ABOVE: Ellison Brown (Narragansett), with son Ellison Jr., at Hyde Shoe, 12-Mile Race in Cambridge, Mass. Ellison Jr. came in 36th. Leslie Jones (1886–1967). March 1955.
MIDDLE: Ellison Brown (Narragansett) running along Lake Cochituate, near Natick, Mass. (around mile nine) in the 1936 Boston Marathon, which he subsequently won. Leslie Jones (1886–1967), photographer.
FAR RIGHT: Young at Heart. Statue of two versions of Boston Marathon runner Johnny Kelley, holding hands. On the left, Kelley when he won the race in 1935; on the right Kelley at the age of 84, upon completion of his 61st marathon. Erected at the base of Heartbreak Hill, the marathon landmark that was the turning point of the race in 1936 when Ellison Brown (Narragansett) passed Kelley and won the marathon. Strangely, Brown does not figure in the statue. Sculpted by Rich Muno.
him the nickname “Tarzan” after the Edgar Rice Burroughs hero, in his own Narragan- sett community Brown was known as “Deer- foot,” the same moniker held by Louis Ben- nett, champion Seneca long-distance runner of the 1860s. Outside of running, Brown’s life was filled
with hardship and disappointment. He grew up in extreme poverty with six siblings, three brothers and three sisters. His brothers died long before they reached old age – Franklin by drowning, Edwin by gunshot and Clif- ford by stabbing. Although a fisherman and a mason by trade, Brown was unemployed for long periods. His formal schooling ended at the seventh grade. Indeed, his hope was that his skills as an unpaid amateur athlete would open doors and provide employment during the hard times of the Great Depression. That did not occur. In 1926 at the age of 12, the precocious
Narragansett runner came to the attention of Tippy Salimeno, a Westerly, R.I., trainer of long-distance runners. One of Salimeno’s runners was Chief Horatio “Dunk” Stanton, Jr. To the trainer’s surprise, the 12-year-old Brown nearly kept pace with the experienced Stanton in a 14-mile run from Westerly to a ballfield in Shannock, R.I. Salimeno encour- aged Brown, but advised the lad that the Ama- teur Athletic Union only allowed participants into sanctioned events when they reached the age of 16. In the next years, although without tutelage and proper running shoes, Brown took up formal running, improved his stam-
44 AMERICAN INDIAN SPRING 2017
ina and learned long-distance race strategies. Salimeno later became his trainer. Track-and-field events had a resurgence
in Indian Country in the early 1930s. At the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Wilson David “Buster” Charles, an Oneida from De Pere, Wis., finished fourth in the decathlon, the premier track-and-field event along with the marathon. It was not a coincidence that Brown decid-
ed to enter the Boston Marathon the following year. Now 21, standing 5'7" and weighing 138 pounds of muscle, he finished 14th year, he finished 32nd
. The next . But in the 1935 Marathon
he received major press attention and became part of the race’s lore, even though he didn’t medal. His mother had just died, and to honor her memory, Brown wore a jersey made of one of her best dresses. During the last third of the race, he decided to abandon his running shoes, beat-up high-cut sneakers, either because of discomfort or because they had fallen apart. For the next five to seven miles, he ran bare- foot. Even without footgear, Brown finished in 13th
place! One of his fellow competitors was
the Haudenosaunee Russell George, a highly touted 17-year-old runner from the Onondaga reservation in central New York. George had injured his ankle prior to the marathon, and both he and Brown failed to catch the ultimate winner, the famous Johnny Kelley. But Brown decisively entered Marathon
history with his first win, in April 1936, on a day when it drizzled off and on. Unlike Brown’s previous marathon strategies where
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY, LESLIE JONES COLLECTION
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