3rd L.A. Marathon : Neighborhoods Have Fun as 17,000 Run

By LAURIE BECKLUND

March 7, 1988 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

For more than 17,000 people who walked, rolled and ran through the streets Sunday, the third annual City of Los Angeles Marathon was a chance to achieve something: a personal triumph, or maybe just a moment of celebrity.

But for countless thousands more who filled the sidewalks of Central Los Angeles neighborhoods to watch that race, it was something both simpler and more complicated:

A giant tailgate party that outgrew the parking lot; a parade that didn’t realize parades in Los Angeles are supposed to happen in Pasadena on New Year’s Day or Hollywood before Christmas; a morning Mardi Gras moved very far West.

By the time the runners got to the end of the race, one could be heard calling the marathon the “friendliest” he had ever run.

Community Activities

In Hollywood, dancers clogged on the names of stars. In Echo Park, children helped clean up the littered streets using palm fronds as brooms. In Chinatown, the smoke of hundreds of firecrackers filled the air.

Bands at official “entertainment stations” played “La Bamba” in Echo Park, “Satisfaction” in Hollywood, and Matsuri Daiko Aikokai drum cadences in Little Tokyo.

The official runners’ marathon started about 9 a.m., when an announcer began the countdown outside the Los Angeles Coliseum. But the din from the crowd and the helicopters above made it all but inaudible.

At 1 minute and 8 seconds after 9 a.m., the starting gun was fired, thousands of multi-colored balloons rose into a polka-dot rainbow and the race was on.

And on. It took nearly 10 minutes for the succeeding waves of bobbing bodies just to cross the starting line.

Behind the world-class competitors came hordes of ordinary and extraordinary people.

A woman in a Superman outfit complete with cape. A tall, skinny Kermit the Frog who hopped through part of the race. Actors from soap operas and police shows.

A couple, Steve and Ava Schumacher, pushing their year-old daughter in a stroller through her third marathon. A 77-year-old Los Angeles personality named Gypsy Boots, who carried a tambourine and cowbell and stood on his head at the starting line.

But most of the entrants were just the runners you see pounding the pavement before work in the morning, men and women who built up their running skills for months, sometimes years, just to run this marathon.

In a double victory that prompted cheers from many Latinos at the finish line, the top male and female runners turned out to be Mexican Olympic hopefuls Martin Mondragon, who set a record for the marathon, and Blanca Jaime. Each was awarded $25,000 and a Mercedes-Benz sedan.

“Everything about this race was special today,” said Bob Molinatti, of Huntington Beach, who placed first in the men’s division of the wheelchair race. “Winning it--there’s nothing like it.”

Candace Cable-Brooks of San Luis Obispo was first across the line in the women’s wheelchair division.

No Crowd Estimate

Crowds lined the streets thickly in some places, and sparsely in others. No one, neither police nor marathon organizers, would give a crowd estimate except to say that there were thousands of spectators. Traffic clogged intersections all around the marathon route and thwarted bus riders who found themselves at bus stops on closed streets.

For 17,040 people, it was a chance to try to go 26 miles to a finish line and a blue ribbon.

But, for the thousands of spectators who lined the length of the course, there was no finish line at all, only a human river of men, women and a few children with stories written all over their faces as they ran, walked, rolled and limped past.

The runners ranged from the inspiring, to the simply perspiring. From the dazzling, to the simply dazed.

“It gives me a great feeling just to cheer them on,” said Rachel Rodriguez, 28, of Echo Park. “I’ve been bringing my son here since he was a baby. I tell him, ‘Look at those runners; maybe someday you could try it too.’ You’re going to be just like them one day, aren’t you, Francisco?”

Francisco, 4, just looked up at her with huge eyes from his stroller.

Echo Park residents saw the early part of the race. From there, the racers wended their way up Sunset Boulevard onto Hollywood Boulevard, then down through the Hancock Park area, along Olympic and Crenshaw boulevards, and finally east along Exposition Boulevard and back to the Coliseum.

In Hollywood, metaphors mixed like oil and water as different sets of people merged for a few hours on Sunday morning and then slipped back into their own worlds.

Large groups of Latino families and your average nine-to-fivers gathered along Hollywood and Sunset boulevards amid panhandlers and punkers in leather jackets.

The “Wildlife Waystation” at Sunset and Vine was one of 10 official “entertainment stations” providing music and other entertainment along the route. That’s wildlife as in endangered animals, not as in what happens in Hollywood on a Saturday night.

Women wore cat faces and furry little cheetah ears at the way station, and rabbit ears as in Playboy Bunnies at Hollywood Boulevard and Orange Avenue.

A man in unruly dreadlocks and a tattered jacket muttered to himself angrily after a police officer asked him to move off the star of the late actor Monty Wooley, which he was sitting on.

“Why don’t they do this at night or something?” he asked grumpily as he headed into an alley.

“Don’t they have anything better to do with their time?”

On Sunset Boulevard, Corinne Davis, 90, leaned on a banister leading up to the Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church.

“I just did my own marathon,” she said, describing the tortuous route she had to take to make it to 10:30 a.m. Mass.

Los Angeles Police Lt. Dan Watson, who works at the Hollywood Division, said crime reports there were lower than average during the race.

“It’s like when the Pope was here, or the Olympics,” he said. “Maybe people are just a little more tolerant, a little more understanding, during events like this. I suppose some psychologist could make something of it.”

The marathon, like a handful of other citywide events here, was remarkable for the sheer numbers of people who left their cars behind and poured into the streets for a day.

Yet, as viewers watched television coverage of the event, they showed a portrait of Los Angeles as a city of, by and for cars. Behind the runners passed an urban panorama of gas stations, drive-through hamburger stands, car washes and parking lots, many with signs in foreign languages.

The race, billed as the “People’s Marathon,” was intentionally plotted to wind through ethnically and financially diverse sections of Central Los Angeles.

In Hancock Park, residents catered elegant brunches and held yard parties to celebrate.

“It was a good way to meet people here,” said Cheryl Waters, who moved to Los Angeles from Toronto with her husband, Paul, two months ago. She threw a marathon party, with guests watching the action while resting on a dozen white chairs set up in front of her two-story home.

All along the race route, families and friends gathered with banners to cheer on their friends and husbands and mothers and children.

“We you Schleckmann,” read one banner.

“Go Kevin!” cheered another family.

People were selling things from start to finish.

Marathon T-shirts were hot items, selling for $6 at the beginning of the race, and rising to $8 by the time it was ending.

Jerry Dragoin, 22, of Ontario, expected to sell more than $300 worth of cotton candy, popcorn and candied apples to spectators.

“I guess they all come out here to watch everybody else stay healthy,” he said.

There were 26 official charities raising money during the race, one for every mile, charities as diverse as the runners and the neighborhoods they passed through: diabetes, AIDS, crippled children.

Officials said there were at least as many volunteers as racers. Which all meant that about 17,000 youngsters and not-so-youngsters lined the course to help hand out cups of water, sweep up and cheer on the runners.

As the day wore on, the crowds of thousands that had cheered the lead runners, and undulating waves of humanity that poured along the middle of the race, drifted away. Straggling racers found themselves running on a carpet of green-and-white paper cups. Smiles turned to looks of gritty determination.

At mile 20, which marathoners sometimes refer to as “The Wall” because of the physical and mental exhaustion that often sets in at that point, two large banners were set up near Western Avenue and Olympic Boulevard.

Each had featured a target with a bull’s-eye that runners could throw paper cups and orange peels at, a gimmick that race organizers thought might give competitors a chance to vent their frustrations, and perhaps pick up their spirits.

Most of the time-conscious early runners ignored the target. By early afternoon, many runners were walking, and threw whatever was handy at the bull’s-eyes, the vast majority of them missing.

Finally, a 40ish man with red hair hit the bull’s-eye dead center with an orange peel from 15 or 20 feet away in what might well have been the sharpest marksmanship in the race.

A loud cheer rose from the small crowd. The runner’s mouth turned up into a smile, his fists rose in the air, and he sped up.

No major problems--traffic snarls excluded--were reported during the race. But the victory of finishing had its price for some entrants. One unidentified runner suffered chest pains after crossing the finish line and was taken to a hospital.

Last year, Orthopedic Hospital used more than 170 pounds of petroleum jelly, 8,700 adhesive bandages, 336 yards of moleskin and 400 lances to pop blisters, a hospital official said.

No one had computed such statistics for this year. But, by 4 p.m. Sunday, 60 runners were lined up for massages at the official massage center near the Coliseum.

A total of 12,750 had crossed the finish line before the 7 1/2-hour cutoff of record-keeping, officials said.

“This is my first marathon . . . and my last,” said Bob Vandenheuvel, 49, of Culver City, after getting his feet bandaged.

He waddled away like a duck, on his heels.