"ME AND JULIO DOWN BY THE SCHOOL TRACK"
by Marc Bloom
Marc Bloom's 1986 story in The Runner magazine--a 16,000-word memoir of the high school boys record in the two-mile relay--generated more mail and overall reaction than any story he's ever written. The piece took on a life of its own and continues to be discussed today. The record, 7:35.6, set in 1966 by Andrew Jackson High of Queens, New York, and its rival, Boys High of Brooklyn, stood for 36 years. Bloom wrote about the record, which he was a part of as a young journalist, in June of 1986, on the 20th anniversary of the race. To do the story, Bloom located and interviewed all eight athletes from the two relay teams, and their two coaches. The story is all the more poignant now in the aftermath of the death of the star of the article, the legendary Julio Meade, on February 23, 2001, at age 53. Meade, the nation's top high school sprinter of 1966, led off the Jackson relay . The story begins...
It was 1966, and I was a teenager in love. I was 19, just starting out as a journalist, and infatuated with something call High School Track.
College friends said, "Get a date, we'll go out."
"No," I said. "I have a meet to cover."
They did not understand, of course. I explained: "The meet lasts all day, then I have to compile the statistics, make some calls, gather all my data and rush a report off to Track & Field News."
Still they did not understand, and secretly I was glad they didn't. Imagine what they would have thought if they did.
Try and tell them that instead of going out on a Saturday night you preferred to watch Julio Meade and Otis Hill run the quarter at a dank military armory on the fringes of Harlem, then write effusively about every nuance of the race to assure that the local athletes were duly recognized and credited by anyone who cared as much about this sort of thing as you did.
Oh, the memories, sweet and lasting: One indelible image is of the sprint relays that were part of the indoor meets at the "Armory," the 102nd Engineer's Armory, a huge installation used by the National Guard in upper Manhattan. Track in New York is black, especially the sprints, and for a white kid barely wet behind the ears in the early '60s, watching an all-black final of an 880-yard on the slick, wood Armory floor took your breath away. Even the warm-ups were captivating. Four young men with shaved heads and dress sweats would jog in unison, cool and dignified. Towels rested around their necks, tucked into their sweat tops. I always wondered what they were for. Long strips of tape were affixed to the jersey of the leadoff man. Homemade starting blocks.
In the tight balcony rimming the track, teammates and friends swayed to the rhythms of radios, harmonized lyrics of encouragement and reached over the guard-rail to pound the balcony beams with their fists. Sprinters' soul music. When I ran, no team from my school, Sheepshead Bay, would dare answer an early call for the 880-yard relay and risk being thrown into a qualifying heat with, say, DeWitt Clinton of the Bronx...
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 20-year reunion in '86. From left: Mark Ferrell, John Henry, Milt Blatt, Marc Bloom, Doug Terry, Julio Meade, Sam Thomas. Kneeling (from L): Mike Randall, Bill Jacobs, Jim Jackson. Missing: Mark Edmead
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