Good luck to everyone running the New York City Marathon today! 🏃
In honor of the big race, this week’s Sunday Epic takes us back to the early days of marathon running, when the sport was still a strange new pursuit. And at the center of our story is one of the most colorful characters you’ll ever meet.
“Bricklayer Bill” Kennedy was a teenage prizefighter, a freight-train-hopping adventurer, and a construction worker who survived a 65-foot fall from a rooftop that killed a pedestrian below. He nearly died of typhoid fever, traveled the country with little money in his pocket, and somehow went on to become a Boston Marathon champion. His is a wild, winding, almost unbelievable life story—just how we like ‘em!
Deep Dives
The odds were against Bill Kennedy when the gust of wind blew him off that roof. One moment, the bricklayer was applying some finishing touches to the Des Moines Coliseum. The next, he was plunging sixty-five feet toward the unforgiving sidewalk below. At age twenty-five, Bill appeared destined to become a statistic: Des Moines’s second bricklayer fatality that week, and one of an estimated 800 nationally that year.
