Kay Rodgers, who died last month at 97, was way more than Bill Rodgers’ mom
Kay Rodgers was not particularly excited about her son Bill’s running, even after he went to Wesleyan on an athletic scholarship. To her, running was merely an extracurricular activity.
“He’s there because of a scholarship because of his high school running, and she still thought he shouldn’t be running,” Bill’s brother, Charlie, said. “She’d say, ‘You shouldn’t be running so much. It’s getting in the way of your studies.’ Which it probably did, knowing Bill.”
She didn’t approve when Bill and Charlie opened the Bill Rodgers Running Center store, either, in Boston in 1977. What kind of living could you make selling running shoes?
But as the store became successful, as Bill won the Boston Marathon and
the New York City Marathon multiple times, as “jogging” became more commonplace and accepted due to the running boom of the mid-70s, Kay finally capitulated. And she became a runner herself, at age 57.
For 22 years, until cervical arthritis put a stop to it, Kay Rodgers and her friends ran everywhere, road races, Senior Olympics, in Connecticut, Boston, wherever. They were members of the Hartford Track Club, Kay, Mary Haines, Adeline Kearney, Jeannette Cyr and others. They had a good time.
And Kay Rodgers, who lived in Newington, was as active as she could be up until the end. She died Nov. 20 at age 97.
“She was always a bundle of energy,” said her daughter Linda Pranitis, who lives in Rocky Hill. “She had a walker in the last couple years of her life. She’d be whipping around Cedar {Mountain] Commons [where she lived], walking mileage every day. She was famous there — ‘There goes Kay.’ She was happiest when she could get outside.”
To understand Kay’s initial mindset - and the change - you have to go back to the ‘60s when Bill and Charlie were growing up in Newington and ran on the first cross country team at the high school in 1963.
“Running was a totally fringe thing, until the ‘70s and the running boom,” Charlie said. “Adults did not go out and exercise in public. For a full-grown adult to ride a bicycle, you would be looked upon as a strange duck. The running boom made it acceptable for adults to go outside and exercise.”
The boom started after Frank Shorter’s Olympic gold medal in 1972 and crested in the late ‘70s. Bill Rodgers fueled the sport’s popularity by winning Boston and New York four times each between 1975-1980, breaking the American record twice. He was the top-ranked marathoner in the world in 1975, 1977 and 1979.
Linda remembered listening to the radio in the car with her mother when Bill won Boston for the first time in 1975.
“I made the first ‘Congratulations Billy’ sign and put it on the front porch,” she said. “It was cool.”
But Kay still wasn’t swayed, not until 1978, when Bill won Boston for the second time and she and her husband Charles visited the running store after their son’s victory. Bill and Charlie gave her some shoes and a running suit. Why don’t you try it?
So she did.
“She felt [then] that Bill and I were actually going to be able to make a living of some sort with our running store,” Charlie said. “Until then, she wasn’t going to endorse it. At the time, opening a running store was sort of ‘fringy’ — nobody knew about these things. There were a couple around but not many. It was just viewed as being sort of reckless.
“She had a real kind of matterof-fact, business-like upbringing in the sense of ‘You’ve got to work. You’ve got to have a job. Running is extracurricular.’ ”
But once Kay put on her shoes and her running suit, she embraced the sport.
“She had a running log,” Bill said. “She would track her miles - 2.2 miles one day, I want to do 6 tomorrow. She got up to 8 miles, her longest run, when she was 60 or something. I think she had a lot of fun with running. I admire her. It gave me a lot of motivation to do what I was able to do in the sport.”
Charlie remembers his mother running in 12-degree weather in her 70s.
“She liked to push herself, she liked the competition - she was very competitive,” he said. “She liked the women she hung out with. She was always talking about them.”
Bill remembered his mother and Mary Haines of Newington, who died in 2012 at age 98, pushing for older age groups to be recognized at races. Many races only gave awards up to 60-plus, if that.
“I remember her going to some races and they didn’t have awards for over 70 or something and she wanted an award for her age group,” he said. “She was kind of a leader for the older women because there weren’t too many around in 1978.
“She had a lot of fun in the sport. She would come up to Boston when the marathon was on, with my dad and had a great time up there. She’d go out running on the Charles River. She had great energy.”