Monday, July 27, 2009

Flint Track and Field

My sister Marty, the true athlete in the family, gets written up in the Tacoma Weekly along with a nice anecdotal lead about Flint:
"When Martha Mendenhall was in the third grade, she would run around in her neighborhood in Flint, Mich., and had a particular appetite for building up a good bit of speed running down a hill and then – this was the best part – jumping over the neighbors’ hedges. Her parents knew early on they had a very “active” daughter on their hands, when she would arrive home after an afternoon of hedge jumping with scratches on the insides of her legs and announce she had beaten all the boys. She’s been competing in track and field ever since – and continues to dominate the competition, as she is currently a 13-time national masters champion in the high jump."
The article doesn't mention it, but she also ran on the boy's track team at Powers since they didn't have a girl's team at the time.



3 comments:

  1. Well, she may have been fast afoot -- and apparently still is -- but I'll bet she still throws like a girl.

    (C'mon Gordo. The rules of engagement for sibling rivalry require some snark here.)

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  2. For your sake, Cooley, I hope you don't live anywhere near Marty...you don't really want to have to run from her, do you?

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  3. "He can run but he can't hide" (Joe Louis, 1941).

    "I can't run but I can hide" (Cooley, 2009).

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.