From The World Cross-Country Championship Archives- The Day They Laid Boomer Cadger Low

From The World Cross-Country Championship Archives- The Day They Laid Boomer Cadger Low 

By Bart Webber

Excuse me if I once again mention the sacred name of Boomer Cadger (real name William although I only got that information later for when I ran against him in high school Boomer was the only name I knew him by. I never found out the reason for the Boomer nickname although he did lower the boom on his opponents then until he met his match with the big boys to be discussed below). For a guy who I didn’t really know except in competition the reader is probably wondering why the now three archival captions on one person. Part of it is that through the “magic” of the Internet I have been able to find out what happened to him, at least indirectly.

I am in contact with his best high school and apparently for some time after friend, John Franklin who as something of the class historian for Boomer’s class of 1964 at North Quincy High School has kept tabs through the years on all members, all members who want to stay in contact. Boomer had a tough life after high school and after the glow of the world championships had worn off. John didn’t know a lot of the details but the important one is that the formerly slender splinter (see photo below), the terror of the roads and golf courses around Boston and Barcelona contacted some social disease and as a result of medication for most of the rest of his life since then he has been big as a blimp, a basketball, huge and of late probably could not run five yards and certainly could not beat a six year old at the effort. (I am tempted to say here that the now football player-sized Boomer has a name more appropriate to his statue but that would be unkind).  

What this trip down memory lane deals with beside the tough way that Boomer was treated in his last world championship cross-country race by the dirty Europeans is yet another tear-etched longing sigh about lost youth and the vagaries of time. Boomer’s time and mine although today I know I could still beat a six-year old over five yards. Boomer Cadger wherever you are you were like the wind in the old days remember that from a guy who ate your dust. B.W.    

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It will never cease to amaze me now say it-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” as some kind of perverts sneaking behind bushes ready to pounce on the innocent, maybe the guilty too from some inner craving, from some inner evil. No “share the road with a runner” and mean it noise then since a runner was as likely to be sideswiped by some passing motorist for fun usually some young girl impatient to see her football player boyfriend or just to harass some nerd although we were not called that then. Menaces on the roads for sure in case of cross- country runners who needed to run long distances off the tracks to keep in shape and who were subjected to honks, near side swipes and angry snarls from irate motorists.

Girls, yes, the all important girls to even running dweebs, would titter and point at runners, us, with nothing but distain. Maybe I am just being sensitive to that scorn from girls since it blocked much social interaction but it really did seem like they were more vicious than any other cohort who tried to run us down and flee the scene. 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. Would go on and on about what was a good Catholic boy running around naked with all those young impressionable girls around and about getting tired and sweaty so she had to do extra laundry. I guess it was better to be fully-clothed, an armed robber and dope fiend junkie like my older brother Lenny since she never said word one against him.        

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 schools wanted him as a wide receiver. Boomer though had such a wretched home life, his father a drunk, a hobo really and not the kind like Utah Phillips who gets touted in these pages but the nasty dust of the earth that will kill you for your not giving them wine money and maybe even if you did, and his mother filled with morphine dreams, dreams since childbirth drug infests 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” (my term but I am ready to bet six, two and even he would know what I mean) 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 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. (In a later interview, this courtesy of John Franklin, Boomer mentioned that he would do what is now a regular routine for long-distance runners, interval work which is short distance repeated speed word-that the training regimen of the legendary Olympic champion Emil Zatopek-no wonder he left me kicking sawdust from my shoes, a term we used when we lost).

As I have mentioned before in a previous caption about this mad monk bastard, 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 at the World Championships, still junior championships I think in Barcelona, this again courtesy of John Franklin. I have already mentioned he qualified his senior year in high school for the World Junior Cross-Country championships held in New York City and the story behind it about what the new pair freaking new pair of white socks. His injury during the race may have cost him the championship although he did finish a mighty fifth to qualify him for Barcelona the next year.   

The last I had heard of Boomer Cadger before John Franklin filled me in, 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. The next year as luck would have it he was assigned to the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean and he was able to compete via his qualifying finish the year before (the commander of his ship thought he was crazy and a pervert too from what John thought but anything that might bring honor to the ship got him shore leave).

Here is where things get dicey-the winner from the previous year, the defending champion, Lars Larsen out of Sweden “knew” that Boomer if fully able would have whipped his ass (would have had him “dusting sawdust off his shoes) and was freaked out when he heard Boomer had somehow made it to Barcelona. Lars, and maybe this reflected the crazed times and crazed atmosphere surrounding cross-country runners, especially in Europe they were treated like living gods just below soccer players. He was so frenzied to win, something about a shoe contract with some firm in Europe if he did although that never got resolved, that he corralled a couple of teammates to impede Boomer’s travel at the beginning of the race. Trip him up in short so he would either get far behind at the beginning or not run. In the event he would not run after being manhandled by these punks and would-be teenage junkie ninjas. Boomer reported the situation but the officials brushed him off as another annoying American looking for some unwarranted advantage after a good European like Lars won the race. More than that Boomer in the Navy had started drinking, had taken to smoking weed and not keeping as fit as necessary so the funny thing is that Lars would have had not worry from him that day.        

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.