From The World Cross-Country Championship Archives-The Day Boomer Cadger Caught Socks And Shin-Splits

From The World Cross-Country Championship Archives-The Day Boomer Cadger Caught Socks And Shin-Splits

By Bart Webber

  

Boomer Cadger was a piece of work, although I only knew of him, had been run ragged by him when he was just coming up as a high school star in cross country back in the day, back in the 1960s. Maybe I shouldn’t even be touting this guy since back in those days everybody, and believe me everybody, saw guys running around in their “underwear” (see below) as some kind of perverts. Menaces on the roads in case of cross- country runners who were subjected to honks, near side swipes and angry snarls from irate motorists. Girls, yes, the all important girls, would titter and point at runners, us, with nothing but distain. More than one time trying to “talk up” some girl in school I would mention that I was on the cross-country team would tell me they did not know the school had a team. Even my own mother wondered what she had raised to young adulthood when I would mention the sport of kings.        

But enough of the bad days social milieu, enough of my humiliations for this is about legendary Boomer Cadger who was so lithe he could do cross-country and so fast that the football coach at his school, North Quincy High School some twenty miles from North Adamsville and historic rivals since we were the same size wanted him as a wide receiver. Boomer though had such a wretched home life, his father a drunk and his mother filled with morphine dreams and who knows what else that running was what kept him alive during high school. He would from what I understand flee his home the minute the drunken fireworks started and go out and run say five miles to “cleanse his soul” if he treated the run as I did when I had my own slight home troubles.

Like I said North Quincy High and North Adamsville High were rivals in most sports and so I would run against Boomer (I never did learn why he had such a nickname which seemed more appropriate for a baseball or football player) and get my ass whipped by him starting in ninth grade. It seemed each year that I improved he leaped ahead even more. I would find out from an interview Boomer did with the now defunct, I think, Cross-Country Runner that in summertime he would travel all the way over to Adamsville Beach, the closest beach to North Quincy and spent the morning running the sand dunes down at the Squaw Rock end of the beach. I knew automatically that he had been influenced by an Australian coach who trained the legendary miler Herb Elliott on the sand dunes down under.    

Now, I guess after all this time I would have to call it a tribute to Boomer, what I want to finish up with is what happened to Boomer when he qualified his senior year in high school for the World Junior Cross-Country championships held in New York City. The race was run through Central Park then and maybe four or five hundred runners were at the starting line. Now Boomer’s people were poor Oakie types beyond their drug and alcohol problems.  Boomer only had one pair of running socks, white, which he washed by hand himself but they had given out so the day of the race he had on new socks, new thicker socks which were tight against his running shoes. As the race progressed along the five-mile hill and dale course Boomer was among the pack of several leaders, for a while. Then, and I am not sure how or why it happened when I read about in our local newspaper as a result of those bunched tight socks bothering him he developed shin splints, a very painful condition and a bane to runners. Instead of dropping out though, or maybe stopping and getting rid of those socks Boomer toughed it out. Toughed it out to a fifth- place finish which given the circumstances may have been a victory if he been healthy.

I might have been kinder to Boomer’s memory, certainly during high school, if I had had my ass whipped by a world champion. To see him in memory’s eye running like the wind will have to do. The last I heard of Boomer Cadger, remember those were the days when running was not like today a big- time sport and so no colleges sought his services, he had joined the Navy out of high school to get away from that hellish homelife.