Squirrel Stage

From 1915 to 1925, Joie Ray was considered the best mile runner in the world. In 1925 he tied Paavo Nurmi for the indoor record--4 min. 12 sec. Three years later he astonished everyone by making good his boast to become a marathon runner. He was on the U. S. Olympic team in 1928. Since then Ray's achievements have diminished, but not his confidence nor his odd, insistent courage. He competed in C. C. Pyle's second transcontinental footrace, lost a six-day race against a horse in Philadelphia. He tried prizefighting, long-distance roller-skating, driving a taxi (his first profession). Last winter he strapped snowshoes on his serviceable feet and finished seventh in the three-day snowshoe race from Quebec to Montreal. Last week reporters were not much surprised when they found Joie Ray in a Newark, N. J. dancehall, where a marathon dance had been going on for nine weeks. Ray, with his partner, a 19-year-old Alice Krug, was one of ten competitors left. Said he:

"You can't keep the wolf from the door with medals. ... I have to eat and that's why I'm doing this. And you can take it from me, I've got this marathon dance thing sewed up. I passed through the squirrel stage, when you get hopeless and exhausted long ago. ... I could go out and break 4:25 for the mile right now. . . . That $1,000 prize is as good as in my pocket right now. . . . This thing is in the bag."

Observers, recalling a career in which Ray's extravagant self-adulation has never deterred him from any form of self-inflicted torture, wondered whether he had really passed the squirrel stage. For his first marathon Ray scorned to train, set off at a fast clip wearing the shoes he used for middle-distance running. Doctors cut off these shoes when the race was over. In them they found evidence of almost super-human endurance--two swollen purple lumps which were Ray's feet, chafed to the bone and caked with blood from broken blisters. Clarence De Mar, spindle-shanked Boston printer, won the race. Ray, informed that he could never run again, slicked his hair, said he would run within a month and "positively win." A month later -- in a race which Ray re members with a shade less satisfaction than the first -- he beat De Mar in a marathon at Long Beach, L. I. Last week, having gained ten pounds in the marathon dance, he announced his intention of enter ing the Quebec to Montreal snowshoe race, in which, last year, his face was frozen.

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