Dale Story 2014 from
Oregon State Archives
There are a lot of resources lying quietly around the country with stories to tell. This one comes from the Oregon State University Library files. A few days ago Bill Stewart in Michigan commented about Dale Story winning the NCAA cross country without shoes and asked some pertinent questions which I could not answer. So a quick google search got me to the OSU library archives. A lot of prominent grads of the university have been interviewed and their stories are in those files. This one is in two forms, audio/visual and transcribed. I'm pasting the portion of the transcription of Chis Peterson's interview with Dale Story where he talks about that NCAA race. Dale Story won that NCAA race my senior year in high school, so we all knew some things about him but this interview will fill in the rest.
Dale Story crossing the line in East Lansing 1961
There are a lot of interesting things about Dale Story and I heartily encourage you to read and/or watch the whole interview. When he was 11 years old he was stricken with polio and could not move for a year. Didn't have to be in an iron lung however. His single parent mom took care of him (no home health nurse in those days) and he recovered. Had to beg his way into a tryout for the cross country team as a 5' 2" middle schooler. Ran barefoot everywhere growing up. He majored in forestry and wildlife conservation. Hunted regularly when he was in college. Doesn't say where he kept his guns, but they were an important part of his life. Really liked his coach Sam Bell at OSU and also was greatly inspired by his high school coach. He became a teacher and coach in northeastern Oregon. It's a very good interview with lots of introspection on why he did not pursue a running career further after college. He actually became less interested in running even in his last year of undergrad.
The link to the site is Dale Story Interview from OSU archives When you open this click on the word "Video" and then you can read or watch the interview. It is 1 hr. 55 minutes long or about 24 pages of reading. The interview was made in January, 2014.
This experience leads me to believe that there are tons of information lying dormant in university archives all over the country. I encourage you to go to you old school library (online) and see what there is in those vaults. If you find good stuff, let us know and we'll bring it to everyone's attention.
George
Here is the part of the interview about the 1961 NCAA race.
CP: So what do you remember about the day of the championship race in Michigan?
DS: In Michigan?
CP: Cold day.
DS: Cold day. It was about—well they said it was 32; I thought it was 30, but anyway. If I remember, there was occasional patches of snow, but not much, just mainly bare, but cold. A lot of acorns from those oak trees on the course. And the wind was blowing, and so we wore our sweat suits to the last, right 'til the very end, because I didn't want to take them off, but everybody looked at me like I was running barefoot, and they just laughed. And they thought, "Well, you're crazy, you know?" And then they were talking about hills, and I said, "Boy, you boys don't know what hills are. You need to come out to Oregon. We can show you what hills are." These things were just gentle rises. Pretty excited.
I wrote down everything that I felt after the race, and it's on a piece of paper at home, and Kinsey Gomez here at the school does the same thing, and I think that's great. Because as soon as the race was over, I would write down all of the positive and all of the negative things that came to my mind, and my emotions, because I wanted to capture them. And then later on I could share them with myself, or my family, or kids, whatever. And I remember being a little nervous, because you always get nervous. You get the butterflies, and then you get them out of your system in the first few meters.
But what really scared me was the funnel we had to go through. We had I think it was 134 runners, if I remember right, and it was two posts that we had to go through about roughly 400 meters out, yards, or 440. And I knew that to channel 134 people through that posts, that if you're not in the first 5 or 10, you're screwed. And so I didn't want to do that; I didn't want to go out that fast, but there was no other choice. So I think that first quarter was probably pretty close to 57. I had somebody there timing, but a little faster than I wanted to be, but you had to do it. And I don't remember exactly; I was like fourth or fifth coming through there, something like that.
And then the race progressed and I just gradually moved up a little bit. And then I got to a point where there was another gentleman runner from BYU, his name was Ratti Matti. What a name! He's from Finland. Nice kid, nice kid. And we were running beside each other, and I pulled up on him or he pulled up on me; I don't remember. And we turned to each other, and I said, "How far back?" And he says, [with Finnish accent" "They were 40 meters back there, you know, something like that." And I said, "Well, we'll run together. We'll help each other." "Yah, yah, we'll help each other." And so we just got a little team camaraderie, and we just kept going. We said, "Well, we'd better pick it up a little bit more." And it was kind of fun running with somebody.
But then I began to think, this can't go on forever. I want to win this race. You want to win the race. We can't do it together. And so I decided when I hit the hill, that—what they called the hill—was my strong point. I was pretty strong on hills. [0:54:59] So I thought, "I'll hit that hill with full fervor." And I sprinted up that baby as hard as I could. Then, I had always done before it, when you get over the top, as soon as I get out of sight, they remember, I was 30 meters ahead of them. When I go over the top, and I'm out of sight, if I can take that 30 meters and now make it 35 meters, and they don't know it, they don't see me speed up, then all of the sudden their brain starts working against them. So I did the same thing; I just let gravity pull me down that hill as fast as I could, in control. Whether it worked or not, I don't know.
But then I thought, since John Ward, that coach from junior college was so important to me, he was like my father, that was the thing I thought about explicitly. I says, "John, this race is for you. I'm doing this for you." And so the emotions just [growls] really got to a pitch, to a fervor. And so I strongly held the lead there for, I think it was like 500 yards from the finish, that hill was, roughly. Yeah. And crossed the line, and thought, "Wow. Did it! Don't know how, but I did it." [Laughs] And our team just came in great. Rich Cutty was 12th, and Bill Boyd was 16th, and Cliff Thompson was 25th, and Jerry Brady, unfortunately I don't have the place that he had right now to tell you, but he had a bad tendon, and he was back there a ways. So all of a sudden, we're all standing there grinning at each other.
CP: Did you feel like you had run one of your better races that day?
DS: No, I was disappointed at the time, but it was so cold. I always kind of like to get course records, and I wasn't able to get that. And yeah, I was a little disappointed at the time. But that damn wind was cold, you know. I just had on—compared to today's runners, I had on running togs, you know, shorts, and a running short sleeve top. We had no gloves; we had no hats. We had no long sleeve shirts, none of that fancy stuff. So you know, it probably took a little bit of toll. But again, I don't know. Who's to say that you could have run faster, or would have run faster? But keeping the body warm with those long tights wouldn't have hurt, because they weigh nothing. Yeah, so.
CP: You beat six future Olympians in that race.
DS: Probably by accident. [Laughs] On that given day, things clicked for me. Maybe they didn't for them. Keep in mind, there was other times that I didn't click, and I had what we would call, what I would call failure, you know. But that's life. That's, yeah. The only unfortunate thing that I had was I never did find out if I could have been in the Olympics. And when I was 35 years old that just beat me up, and I kept thinking, "Why didn't I do that? Why didn't I do that?" And I kept thinking, "At the time, you made the best decision you could do under the circumstances." Looking back on it now, it's different, but sure, there's a lot of things that are different now. But at the time I just couldn't make it fly.
CP: One of those Olympians was Billy Mills, in that race.
DS: Oh yeah, yeah.
CP: Did you ever know him at all, or meet him?
DS: Well, afterwards, I think—no, I didn't. But he came to the school where my granddaughters were running, and gave a speech, up in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, about I think roughly two years ago. And it was ironic, because they sat there and listened to him, and of course they were mesmerized, and I would be, too. Here's an Olympic champion, and an Indian too, and I really love the Indians. I just think they got really a bad deal. Anyway, but Sioux Indian, and yeah, fantastic. But again, who knows?
CP: How did the team celebrate afterwards?
DS: Well, we didn't drink. [Laughs] We were teetotalers, at least I was, and two of the three of the other guys. We didn't do too much that I remember, just sat around, I don't know. God, that's a good question. You might have to ask them. [Laughs] But we didn't go out and party or anything. It was kind of low-key. And I remember when we came back, Bill Boyd I think—yeah, Bill Boyd told me just not too long ago, he says, "When we came back to Oregon State, and landed, a few people showed up and said, 'Hey, good job.'" And he said it was like nothing, you know. And it was a little different than what you might see today.
But then, there's more kids today. There's more communication. [1:00:00] Things are bigger, and let's face it, I mean, I don't want to knock anybody's performance or anything, but this is cross country. This is not the big, major sport, football, basketball, you know. So, in that sense, it would have been nicer if it was a major, major sport, but it didn't, and so you just had to face reality. But we were pretty proud of it, you know.
CP: You received some attention partly for the barefoot piece, I'm sure, but you were in Time and Newsweek, is that correct? You were in several magazines.
DS: Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah it was kind of a thrill. [Laughs] Back in those days, nobody was running barefoot, so it was something unique. And I didn't do it to gain attention; I just did it because it was comfortable and I just thought it was faster. And since it worked for me, I kept it up. And all of the sudden, people started gravitating toward the barefoot runner, the barefoot runner. Then later on came Zola Budd, from South Africa, ran barefooted. And the big one was Abebe Bikila from Ethiopia, a marathon Olympic champion, and ran barefoot through the streets of Rome. I never ran through the hard pavement of Rome. I ran through gravel and dirt roads, so I probably, but. And now all of the sudden there's this new emphasis on running free, and with feet, and they've got those special shoes today that—but I told my friends I probably got more notoriety out of running half-naked than I did—or barefooted than I did with my times.
George:
As the article said, Sam Bell was his coach at Oregon State. Sam sometimes talked about Dale Story and later about Dyrol Burleson, his two best distance runners. By running barefoot Dale Story gave Sam plenty of stories to tell IU runners whom he might have considered a bit soft by the 1970s. I could just picture Dale picking it up after the crest of the hill. Sam always taught to pick it up after the crest of the hill because others would be just glad to get to the top. I can also picture no beer after the meet, very typical of Dale Story but also of Sam Bell. Indiana had a female runner win the NCAA barefoot in 1989. Michele Dekkers was from South Africa and never trailed in a race the entire season. I saw her run in the Regionals on a cold, wet, muddy day in Champaign, IL and she killed the field and impressed everyone with her running as well as her barefoot choice. Bill Schnier
George.. another to eschew the shoe.. bruce tulloh.. from Bill Stewart.
and Zola Budd. GB
I read somewhere how the Kenyans first have to adapt to wearing those shoes provided by the big shoe companies. After growing up barefoot and running sometimes six miles to school and back each day those kids develop incredible soles on their feet. When teaching in Zimbabwe one of the boys on the soccer team cut the sole of his foot on a pipe sticking out of the ground. We took him to the clinic and got it sewn up. I don't remember how many stitches. But that afternoon the soccer coach had him out on the field playing. I coached the track team and had some decent though not great runners. One of the boys a particularly nice kid named Ben Chitsike was the star 800 runner. I used to let him wear my Nike Waffles which were probably the only pair in the country at that time. He loved those shoes and enjoyed being seen wearing them. On the day of the big meet he had them on warming up and just before the race came up to me and handed them back. "Sir, I just can't run that well in these." He proceeded to go out and win his race. GB
Third Leg of 4 x 1 Mile Relay Drake Relays 1961 Dale Story, John Bork Western Michigan and Jerry McFadden Missouri. Can't see if Dale is barefoot. I asked Jerry what he remembered.
George,
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