A Driving Force : For Former Boston Marathon Champion and Cabbie Kelley, Clock Is Always Running

He has made his peace. Age helps. And so does the job. When you are driving a cab and listening to the problems of others, yours seem less significant.

He took the job for two weeks 14 years ago because he quit teaching, angry with the education system in Groton, Conn. He’s still driving and will work tonight. Then he will go to Boston as an honored guest, celebrated as a part of the city’s history on Patriot’s Day.

He’s Johnny J. Kelley--Johnny the Younger, as opposed to Johnny A. Kelley, Johnny the Elder, who won the Boston Marathon in 1935 and ’45 and still trots the course once a year as part of the race’s pageantry.

“By a fillip of teasing fate, I bore the monarch’s name,” said Johnny J. Kelley when he won Boston in 1957. For 2 hours 20 minutes 5 seconds, then a course record, he was king, running from Hopkinton, through Framingham, past the women of Wellesley and up the hills of Newton ahead of the world’s best, and finally down Exeter Street alone, almost

four minutes in front.

With triumph came relief.

“The hardest part was always going back to work the next day and answering the questions,” Kelley, 63, recalled.

They usually asked, “What happened?”

For a decade, from the mid-1950s into the early ‘60s, Kelley was America’s best marathoner. It was a title that might have meant little worldwide, but brought extreme pressure on Kelley at Boston, which will be run Monday for the 98th time.

Kelley ran second in ‘56, ’58 and ‘59, dropped out at 21 miles in 1960 because he knew he couldn’t win, ran second again in ’61 and ‘63, and fourth in ’62.

“If you are second, you always have an idea that if you had put in a little extra work, done something different tactically, ate something different, slept a little more, you would have won,” Kelley said. “That was the hard part for me. I could ignore most of it--all but feeling I had to apologize for finishing second.

I think it was Churchill who said of war, ‘Your majesty, there is no second place.’ I know what he meant.”

It was worse for Kelley because of the dearth of American winners. From 1946 until Kelley’s victory in 1957, no American won at Boston. After his victory, no American won until Amby Burfoot, whom Kelley coached in high school at Groton in 1968.

Financially, it did not matter much where Kelly finished. In his era, the marathon was an amateur event. Nike, Reebok and Adidas were yet to be born and Converse concentrated on basketball.

“I would go into a shoe store and buy a pair of Keds, rip out the insides to make them lighter and hope they didn’t rip up my feet,” Kelley said. “Later, I wore custom shoes, made for me to run in.”

He ran everywhere, including the 1956 Olympics at Melbourne and the 1960 Games at Rome. He led for 13 miles at Melbourne, burning himself out in the 85-degree heat and hobbling home 21st, behind runners he had beaten at Boston only months before.

“Johnny was always making like he wanted to be accepted in the mainstream,” said Burfoot, editor of Runner’s World magazine. “That meant winning, leading. He ran for everybody else, instead of for himself.”

He supported himself by teaching remedial reading at the high school in Groton. He would not coach track but handled the cross-country team.

“Track coaches and other coaches would have you out there, running around in circles,” Burfoot said. “Kelley would take us on runs down roads, through an apple orchard and through the water of the Long Island Sound. He would constantly quote Thoreau about leading the simple life, the animal’s life.”

Kelley would repair to Boston, once a year, to renew a love-hate relationship that had begun when he was in high school in 1949.

“I stopped with about six miles to go, in Newton, and just sat by the side of the road and shivered in the cold,” Kelley said. “I didn’t know what to do. Nobody was coming by to pick me up. I just sat, a skinny kid in the cold. Then a kid came pedaling his bike over a hill, holding up the marathon edition of the Boston Herald. The headline said: ‘Swede Wins.’ ”

More than an hour after Karl Leandersson had won, Kelley hitched a ride to the finish line in a Studebaker.

“Maybe I should have learned from that,” he said.

He did learn from Emil Zatopek, the famous Czech distance runner, who prescribed long, slow distances to build endurance.

But as a competitor at Boston University, such training went against the grain. So, Kelley ran through woods, along rivers and through fields in secret, won weekend races and worked in a cafeteria to survive before getting his English degree.

“I remember winning a race at Salem (Mass.), and they gave me a pair of shoes--leather, business-type shoes for a professional to wear to a job,” Kelley said. “I took them and walked away, and an old geezer came up and said, ‘You know you can’t accept those shoes, don’t you? You’ll jeopardize your opportunity to run in the Pan American Games.’

“The shoes were worth more than $35, and that was the limit then. More than $35, and you were a professional.”

Instead, Kelley drove back to his Connecticut classroom, teaching after a 13-mile morning workout.

“Marathon runners were ensnared by the dictatorship of amateurism,” he said. “You couldn’t legally take money, though some did, under the table. But there wasn’t much to take. Men dedicated their whole lives to the sport and their families’ lives. You had to be almost consecrated to running. . . . Actually, you had to be really a kook.”

Kelley won a laurel wreath and a medal in 1957. A vegetarian, he disdained the traditional bowl of beef stew.

On Monday, the winners will each earn $70,000 and a luxury car.

“When I won, doors opened to a much larger world for me,” Burfoot said. “There were trips around the world. There were no opportunities to get wealthy off it, but there were still rewards. It was the same for him. I always wondered why he didn’t capitalize on 1957. He said he wasn’t the traveling kind.”

Money came to the Boston Marathon too late for Kelley, but being the purist he at first fought the transformation in the mid-’80s.

“The race had to cross the Rubicon and pay,” Kelley said. “For the people in charge, amateurism equated to morality. It all seems so stupid today.”

As Kelley’s attitude changed, he began to appreciate Bill Rodgers, who won Boston in 1978, ’79 and ’80.

“I guess Bill was the first to capitalize on the fame that comes from winning Boston,” Kelley said. “He broke away from amateurism. Many thought he would be corrupted by money, but it seemed that was not the case.”

Rodgers opened a running store as the nation awakened to a health boom.

“Now, 50-year-old doctors are taking up marathon running,” Kelley said. “All I know is that now, when I run, nobody rides by and throws beer cans at me anymore.”

He still runs, three or four miles a day, and on Wednesday, when his weekly running column is due at a local paper, he runs it in, 10 miles from Mystic to New London and back. When it rains, he rides a bicycle.

At night, there is the cab.

“He’s definitely a free spirit,” Burfoot said.

“No,” Kelley said. “I’m a dropout. I’m completely disaffected.”

But he’s at peace, because nobody asks him “What happened?” anymore.