taken the brunt of the collision, shreds of bones protruding grotesquely from the flesh. Yet the boy was still alive, his chest heaving up and down. The girl, on the other hand, who had suffered at the very least a broken leg, judging by the bone poking out, appeared to be dead.

  Neither of the rescuers recognized the two victims, which was unusual; most everybody in this general area knew everybody else. The men removed them from the plane and carefully placed them on the wet ground, inspecting them before Adamaski rushed the boy to his Model T and quickly drove him to the nearby Ingalls Memorial Hospital. Newland lifted the girl in his arms and hurried to his truck, where he deposited her in the bed and drove to the funeral home to collect payment.

  There the parlor’s director searched through the girl’s clothing, intent on identifying her. Even after the accident, she was still pretty, a girl of average height with shoulder-length chestnut hair and in remarkably excellent shape. She had the faint look of a movie star, though he couldn’t place which one. But as he began to prepare his instruments, he detected something peculiar. He leaned his ear closer to the girl’s lips and realized that she was slowly taking faint breaths in and out. They were tiny gasps indeed, yet—without question—she was still breathing.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ON TRACK

  Early 1928 had been one of the coldest winters Charles Price could remember. He felt a gust of wind blow against his neck as he stood on the platform waiting for the train, then huddled deeper into his heavy coat. He looked up toward a gray sky heavy with clouds, removed his wire-rimmed glasses, and wiped away the snowflakes that had rested on his lenses. He assumed the wind was coming from the west and, looking up once again, further guessed that the flurries would soon turn into a more substantial snowfall. A science man, he delighted in gathering such details from his surroundings. He was eager to get home, even though a stack of papers on his desk was awaiting him. Correcting his students’ assignments could wait, but he preferred to deal with them right away. He was a disciplined man, never giving precedence to leisure when a task awaited him.

  At thirty-seven, Price shared his home with his wife, Ethel, a few years younger than he, and his three children: Jane was now twelve; Raymond, eight; and baby Harry was still in diapers, at barely a year old. Their house, just one stop away from Thornton Township High School in Harvey, Illinois, where he taught biology, was a modest one-story brick structure at the end of a bland, dimly lit lane a few blocks north of Main Street, where the spindly trees wouldn’t reach their maturity for decades to come. He knew the house he had purchased was small, but it nonetheless thrilled him that he owned it, as much as it thrilled him that he owned the latest-model radio he had seen advertised in the local newspaper, The Pointer—a splurge, but one that he had desired since the gadget hit the market. The radio afforded him intervals of respite and entertainment that he could not get anywhere else.

  As he tightened his coat, he hovered at the edge of the platform, where he finally heard the whistle of the train as it rattled over the elevated rails. From his vantage point on the platform, Price looked up toward Broadway Avenue, where the main doors of the high school were located. It had become the largest school serving the Riverdale, Harvey, and Dolton areas, as well as the other smaller communities nearby. A history buff, he had learned when he started teaching that the school dated to 1892, when it had been a mere schoolroom located in the basement of the First Methodist Church. Back then, only twenty-two students had crowded the single room, though three years later the number had already grown to seventy-five.

  Price liked his job. He was a graduate of the University of Illinois, where he had earned a bachelor of science degree and also pursued his interest in sports. Now he taught biology and was one of the coaches of the boys’ track team. He noticed several of his students crossing the sodden front lawn of the main building and heading toward the train station. He presumed they were continuing their conversations about the snow that had recently fallen, canceling the latest football game, or about the play that would take place in the auditorium two weeks from Sunday. He knew the topics well; they had made up the bulk of the students’ chats in homeroom that morning. Most were not in a hurry, despite the inclement weather, but walked in small groups at the leisurely pace young people always tended to adopt. That is, all but one. A lone girl caught his attention.

  Betty Robinson had broken away from the rest and was running to catch the incoming Illinois Central commuter train—the same one for which Price stood waiting on the platform. He turned to his left, from which the train was now fast approaching, and then back toward his student. Quickly calculating the speed at which both were traveling, he knew Betty would never make it; it was a simple matter of time versus speed.

  She was one of his biology students and in his homeroom, too; he knew her to be a good pupil and enormously popular with both her teachers and her peers. The previous November he had seen her perform in one of the school plays, a production his family had thoroughly delighted in. Betty’s hazel eyes, which the audience had been able to glimpse even from their seats, had shone from the stage and had captivated his wife, as had her short bobbed hair, an odd shade that was neither bright blond nor the color of hay.

  He watched, mesmerized, as Betty filled her lungs with the cold air and lunged toward the station. There was nothing particularly sophisticated about her running; she was obviously untrained. With big long strides, arms aflutter and hair buoyed by the wind, a book bag slung over one shoulder and papers in hand, she appeared as if she were running to catch a runaway dog or a wayward child. But her ungainliness amused him, and he admired her determination. Being a coach, he appreciated her efforts, regardless of their seeming futility. She was still some distance away when the train stopped in front of him and its doors opened; he walked inside, finding a seat near the window.

  He removed a newspaper from his pocket and settled in for the short ride home. There was no need to remove his coat or to make himself too comfortable. He was about to deposit his briefcase on the empty spot next to him when a stack of books landed on the seat. He recognized them: they included the required biology text he assigned to his classes. He looked up to see Betty Robinson, shaking snow off herself before sitting down. She unbuttoned the top of her jacket, flashing him a confident grin that would eventually earn her the nickname of “smiling Betty.”

  Price was stunned. Having mentally estimated her running speed against the train, he’d never thought it possible that she would reach it on time; he should have removed the stopwatch from his briefcase and timed her.

  He asked her if she liked to run. She shrugged her shoulders and said she did, although no more than anything else she enjoyed. She was also a reader; she liked to care for her nephews and enjoyed the company of her cousins. Most especially, though, she enjoyed dancing and performing in school plays, she said, her face brightening as she spoke of those activities.

  The train whistled as it slowly made its way to the next stop, snow coming down a little more heavily. But she did like running, Price insisted. Betty casually told him that she liked to run up and down her neighborhood with her friends and across her family’s and neighbors’ backyards during the late afternoons, when the sun slowly dipped behind the clothesli
nes and the grass was cool against her feet. She ran during the church picnics her parents brought her to, winning almost as many ribbons for those races as she did for her cakes. She also ran at her father’s Masonic meetings, with the same results.

  Had she ever been timed? Price asked. Had anyone ever used a stopwatch to see how fast she could run? Betty seemed a little taken aback by this and said no one had ever shown any interest in doing that.

  The train slowed as it approached Price’s stop. When it pulled into the station, its doors opened and he got up. Before leaving, he turned back to Betty and made her a proposition that would change the course of her days: Would she mind meeting him tomorrow afternoon in the first-floor corridor of their high school? He wanted to time her, to see how fast she could really run.

  —

  Betty considered his request; she liked Mr. Price, with his quiet, awkward manners and the thoughtfulness he brought to even the most boring lessons he taught. So she agreed, and the doors closed behind him. She watched him walk over the elevated platform into the waning light, still unsure of what the conversation had been about or why it had mattered so much to him that she’d come for a run tomorrow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A NEW ARRIVAL

  Elizabeth “Betty” Robinson was born on August 23, 1911, in Riverdale, Illinois, to Harry and Elizabeth Robinson. Harry had arrived in the United States in the late months of 1888 from his native village in Ireland, where he had spent his free hours between dawn and dusk practicing his own athletic interests, including sprinting up and down the country lanes, all the while dreaming of ways to cross the Atlantic. People had watched as the years went by and the exercises strengthened him, so that by the time he had managed to leave his country, the tall young man, who stood over six feet, had distinguished himself by his powerful legs.