The first New York City Marathon was nothing like Sunday’s big race, but they do have one key thing in common: Fred Lebow.
Lebow, a Romanian-born Holocaust survivor who sold knockoffs in Manhattan’s Garment District, helped launch and organize the first ever New York City Marathon in 1970.
It was a relatively humble affair: 126 men and one woman lined up at the starting line then proceeded to run several laps around Central Park.
“By today’s standards it seemed quite disorganized, with bicycles and pedestrians weaving in and out among the racers,” George A. Hirsch writes in the introduction to “New York City Marathon: 50 Years Running” (Skyhorse Publishing) from Richard O’Brien, out now. The book paints a rich portrait of Lebow and his pioneering road race, happening for the 50th time on Nov. 7.
The New York City Marathon as we know it didn’t really get moving until 1976. That was when a civil servant and local runner named George Spitz proposed expanding the race to go through all five boroughs. Lebow thought it was overly ambitious.
“A race like that could cost $15,000 and where are we going to get that kind of money?” Hirsch recalls Lebow asking. But Spitz persisted and got then-Manhattan Borough President Percy Sutton on board. Sutton found some local businessman to put up $25,000 for the event, and things took off.
“That was the starting point,” writes Hirsch, the 87-year-old former publisher of magazines including The Runner and Runner’s World.
About 2,000 people started the race, and 1,549 finished, surpassing the number of participants in the Boston Marathon at the time and making it the biggest marathon in the world.
“We all knew that we had an instant hit on our hands — one that would become an annual institution and the best day in the life of New York City,” writes Hirsch. And “everyone agreed that Lebow had done a magnificent job.”
Lebow became the driving force behind the day, overseeing every aspect of the race, large and small, year after year. He’d hand out T-shirts in the streets and was an easily recognizable presence always sporting a beard and sneakers.
A 1979 article in The Runner magazine depicted Lebow hardly sleeping or eating for several days in the run-up to the event, fussing over every line and every turn on the course. Another article portrayed Lebow “coping with the aftermath” of the 1978 marathon. It had been successful but he fretted over tiny things that didn’t quite go as planned, telling the magazine “my personal disorganization was inexcusable.” He even wondered if he should stop doing it.
“I feel tonight a little like the happily married man who goes down to the corner for a pack of cigarettes and never comes back,” he said. “Maybe I should just walk away from the marathon, disappear, do something different.”
His obsessiveness meant he could never actually compete in the marathon himself.
“To have directed it so well that I could afford to run in it, too,” Lebow once said. “To be able to run in the New York City Marathon — that’s my ultimate dream.”
Born Fischel Lebowitz to a large Orthodox family, Lebow grew up in Arad, Romania, during the Nazi occupation. He survived and, after the war, fled during his teenage years, working as a smuggler of sugar and diamonds from continental Europe to England and Iceland. He eventually emigrated to the United States and ended up running a nightclub in Cleveland. Then he moved to New York and started working in the garment industry. One day, a friend challenged him to a 1.6-mile trot around the Central Park reservoir and he quickly became consumed with the sport. He went on to join the New York Road Runners, an organization he would eventually oversee for two decades.
He was as serious about his own miles as he was overseeing the marathon.
“Running is the oasis in life, the one area, unlike business or relationships with women or friends, where one does not cheat or exaggerate,” the lifelong bachelor told Hirsch. “I will never write in my log that I ran a mile more than I really did.”
And yet, for all he did for the city’s running community, Lebow wasn’t perfect. For years, he fought against having a wheelchair division and he was reluctant to fully embrace female runners in the early days.
“As much of a visionary as he was, he was still kind of a purist in his mind,” says O’Brien.
In 1992, Lebow ran the marathon for the first and only time. He was 60 years old at that point and in remission from brain cancer. Grete Waitz, his good friend and winner of the marathon a record nine times — Lebow called her “the Queen of the Road” — ran by his side through the entire course.
Just before their race together, Waitz recalled seeing him a couple years prior and thinking he had only months to live. “I didn’t think we would be running a marathon two years later,” she told The New York Times.
He talked of how he’d run in the hospital, saying “it was 67 times around the roof to make one mile. I would go 67 laps.”
The pair finished the race in just over five and a half hours. “Fred’s journey that day remains one of the emotional highpoints of the race’s first half century,” O’Brien writes.
“He and Grete had been cheered every step of the way by throngs of New Yorkers who recognized and clearly appreciated … this thing he had done so much to give them. This great annual celebration of city life and spirit.”
The years run by
A selected timeline in major moments of the New York City Marathon
1970 — The first New York City Marathon is held. The course is limited to laps of Central Park and there are just over 100 competitors.
1976 — The first five-borough New York City marathon is held. Roughly 2,000 men and 100 women run the race. Among them are two celebrities: ballet dancer Jacques d’Amboise, who had to hide his training from George Balanchine, and Newark Mayor Kenneth Gibson. Bostonian Bill Rodgers completes the course in a blistering two hours, ten minutes, and 9.6 seconds, the fastest time ever recorded by an American at that point. After collecting his trophy, he jogs to get his car on the Upper West Side and finds it’s been towed. Lebow has to lend him money to get it back.
1978 — An unknown woman with her hair in blonde pigtails and red ribbons speeds ahead of the pack. “We don’t know who she is,” an announcer calls over the PA as she takes the lead. She is Grete Waitz, a 25-year-old teacher from Oslo, Norway, running her first-ever marathon. She wins handily, coming in at 2:32:30, two minutes faster than the women’s world record at the time. It’s the first of nine NYC Marathons that Waitz will ultimately win, a record that still stands today.
1979 — A Cuban-American woman named Rosie Ruiz convinces Lebow to give her a last-minute slot in the race, saying she has brain cancer. She runs the race in just under three hours, coming in 11th place, but it’s later found that she didn’t run the race in its entirety. Ruiz is disqualified.
1980 — A 22-year-old from Massachusetts named Alberto Salazar wins in his marathon debut. Salazar will go on to win two more times and become one the country’s most famous distance runners and later a prominent coach. But, in recent years, his legacy has been tarnished by allegations of doping, and sexual and emotional abuse.
1992 — South Africa’s Willie Mtolo wins, ushering in decades of African runners dominating the event.
1994 — The 25th five-borough marathon features a record 31,129 starters. Kenyan Tegla Laroupe is the first African woman to break the finish tape.
2001 — The city comes together for the event, just 54 days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “Amid mourning and ongoing apprehension, but buoyed by a determined sense of togetherness, 24,000 runners and two million spectators took to the streets — their streets — in a united act of faith and renewal,” O’Brien writes.
2007 — Briton Paula Radcliff is the winning woman. She celebrates holding her 10-month-old daughter, Isla, in a victory for female athletes. “It was a moment that transcended sport,” then NYRR president Mary Wittenberg told Runner’s World. “All these moms who were watching were like, ‘Wow. OK. We can do that.’”
2009 — Meb Keflezighi, who emigrated from Eritrea as a child, becomes the first American man to win the marathon since 1982.
