My first memories of track and field are of my older brothers John and Eddie running in track meets at Persian Field in downtown Jersey City. I don’t know if I ever ran there, but I do remember that they were very good and came home with medals and ribbons. My brothers are John, Eddie and Willie. Everybody called me Robby. To this day nobody in my family knows who is “Bob” the adopted name that I was given as a track runner and coach. John was always John. However, there is a family legend of the Jersey City street name for John, Chico. The origin of Chico has never been explained. John was a type A,h first born child. He was as straight as an arrow and as tough as nails. Those qualities probably helped him become an outstanding quarter mile runner in high school. Running 51 seconds for a 440 in the mid-fifties was enough to earn John a partial scholarship to Seton Hall University under coach John Gibson. He entered Seton Hall University in 1957 as I entered st. Aloysius High School as a freshman. Eddie, entering his junior year, was also on the track team. So it seemed pretty much determined that I would be joining the track program as I entered High School. It turned out I was a pretty good distance Runner. Legendary coach Bob Short, who had produced many quality distance runners over the past 10 years at St. Aloysius, seemed to think I had talent. Coach Short is the first adult I ever remember calling by a first name. He told us to call him Bob. He called me Bobby.

Two key events I remember from freshman year set the stage for a lifetime in track and field. I finished in second place in the Freshman division of the North Jersey Catholic Track Conference Championship in Lincoln Park. Bob and my brother Eddie were both very impressed with that performance. Their words made me feel very important, maybe for the first time in my life. I was going to be a cross country star like Brian Hennessy, the reigning city and county cross country champion from St. Al’s!

The other event was the surprise that in the spring I qualified for a spot on the distance medley relay team scheduled to compete at the Penn Relays at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This was a huge deal. As a fifteen-year-old I had never been away from home overnight or stayed in a hotel. This was kind of a culture shock taking a trip to a big city with the team. There were too many new experiences that weekend for me to list here. If anyone would like to hear them all, leave me a note and I’ll write a separate post. But the one event that I have said changed my life occurred at the stadium, Franklin Field. My race itself, three-quarters of a mile leg on the distance medley relay, was unmemorable. I was so overwhelmed by running in a large stadium in front of probably thirty thousand people at the time I could not even absorb it. But later that day I witnessed the St. Francis Prep High School mile relay run the first-ever sub 3:20 mile relay to win the
Championship of America. By then there were more like fifty thousand people in the stadium who were chanting wildly as this team of four boys took a Victory lap around the Franklin Field track. That moment is embedded in my brain. I was hooked for life.