Paving the way
East Hartford’s David Vogel, 98, helped lay out the 5-borough course for the New York City Marathon
EAST HARTFORD — The New York City Marathon will celebrate its 50th running on Sunday. East Hartford’s David Vogel, who will be watching the race as a guest of the New York Road Runners Club, was there from the start.
Vogel, at98 years old, is the oldest living charter member of the New York
Road Runners, which started the iconic 26.2-mile race in 1970 in Central Park. The first time the race went through the city’s five boroughs in
1976, Vogel helped lay out the course.
“In New York, we had to go to New England to run races,” Vogel said. “They didn’t have New York races until we started the New York Road Runners.”
He was a runner for about 60 years, up until a few years ago.
“I’ve been very lucky because of running,” said Vogel, who ran close to 100 marathons before he stopped 20 years ago. “If it wasn’t for running, I’d be gone.”
Vogel grew up in New York City on the Lower East Side with five brothers and sisters. He is the only surviving sibling. His father was a baker, and Vogel rarely saw him because he worked at night. His older brother, Sammy, who was an Olympic boxer in 1920, was a father figure to Vogel and took him to his first Yankee game in 1936, the first year Joe DiMaggio played, at age 13.
Vogel was always athletic, but he didn’t start running until after he returned from World War II. He was working out when a friend approached him and told him he should try the sport. He ran the Boston Marathon for the first time in 1956.
He was one of 47 original members of the Road Runners Club-New York Association, organized in 1958 as a chapter of the Road Runners Club of America. Dues were $3 a year. Ted Corbitt, the first Black American Olympic marathoner and an ultrarunner, was the co-founder of the organization and its first president.
The club organized seven races its first year, and on
Feb. 22, 1959, it put on its first 26.2-miler, the Cherry Tree
Marathon, a five-loop course which took place in the shadow of the old Yankee Stadium and went through the Bronx along the Harlem River.
“Maybe 50-60 guys” ran the first Cherry Tree, Vogel said. Corbitt won in 2:38:57.
In 1970, they moved the race to Central Park, where it became the New York City Marathon. By 1975, the field (339 entrants) was growing too big for the park, and the NYRR wanted to make a splash because it was the bicentennial year. Gary Corbitt, Ted’s son, cited a letter from May 1976 from his father to fellow club member George Spitz in which Ted discusses the
idea of the five-borough race. (Spitz is credited on the NYRR website with coming up with the idea).
“George wanted the city to have a big race to make a big deal about the bicentennial,” Gary said. “In conversations with my father, my father came up with a unique way to have runners cover all five boroughs.
“[Spitz] took the idea to [Manhattan Borough president] Percy Sutton, he had a relationship with Percy Sutton. That made the race happen.”
It was the job of Vogel and another club member, Harry Murphy, to lay out the course.
“I helped plan the course of the marathon in New York,” Vogel said. “We used a couple of cars. I was in my car with some of the guys, [race director Fred]
Lebow and those guys. We planned the course. We had different ideas for different courses.
“We finally decided on the five-borough marathon starting in Staten Island, then it went into Brooklyn. At first, they wouldn’t let us use First Avenue in Manhattan. The police didn’t think it was a good idea.
“The kids in Brooklyn, they were wise guys. We put a blue line down. It was my idea. I saw it in the Munich Olympic Marathon, they did that. We had it painted. These kids in Brooklyn, they tried to do their own painting [to divert the course].”
There were over 2,000 entrants in the 1976 race. Bill Rodgers won, beating Olympic silver medalist Frank Shorter. Fueled by the running boom of the
1970s, the race became one of the world’s most popular marathons.
“The last time they had
the marathon [in 2019], there were 53,000 that finished,” Vogel said. “Can you believe that? I thought the first time we had the five boroughs, there was 2,000, and I thought that was ridiculous.”
The race was not held in 2012 due to Superstorm Sandy, and last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so this year will mark its 50th running.
Vogel, who owned a trucking business in New York and was a salesman, worked on the race for 10 more years. He moved to East Hartford after he got married to his wife Sylvia in 1986. Sylvia died in 2003.
He ran the New York
City Marathon course for the first time in 1976 to test it but never ran the actual race.
“I was probably one of the first to run it,” he said.