Frank Shorter in Munich 1972 (NPR picture)
Born October 31, 1947 in Munich, Germany, where his father served as a military physician, Frank Charles Shorter joined the leading edge of what came to be known as the Baby Boom generation, the largest and most pampered cohort in American history. Frank's eventual great rival, Bill Rodgers, followed on December 23, while your author got Caesarian'd out on January 2, 1948.
In post-World War II AMERICA, returning vets and their brides were spitting us out like watermelon seeds. We were many, and we were fortunate, growing up in a time of American hegemony and easy abundance as much of the world dug out of the ruins of war.
20 years later, amidst what the French call our l'age ingrat, the thankless age, we came into early adulthood with an attitude, proclaiming, "forget you, Mom and Dad. We don't want the stultifying banality of your gray-flannel, three-martini society. We're looking for something different, something more freeing."
Of course, we never took into consideration how the privations of the Great Depression or the sacrifices of WWII might've molded our Greatest Generation parent's worldview. All we knew was what we wanted. So we traded gray-flannel and hard liquor for blue jeans and soft drugs.
But besides denim and doobies, another of the cultural artifacts from that era that remain with us today is the sport of running, a self-induced opiate for the masses. Read more of this post
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