SIX WOMEN SIT and hold signs written in marker on white poster board, their legs crisscrossed, shoulder to shoulder at the start line of the third New York City Marathon on Oct. 1, 1972. They sit for 10 minutes.
The signs are misspelled, written the night before, and read: "The AAU is archaic," "The AAU is midevil," and "Hey AAU this is 1972 wakeup!"
The women, Lynn Blackstone, Jane Muhrcke, Liz Franceschini, Pat Barrett, Nina Kuscsik and Cathy Miller, are in their late 20s and early 30s -- except for Barrett, who is 17 and terrified the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) will bar her from future races if they see a photo of her holding a sign calling out the organization. Her head is tilted toward the ground while the others look to the right.
"I was handed a sign," Blackstone says. "They were just handmade signs, scribbled." In the photo, she's on the far left wearing a striped tank top, her arms wrapped around her knees.
Standing behind the women is a group of 30 or so men with race bibs pinned to their shirts. They're waiting for the 26.2-mile race, still in its infancy with 272 runners and held entirely in Central Park, to start. The fee to enter is $1.
New York Times photographer Patrick A. Burns positions himself to the left of the crowd. He frames his shot to capture the starting line a few feet away. He is 64 and has worked at the paper for more than half his life. He senses history in the making. No one else seems to notice when he takes the photo.
It's the first New York City Marathon in which women are allowed to officially participate. After years of being barred from distance events, the AAU announced during the previous fall that certain women would be allowed to race in such events. There was no guidance on who qualified as "certain women," but in the spring of 1972, Kuscsik became the first woman to win the Boston Marathon officially. Before, women had to make their way into races covertly. In 1967, Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon with a bib number, ran under the name K. V. Switzer.
And there was a catch. The AAU mandated a separate start for men and women. The women could start 10 minutes before the men or after or from an entirely different start line. But they would not start together.
The six women are there to protest the separate start rule just months after Title IX of the education amendments of 1972, which prohibited federally funded educational institutions from discriminating against students or employees based on sex, was signed into law. There are 500 or so spectators, and from the crowd of people gathered this morning in front of Central Park West and 67th Street, a woman shouts, "right on!"
Burns' photo is published the following morning across four columns of the New York Times, right above mentions of the ongoing war in Vietnam, and collectively the women become known as "The Six Who Sat."
Blackstone, now 82, never talked about the photo much. She believed that her role in the photo, and thus history, resulted from being at the right place at the right time. She went to watch her husband run a marathon that day. Still, she's aware of the photo's resonance, how the sign she held alongside five others has allowed future generations of women to participate in distance running as equals. Women like her 14-year-old granddaughter Lily, who thought she'd maybe never run again. Blackstone is still an avid runner and takes a few seconds to respond when asked why. "Because I'm still here."
WE MEET AT a restaurant a few blocks away from Blackstone's apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She's lived in the same apartment building for 50 years, settling into a one-bedroom with her husband as newlyweds. As their family expanded, they moved to the 34th floor, where she could watch the sun rise and fall over the city.
It's early June, and in a few weeks, Blackstone plans to run the Mini 10K in Central Park with Lily and Lily's mother, Karina. Fifty years after Blackstone's first road race, the "Crazylegs Mini 10K in Central Park" -- where the race director invited Playboy Bunnies to promote the first all-women's road race -- she's running alongside Lily for her first.
We order lunch and make small talk. I scoot the recorder closer to her side of the table because of the music in the background. She doesn't seem to mind. Her voice comes out soft but certain. She is about 5-foot-5 with blue eyes and short hair, and attributes her health at this age to good genes and luck. After working at the Rockefeller Foundation for years, she retired in 2006 and is now considering getting a part-time job at Costco. "I don't want a lot of responsibility, but something to stay active and meet new people."
She is happy to talk to a reporter but worries she may not be interesting enough. Halfway through telling a story about growing up in Morristown, New Jersey, Blackstone asks, "Do you really want all of this?"
The oldest of four children, Blackstone and her younger sister were born during World War II just 13 months apart. The next two came after the war. Blackstone's father was a doctor stationed in France and North Africa for five years. He never talked about what he saw, and Blackstone never asked. "I was born in 1940, and my father got called to service in '41," Blackstone says. "For the first five years of growing up, we didn't know him." There was a picture of her father in his uniform that she and her sister Elizabeth would kiss goodnight.
Her parents encouraged their children -- three girls and one boy -- to play sports, which made others cluck. "Oh, the Terreri girls are lovely, but they're very athletic."
"It wasn't very feminine," Blackstone says. They lived near the local YMCA, which gave them access to a pool, and they became strong swimmers. When it was warmer, they took water ballet at summer camp. In high school, Blackstone was captain of the girls' six-on-six basketball team, on which she played guard. Their family belonged to a country club, and when Blackstone's father came home from the war, he decided his daughters would learn to play golf so they could perhaps play with their husbands one day. At this, Blackstone laughs. She enjoys the sport, but "not one of us married a golfer."
When the waiter comes to take her food away, Blackstone motions toward my plate. She believes it would be rude to clear the table while someone else is still eating. Then she continues her story. None of the three Blackstone girls married a golfer in part because Lynn Terreri met Dave Blackstone.
"I chased him up five flights of stairs," Blackstone says. Dave lived in a flat above hers in New York City, which Blackstone shared with Elizabeth. In the '70s, Blackstone graduated from Trinity in Washington, D.C., and worked as a secretary for the Rockefeller Foundation. "I was an economics major -- why in the world?" she questions. She started running because of two things: getting in shape and because of Dave.
Dave bought Blackstone her first pair of running shoes. She doesn't remember the brand or model, but it would be years before Nike would release the first running shoe designed for women. And there weren't running clothes designed for women, either. Blackstone remembers people commenting on her legs and how awkward she felt in her apartment building wearing shorts.
"I felt like such a fraud," she says. "I was going to run around the Reservoir with all these people who, in my mind, knew what they were doing. I don't think women these days feel that way." It took her three tries to run the 1.6-mile loop without stopping, and she never looked back.
In the early 70s, the running community was growing but still small in scale; it was still a few years before Jim Fixx's best-seller "The Complete Book of Running" would launch a running craze in America. Once, Blackstone and Dave were running in Central Park when a biker whizzed by with a shout: "If God meant man to run, he wouldn't have invented the bike!" But if you lived in New York City, you ran around the Central Park Reservoir. "You knew everybody was running on the Reservoir," Blackstone says. "You called them by name."
"There were about six of us, a group of women," she says. "And we would run north. Coming from the New York Athletic Club would be a group of men from the other direction. They would go, 'Hello, girls,' and when they ran by, we would say, 'Hello, boys.'
THE PHOTO ENDURES. But all these years later, none of the women remember who came up with the idea to sit and protest.
"I was there because Dave was running it," Blackstone says. "I happened to be at the right place, and they said here, 'Sit down.' That's how it happened for me."
"Me too," Jane Muhrcke says. Fifty years ago, they sat shoulder to shoulder at the line, Muhrcke on the right, Blackstone on the left, and today they are still friends. Blackstone runs with Muhrcke's husband in a group that meets every Thursday where no one is under the age of 70, and the ongoing joke is that you must qualify for Medicare if you want to join.
"My husband ran, so we'd be at all the races," Muhrcke says. "We had three little kids. Nina had three, and I used to babysit."
They were an eclectic group of women to take on the AAU, founded in 1888 to create common standards in amateur sports. Like Blackstone, Muhrcke arrived at Central Park that morning to watch and support her husband, Gary Muhrcke, who had won the first New York City Marathon in 1970. The woman next to Muhrcke, Liz Franceschini, was a London native who had moved to the States about a decade earlier.
To Franceschini's right was Pat Barrett, a freshman at Monmouth University who, in high school, trained with the boy's cross-country and track teams until a girls team formed.
"I just wanted to run," Barrett says. "Just like voting rights, we take it for granted." Of the group, Barrett and Kuscsik were the only two who, after sitting for 10 minutes, got up and ran with the men.
Then there was Nina Kuscsik, who recruited Barrett and the rest and was the only woman among the six who knew all the others. She was a New York State champion in speed skating, roller skating and bicycling in the same year. Then she read Bill Bowerman's book "Jogging" on a whim. It cost one dollar, and she read it between doing loads of laundry. Bowerman, the co-founder of Nike, wrote that if a high school girl could run a 7-minute mile, she was worth training. Nina did it in 7:05. She was six weeks pregnant.
Kuscsik ran in the rain. She ran with a broken arm. She was a single mother of three who ran into the house every mile around the neighborhood to check in on the kids.
"I was seven at the time," her son Steve says. "She'd run around, stop and see us, run around again, stop and see us. It was a different world."
"The police thought I was running away from something," says Kuscsik. "And I had to be like, 'No, I'm just running for fun.' The neighbors thought I was crazy."
The first time women were allowed to compete in track events at the Olympics was in 1928. When runners collapsed at the finish of the 800-meter race, the New York Times wrote, "The gals dropped in swooning heaps as if riddled by machine-gun fire." It didn't matter that the winner had broken the world record. The International Olympic Committee banned the event, and women wouldn't run the half mile again at the Olympics for over 30 years.
Meanwhile, the AAU continued to limit the participation of women in distance events. Five miles was the maximum length of a women's race, which the governing body then increased to 10 miles by 1971. When Kuscsik traveled to AAU meets, she was required to be "accompanied by a female chaperone."
After the six women sat in 1972, the AAU eventually dropped the separate start for men and women. The photo was perhaps part of the reason. Kuscsik said years later that organization knew they couldn't beat the photo's publicity. But it's mostly forgotten that at the following AAU convention, Kuscsik arrived armed with a lawsuit prepared by the ACLU threatening to sue over the rule. The 10-minute rule was scrapped -- but only after the AAU added 10 minutes to Kuscsik and Barrett's times in New York.
It wasn't until 1980 that the American College of Sports Medicine stated there was little medical evidence to support that long-distance running would be harmful to women. Four years later, American Joan Benoit Samuelson won gold at the first women's Olympic marathon in Los Angeles. It was the most dominant marathon performance in the history of the sport.
ON THE MORNING of the Mini 10K in June, we meet at Blackstone's apartment. Lily is gathering her things from the bedroom that used to be her father's while Blackstone is in the kitchen slicing apples. She asks if I want one, then wraps two in aluminum foil for the walk to the start line.
There are photos of Lily lining the edge of the piano, her school photos and the ones of them at Central Park Zoo. The grandmother and granddaughter go every other year and are due for another trip soon. On another shelf are pictures of a family wedding, Blackstone and Dave with friends at road races from years past. Some of the photos have faded. Many of its subjects are gone -- from old age and memory loss and because such is life sometimes.
Dave died of cancer in 2009. This September would've been their 50th wedding anniversary. Blackstone says she's been thinking about him a lot and keeps his legacy close through the Central Park Track Club, which he founded shortly after they married and now has 450 members.
A book of photos from the Central Park Track Club through the years sits atop her coffee table. I open a page, and there's one of Blackstone when she won the Yonkers Marathon in 1976. She's wearing the orange singlet the Central Park Track Club became famous for. It was one of the first, if not only, co-ed track clubs in the city. "I was the first woman member," Blackstone says.
Dave would love that she's still running. He would love even more that she's running the Mini 10K with Lily.
A neighbor notices Blackstone and Lily's matching black tank tops in the elevator. "Running in a 10K?" He asks. "Man, good for you."
The door opens, and then we cross the street, headed towards the start line. We pass a sign marking the 5K point of the race, which is essentially a large counterclockwise loop of Central Park. "You finish around 72nd Street," Blackstone points out the marker to Lily. "This is the 5K. You'll run up this way, and then you'll see that sign."
"OK, seeing this sign, it's getting better," Lily says.
"I know this is embarrassing, but I give up a lot," Lily adds. "I always give up and wanted to do at least one race before I went off to camp." She hopes to find a friend she can run the race with and that she doesn't stop. But mostly, Lily's happy that she can do this at all.
Two years ago, a few days after her 12th birthday, Lily woke up paralyzed. She couldn't walk or feel her legs, and over four days in the hospital, it got worse before it got better. Doctors diagnosed her with Lyme disease, and it was attacking her joints.
"I just kept praying and saying, 'It's going to be OK; it's going to be OK,'" Lily says. She was on antibiotics for a month afterward. "I'm just really happy I can run again."
Blackstone looks at her watch a few blocks from the start line. "Is it alright if we pick up the pace?"
"I'm just in awe," Blackstone says. "I ran the first Mini10K, and I'm running in this one 50 years later."
BLACKSTONE'S LEGS BURNED as she traversed the ups and downs of Central Park. Her shorts chafed against tender skin, and Blackstone thinks she's starting to develop arthritis in her foot. "I think that's just all part of getting old," she says. "I'm not going to let that stop me." Next weekend she's supposed to run another 10K in Queens. "It's just such fun. In the end, it's such a high feeling. You must keep going."
She had hoped to run under a 12-minute pace, but her final time put her at just under 13 minutes. None of it matters. She has never considered herself an athlete like Kuscsik was back in the day. But she liked running, and that has always been enough. She does, however, downplay how fast she was. Blackstone's personal best was a 3:28 at Boston. She delights in the fact that she is a 4x00 meter relay record holder for women 70-74 (7:50.49), along with three other runners from the Central Park Track Club. She had never been in a relay before but ran anchor under the lights of the historic Penn Relays. "It's totally ridiculous," she says. "But what fun!"
Of the six women who sat in Central Park 50 years ago, she is the only one still actively running. "That was tough," Blackstone says after finishing the 10K. She repeats it again, smiling. "That was tough."
Thirty minutes later, four of the six women who sat -- Blackstone, Kuscsik, Muhrcke and Barrett are standing in front of the Women's Rights Pioneers Monument. The monument is assembled of bronze figures of Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, commissioned to commemorate the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment (ratified on Aug. 18, 1920) which gave women the right to vote.
A street drummer plays nearby, and the rapid beat of drumsticks against his bucket paces the bustle of the Mall in Central Park. New York Road Runners wants to film interviews leading up to the anniversary of the protest this fall, and as the camera crew gets ready, the women mill around, catching up. The last time they were all gathered was four years ago. Franceschini is the only one missing. The sixth woman in the photo, Cathy Miller, was the girlfriend of a runner in the marathon at the time. When they broke up, no one knew where she went.
A professional runner approaches the group. Her name is Aliphine Tuliamuk, the fourth-place finisher of the Mini 10K. She asks if she could take a picture with all four women, and they gather in front of the statue.
"Thank you so much for setting the stage for us to have a career in running," Tuliamuk says. "Thank you so much." Her husband is watching their one-and-a-half-year-old daughter at home in Phoenix. Because of them, she tells the women, her daughter has a choice of career paths. "I hope someday she will love running too," Tuliamuk says. "We must keep doing this. It keeps us young."
Sometime before noon, Karina and Lily say their goodbyes. Lily has a review session for an exam on earth science and has to return to Long Island. Earlier, Karina had pointed to her daughter underneath a tent at the finish line with Blackstone. "You know what my goal's going to be? In 50 years, she'll be 63. And I'll be 90."
Then she nods towards Blackstone. "I'm going to run this in your honor."
"We've got to live like her, then," Lily says.
"You're going to be doing this at 90," Karina says. She looked at Blackstone. "So, I can do it at 90."