The Remarkable 1966 Track Season in New York City

Sparked An Era Of National Excellence

By Marc Bloom

Part One

(first of two parts)

Sixty years ago this week, on a Friday in May, 1966, I packed a bag, put my teel Olivetti Lettera 32 manual typewriter into its nifty blue-and-black carrying case, secured my professional reporter’s notebook, Radio Shack recorder and updated all-time lists, and took my first car, a converted New York City taxi-cab with a cherry-red paint job and spacious back seat, to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

I was 19. It was my first assignment for The New York Times. I would be heading three hours north as a guest of the Boys High track team to cover the 26th annual Schenectady Interscholastic Sports Carnival. Re-named in 1969 as the William F. Eddy, Jr. meet, the 2026 edition is coming up this Saturday on May 16.

Times have changed, quite literally. Back then, even with an un-super track and very un-super shoes, all the boys’ winning times were faster than what was produced in 2025, 59 years later. The 2-mile differential was 14 seconds.

In 1966, my typewriter gave me away: despite my youth, I was a real reporter, like Tom Wicker covering racial strife in the South or Harrison Salisbury taking apart the Iron Curtain from his gilded post in Moscow. 

Oh, but it was just a track meet. Upstate, too. Who the heck cared about Upstate? Funny thing, The Times did.     

Back then, Times editors on the third-floor newsroom at 229 West 43rd Street, in the heart of Times Square, wore three-piece suits, smoked pipes and decided what the world should think about. They referred to the sports pages derisively as the “toy store.”

The Old Grey Lady took its sports with some self-conscious refinement. The “Yanks” and “Dem Bums” were for tabloid chatter. Even Willie Mays, the stickball king of Lenox Avenue, and Sandy Koufax, the Bensonhurst bonus baby, had to share space with fishing columns and dog shows.

So, what did The Times want with a high school track meet three hours yonder in the small city of Schenectady, known mainly for being the home of General Electric and its proximity to Albany, the state capital?

Then, the nexus of New York City track and cross county could be mapped into a tight triangle from the Armory on 168th Street to Downing Stadium (now Icahn) on Randalls Island to the hills of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx -- all connected within a handful of bus and subway stops. It’s not all that much different today.

With The Times doing its important work in the halls of the Capitol, and fulfilling its journalistic role in seeking to preserve democracy, there was little time to be cute or colorful, to waste time with balls and strikes. After all, it had been almost a decade since the Dodgers and Giants had gone West. There was no Super Bowl or March Madness. The NBA teetered on bankruptcy. The NFL was barely on television.

When I took my Lettera 32 up to Schenectady, I wondered about the impression I’d make. What would the local press from the Schenectady Gazette and Albany Times-Union think of a kid from Brooklyn trying to come off as one of their own? I had already been covering meets for the Long Island Press, starting at 18. I’d devoured accounts of journalism, even a 600-page textbook called, “Modern Sports Writing,” published in 1965.

I held onto the book, and when I opened it recently, I was reminded of what served as the frontispiece — a letter on Times stationery dated January, 1940, by the most heralded sports columnist of them all, Arthur Daley, in which he passed on sage advice to a young sports writer. Daley made a point of saying, “I started out in this business covering track meets,” and with the indoor meets at night, Daley said, he learned to size up the results and write fast to meet deadlines.

Daley emphasized the good training those early assignments gave him, and I can say the same for myself. Learning the ropes, I would welcome reporting for multiple outlets, turning out a fresh “lede” for each story, as various deadlines and local angles stared me down.

I still have the Lettera, too, and now, when I pick it up, the machine feels heavy, much heavier than I’d remembered. That vessel did indeed carry weight. In the heyday of print, it meant something as a primary conveyance of news and illumination, even if the keys pecked out races and places from the toy store, with their quick studies of young athletes in the throes of a burgeoning manhood.

When I arrived in Bed-Stuy that day, I parked near Boys High, where I would meet the team and its coach, Doug Terry, for the trip. Terry had welcomed me onto the team bus in what would become a more than 50-year friendship. 

Unlike most people in my parochial neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay, I saw promise and enlightenment in mixing with black peers. Something within me assessed a freedom in pushing boundaries and finding out how others lived. I guess that was part of my journalistic ambition: to know more.

When, two years earlier, Bob Dylan had come out with “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” a racial comeuppance and tribute to Medgar Evers, gunned down by the Klan, I took that message seriously. Bed-Stuy was not new to me. Helping my father during school holidays on his soft-drink delivery route, I would see poor kids hanging out aimlessly on sweltering streets.

Bus trips for high school teams from the city were almost unheard of. Who had the money? Besides, if you went afar, say, to the Penn Relays in Philadelphia, train lines could take you to within a walk of Franklin Field.

But Schenectady was special — the meet had begun in 1941 six months before Pearl Harbor — and the Kangaroos’ athletes filled the bus. Their main opposition would come from Public Schools Athletic League rival Andrew Jackson of Queens as well as White Plains, from the Westchester County suburbs just north of the city. 

With the unique collection of athletes from those three schools, and the sizzling performances stamped that winter on the barn-like 220-yard track at the Armory, it was understood by all of us that we were on the cusp of some new definitions of high school pre-eminence.

There was already much grandeur to live up to. In 1965, two future Olympic gold medalists had left their marks locally —Vincent Matthews of Andrew Jackson, who would win the 400 meters at the Munich Games in 1972, and Bob Beamon of Jamaica, also in Queens, who would win the 1968 long jump at Mexico City with his “Beamonesque” leap.

The 1966 athletes would soon achieve Beamonesque stature before there was even a name for it. And it was the perfect moment. Track did not have to beg for attention. Track was big. 

As I took my seat next to coach Terry in the front of the bus, and we headed up the Thruway, I felt an importance beyond my years. 

In high school, at 17, I’d sent meet results and stories to Track & Field News. One day, I received a personal letter of thanks from the editor with an I.D. card naming me as an official contributor. I could not make my team’s mile relay for Penn in 1964, but went to Philadelphia anyway and met my first mentor, Jim Dunaway of T&FN, in the press box. One thing led to another and by the time of the ’66 season, I was the young guy who knew all the records, the one coaches relied upon to help plan for post-season showdowns.

While track was respected, and events like the annual U.S. vs. Soviet Union dual meet captured Cold War attention, in high school circles, at least locally, the sport was embarrassingly primitive. New York State rules allowed for doubling only in the 100 and 220, or in one sprint and one hurdles race; or in a sprint and field event; or two field events. If you ran the 440 or longer, you were done, you could not even come back in a relay. 

With the severe rules’ restrictions, post-season events were necessary in order for teams to assemble its best and try for records; also, to take advantage of good weather since early spring in the northeast was so unreliable. In 1966, White Plains had hoped to attack the national mile relay record of 3:14.9 at Penn, but wound up running 3:17.9 to win in a downpour on the muddy cinder track at Franklin Field. The Tigers defeated Excelsior of Jamaica, 3:21.0.

Three seconds ahead of the best foursome from Jamaica? Something was cooking!

At Penn, I’d sat in the sprawling press box with all the pros whose stuff I’d try to emulate, like Jesse Abramson of the New York Herald Tribune and Frank Dolson of the Philly Inquirer. In Schenectady, I would find a bridge table serving as press row with a few of us crammed together, our typewriter carriages colliding like train cars. We would wait for results from another table where the ladies’ auxiliary typed out names with all the speed of Carol Burnett in her hilarious secretary skit with Tim Conway.

A Times sports editor had told me the number of words to write, finishing his instruction with “and,” shorthand for the summaries, or results, also called “agate” for their small 5 to 6-point type. I was also ordered to “file” my story with Western Union, which serviced newspapers at various speeds at a time when content was called “copy” and reporters were the press, not the “media.”

That year’s site, Linton High School, was prepared to welcome the likes of Julio Meade and Mark Ferrell from Andrew Jackson, James Jackson and Mike Randall from Boys High, Otis Hill and Larry James from White Plains, to name a few of the luminaries who a few weeks hence would lead the nation carrying, in the current vernacular, “burning batons.” 

I’d brought all my stats onto the Boys High bus. Coach Terry and I plotted out the final details of the planned match races for June, in which Boys, Jackson and White Plains would go for it all. The boys on the bus included the foursome that had just set a national record in the distance medley at Penn — on a clear Friday before the Saturday rain — in 10:09.8. Jim Jackson had run a 4:14 anchor mile. Mike Randall’s three-quarter was 3:06.

Jackson, then a junior, always went out fast, some would say too fast. That winter, he’d set national “flat-floor” records (a designation for unbanked tracks) in the 600 yards, 1:12.9; 880 yards, 1:55.2; and 1,000 yards, 2:14.0, at the Armory. 

“I came into Boys High as a sprinter,” Jackson reminded me when I spoke with him recently from his retirement home in South Carolina. I’d stayed in touch with Jim and the others contacted for this remembrance through the years. Jackson added, “I was a neophyte in the mile.”

The mile, and distance running overall, were catalysts in track’s stature, which, among the other major sports of the day—baseball, college football, college basketball, horse racing and boxing — permeated with a certain veneer of amateur panache: working class hero meets “Chariots of Fire.”

It was only a decade or so since the Englishman Roger Bannister’s first sub-4 in 1954. After that, Herb Elliott of Australia captured the 1960 Olympic 1,500 in world record time and would retire in his early 20s. He had to get a paying job. Peter Snell of New Zealand succeeded Elliott with his early sixties Olympic titles and world records. 

Not to let Commonwealth runners take all the glory, Jim Beatty of the U.S. became the first indoor sub-4 runner in ’62. Bob Schul and Billy Mills proceeded to sweep the Olympic 5,000 and 10,000 at Tokyo in ’64. That same year, Jim Ryun and Gerry Lindgren made teen-age breakthroughs previously unimagined.

Maybe it was becoming anachronistic, but the prized purity within the gritty lean-ness of the track, soon to be embodied in the daring style of Steve Prefontaine, struck a chord with the public. It was that kind of cultural imperative that embraced Boys High and the other city and suburban kids as they made their way up to the Capital District.

While Ryun and Pre would garner prestigious Sports Illustrated covers in high school, New York collected something almost as fancy when an S.I. photographer paid Jim Jackson a visit in Bed-Stuy. The resulting shot, a full page, pictured a smiling Jackson, track shoes slung over his shoulder, with neighborhood kids showering him with cheer, and 19th-century brownstones, now worth millions, in the background.

Jackson’s young life was not always so rosy. The 10th of 13 children to a mother who worked as a domestic and father who took odd jobs as a handy man, Jim grew up in a public housing project. With the age spread, Jim told me, there were seven siblings in the house at the same time, four boys in one room, three girls in the other. 

“I did not have my own bed,” said Jim. “But I never knew I was poor. Our apartment was always clean, and our Christmas was always joyful.”

Jackson had avoided the worst ills of the streets by running for the Police Athletic League. Once making a name for himself at Boys, he would learn of newspaper stories about him from teachers, clippings he would find and keep to this day.

Amid the racial turmoil — from the Bloody Sunday of Martin Luther King’s Selma-to-Montgomery march, to the assassination of Malcolm X a few blocks from the Armory, both in 1965 — it was not surprising to find black youth guarded in the presence of white folks.

When the Boys High team pulled into Schenectady for the night, I sensed that Terry had hand-picked a “Green Book” hotel. In the mid-sixties, upstate accommodations were not particularly hospitable to a bus-load of black kids from the ‘hood. When everyone got out into the lobby, Terry lined up the youngsters in pairs and assigned them rooms.

As the athletes walked the corridor, the Green Mile, as it were, Terry asked each one who would like to room with me. No response. At the end of the line, one boy, of Puerto Rican descent, agreed. We hit it off.

On The Times sports pages then, the biggest stories were treated with “streamer” hedes, that is, headlines run across all eight columns at the top of a page to signify importance — an honor that track and cross country could count on at the time.

Like this one from the ’66 indoor season that I saved along with hundreds of other clippings, including my own, in thick looseleaf binders:

Meade Races 440 in 0:49.9 and Defeats Hill by Two Feet

Written by Bill Miller, my second mentor after Jim Dunaway, the story featured one of the four historic long-sprint duels that winter at the Armory, this one at the St. Francis Prep Games, between Julio Meade and Otis Hill, the two best quarter-milers in the country. Meade won all four, two at 300 yards and two at 440, running 31.3 and 49.4, the latter a flat-floor record, in the process.

“Legendary” has become a cliche that gets bounced around. Here it was a bullseye. The two seniors, from blue chip track programs, shoulder-to-shoulder, money waged, the metal garters in the cheap seats pounded by each camp’s fans for all they were worth.

The elegant Meade, supple and lithe, evinced maniacal serenity while holding off the muscular Hill, an all-county halfback with a tight stride and stoic bearing, who ran coiled to the wire.

Four races. Four Saturdays. It was Shakespearean.

The track facility, then called 102nd Engineer’s Armory for the National Guard unit that served out of its quarters, was often referred to as a “drill shed.” The Guard did its military maneuvers on the main floor where the oval had been situated since the Spanish-American War. They must have gotten the wooden planks in a fire sale. 

The surface, to my mind — I first laid my eyes on it running a novice mile relay in December ’62 — was barely adequate for “hut, hut, right, left, forward march.” For running? Oh boy.

Meade was the rare bird who’d mastered the physics of sprinting out of the hole — no blocks or spikes allowed — to the turn untouched, slicing around the curve with a superego that would have astounded even Freud, and hauling home with legs eating up the splintered mass enshrined by the peering lights of the Edwardian ceiling.

If there was ever any doubt that Meade was the Michaelangelo of the Armory, the year before, in the winter of ’65, in a match race that would prove to be a forerunner of ’66, Jackson and Boys met in the 880-yard relay. 

First game of a Subway Series.

When Vinnie Matthews handed off to Meade for the anchor leg, Boys had a sizable lead, perhaps 7 or 8 yards. I was there and braced for what would happen next.

Meade took a clean pass and accelerated into flight like something original: the sprinter as the perfect human. Did Meade’s feet even touch the ground? I could not be sure. No one could. Meade made mincemeat of the Boys High anchor, a young man who probably wished he’d stayed in bed that morning, with an anchor split of 21 seconds flat.

Jackson coach Milt Blatt thought his stopwatch had gone bonkers. But that was Meade’s time: 21 seconds. Imagine the split today on the Mondo surface with jet fueled shoes. I dare not say. Jackson and Boys were clocked in 1:30.1 and 1:30.2, then the fastest indoor times ever.

In his Times story of the St. Francis 440, Bill Miller wrote that Meade’s “superior stamina made the difference” when Hill pulled to Meade’s side with 70 yards to go and the two athletes drove down the stretch, Meade winning, 49.9 to 50.0.

Originally from the Dominican Republic, Meade was unique among runners, then and now. He was a sprinter who also excelled at distance. From the indoor 60 yards to 2.5-mile cross country, Meade’s versatility knew no limits. Meade did not just run cross country: he was all-city in the PSAL.

Years ago, Meade told me that he got his endurance from working his grandfather’s sugar cane crop in the Dominican Republic over the summer. He had that in common with his best friend, Mark Ferrell. Recently, Mark said that he’d also worked on his family’s spread, in North Carolina, helping with the tobacco crop. “That was how I started getting in shape for cross country,” Ferrell said.

In the corridors of Andrew Jackson, a large racially mixed school that drew from Cambria Heights, mostly white, and St. Albans, mostly black, the trio of Julio, Mark and Bill Jacobs — “thick as thieves,” said Mark — and their teammates were fairly lubricated from the racial tensions of the moment. When Mark had a white girlfriend, he drew some furrowed looks, but they were harmless. “We all got along,” he said.

Julio was too busy for girlfriends. He worked two jobs after school. Plus, his strict Dominican father, a longshoreman, would not have approved. Dad was not a fan of his son’s track life either.

But, in a few short weeks, from Queens to California, when his credentials were added up, Meade would prove to be not only the most magnificent of all high school trackmen at the time, but maybe ever.

Julio Meade: Quincy meets Cooper. A figure perhaps only Michaelangelo could imagine.

(End part one)