New York’s Fred Lebow Knows Running, Ambition

The oldest of our competitive events is running. It began when the first man ran from the second man.

Or maybe it was a man running and a woman being chased.

Fred Lebow knows running. He got New York running. It seems that he has been running all his life -- slowed only a little the last six months by cancer.

But he ran 4 1/2 miles Saturday and again on Sunday in that heat, so when he says that he feels good, who would argue? He has made a lot of running happen in New York.

The New York Marathon is his, having swelled to 25,000 runners through all five boroughs and countless ethnic enclaves. The spectacular Fifth Avenue Mile on the straightaway is his, and the Empire State Building Run-Up, the L’eggs Mini Marathon and, Sunday, the second New York Games. New York is better for having them. New York is better for having him.

Lebow’s lofty ambition is that the New York Games -- at Columbia University -- has so caught on that it will not lose as much as the $250,000 it lost last year.

Carl Lewis will be there to sell and autograph his book and compete in the long jump. Leroy Burrell, who beat Lewis in the 100 meters Monday night at the Goodwill Games, will be there to run in the 100.

Lebow got the 1991 Mobil Outdoor Championships, the national meet, for New York. You may remember, the last time New York had an outdoor meet of any magnitude was the 1964 national championships at Randalls Island.

Tuesday he was negotiating with an insurance company, a $10,000 fee for a $50,000 prize, in case the world record is set in the 4-by-100 relay. And in two weeks -- after the last of his chemotherapy -- he is off to help the Russians put on the Moscow Marathon. It would be a cliche to say that he is too busy to be sick.

“I feel I’m the best cancer patient there is,” he said.

Actually, he wants to see how it all comes out. “I feel what’s happening is so much like what happened in Europe in 1945,” he said. “It took a backturn under Stalin. The Second World War was over and it was such a bright time. “When the Russians came in, how happy we were. I remember my father saying, ‘It’s going to be a great world now.’ A couple of months later we had to escape from the Russians.”

He pronounces his name LEE-bow, as in Lebowitz, which it used to be in Arad in the Transylvania corner of Romania nearest Hungary. Romania joined with the Nazis and, until it was time for a final solution, Lebow’s father and five brothers were among the Jews sent off to forced labor. He was too young. He and his mother and sister and one brother spent the war years mostly hiding. He remembers that on occasion his mother was able to send bread to her men -- but not the good white bread of aristocracy. “She put in browned sugar to make it look like dark bread,” he said.

“My family survived. My grandparents, aunts and uncles didn’t. Imagine how devastating it was to see all the dead people and the dying horses in front of your home.”

Shortly after the Russians came in from the East, Lebow who was 13, fled West with his 15-year-old brother Mike. They moved and they moved in groups and sometimes alone like the boy in Jerzy Kosinski’s Poland in “The Painted Bird.”

Czechoslovakia, Holland. They were moved to Ireland, where they lived for a time in a 12th-century castle, and to England. “Everywhere we went, I went to school,” Lebow said.

He never did graduate from high school. He and his brother came through Ellis Island, to Brooklyn, N.Y., then to Cleveland and got into the garment business, replicating designer dresses for the likes of J.C. Penney.

“We came here in the ‘60s,” he said. “I don’t remember a lot of names and dates. It has nothing to do with my cancer. I didn’t remember before.” He remembers he became less interested in meeting the Penney order and more interested in running.

He bought 15 watches for $15 each for the top finishers in the first New York Marathon, run in 1970 by 126 runners entirely in Central Park. He put it in the city streets, however apprehensively, and it was a triumph.

When he became president of the New York Road Runners Club in 1972 it had 270 members, two of them women. Now it has 29,000 members, a third of them women, and occupies a 40-room brownstone with computers and all on 90th Street and Fifth Avenue.

Among the running records in his office, he has a cookbook of Transylvanian cuisine. He treasures the memory of the potato pancakes of childhood.

In February a growth was found on his brain. He is bald as can be now. His beard is coming back strong and his attitude was never gone. “I have no sense of smell,” he said. “I don’t taste food. I wasn’t able to run. I can’t have sex. I find it fascinating. As a child I was a vagabond. The only stability I ever had has been the last six months.

“I think I began to care more about people, to be more patient. I got a call in the hospital from a friend I hadn’t spoken to in years; a couple from my building I didn’t speak to sent a basket of fruit. Why should people carry grudges?”

Sen. Paul Tsongas, when he retired with a treatable cancer, said: “Nobody on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I had spent more time at the office.”’

Lebow has no wife or children. He looked elsewhere. “I’m a better person,” he said. “I hope I don’t go back.

“In the hospital things looked kind of bad. They said I had three to six months to live if the cyst expanded. Well, it went down 75 percent. I feel terrific.”

What he would like to do next is put on the meet where Lewis runs against Ben Johnson for the first time when Johnson comes off his sanction. Maybe in October, Lebow mused. With that event, he could build a whole meet -- 50,000 people at Randalls Island.

And then? He has run 68 marathons in 35 countries, seen Shanghai and points east and west. “You know, in my own country I’ve never seen the