英语书籍：The Coolest Race On Earth（四）

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THE COOLEST RACE ON EARTH
Mud, Madmen, Glaciers, and Grannies at the
Antarctica Marathon
by John Hanc (nonfiction)

Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
ISBN: 9781556527388
Copyright (c) 2009 by John Hanc
RACE (Part 4 of 5)
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CHAPTER ONE
THE BOY WHO WALKED TO THE ZOO AND RAN TO THE
ENDS OF THE EARTH

Tom Gilligan was born to travel--around the block, around the world.
"I always wanted to go places," Gilligan recalls. "I'd go anywhere."

As a boy, Gilligan ("just like the island," he says whenever asked
the spelling of his last name) once walked five miles to the zoo in
Stoneham, Massachusetts. Was it simply a way to escape the lower-
middle-class neighborhood of Medford, then a drab suburb of Boston
best known for being on the route Paul Revere followed on his famous
midnight ride? Perhaps. His youthful wanderlust might also have been
a response to the crowded conditions of his house--three boys, three
girls, and mom, and a square-jawed football-coach father who, in his
son's words, "ruled with an iron hand and a leather belt."

In many ways the Gilligan clan was not so different from any of the
other mostly Irish and Italian families living in Medford in the
postwar years. They didn't come over on the "Mayflower," and they
certainly weren't Brahmins, but they were as embedded in the fabric
of the city as the piers sunk into Boston Harbor. Tom's dad, also
named Tom, and his mom, Lucille, were high school sweethearts. Tom
Sr. was a legendary athlete at Malden Catholic--all-state in both
football and baseball. Lucille, who grew up in Medford, attended the
girls' Catholic high school nearby. As a 165-pound lineman and
placekicker, the elder Tom led Malden Catholic to a championship in
the 1930s. Cartoon drawings of him and some of his teammates
appeared in the "Boston Globe"--a great honor in those days, when
lionizing caricatures of star athletes were a regular feature of the
sports pages. Tom Sr. joined the navy when the war broke out, and
Lucille followed him, becoming a nurse. He ended up getting wounded
in North Africa, and after recuperating was on his way to the
Pacific when, during a brief stopover in San Diego, he and Lucille
got married. After the war he did what many young men did in that
era: he got a job with the phone company, New England Telephone. It
was the type of position that would guarantee a steady income,
benefits, and a pension. He worked his days as a repairman, and on
nights and weekends he returned to the gridiron as the coach of his
old team, Malden Catholic, leading his alma mater to another
Catholic League Championship.

Tom and Lucille had six kids and raised them in a four-bedroom house
with one bathroom. The town they lived in was known by locals as
"Meffa"--that's "Medford" the way a tough guy, a mafioso with a
"Bahstan" accent, might pronounce it, gulping down the word and
swallowing the "d"'s like cups of hot espresso. However it was
pronounced, Medford was a tough town, divided into different ethnic
enclaves: the Italians in South Medford, the Irish Catholics in the
north, the African Americans in the western part of town. But each
neighborhood was proud and close knit. "It's not like there were
gang fights, but we were competitive with one another," says Dave
McGillivray, a friend of Gilligan's who also grew up there. "People
took pride in their territories, their sports, and their ethnicity."

Young Tom had another source of pride--and sometimes frustration.
Growing up as the son of Tom Gilligan Sr., the football star, the
football coach, there were certain expectations. You weren't going
to cry when you fell down, and you were going to play a contact
sport. For Tom Jr.--who also attended Malden Catholic--that sport
was hockey. Everyone knew that Coach Gilligan's son was going to be
hard, and he was. Especially on defense, which in any sport is what
the blue-collar guys gravitate toward. "I was pretty tenacious,"
Gilligan recalls. "I worked hard at it."

The year before Gilligan joined, Malden Catholic's hockey team had
won the Catholic school championship--a big deal in that part of the
country. They took the game seriously, and for Tom Jr. that included
staying in shape in the off-season. When his hockey teammates joined
the cross-country team, he was encouraged to follow along. He did,
reluctantly; running was painful.

"I hated it," he says. "I was doing it for hockey."

While Tom flourished on the ice and dreamed of wandering far afield,
his future, like that of most of the families around him, seemed
preordained. "I was being bred to go to work for a big company," he
said. That was where the union jobs were, the protected jobs, the
jobs that a man could rely on to help him when he was ready to
settle down, start a family, and move into a house--probably a row
house like all the others that seemed to dot the neighborhoods of
Boston.

The problem for Tom, and a lot of young men and women in the 1960s,
was that he didn't want to do any of that, a point over which he and
Tom Sr. clashed. "He was a staunch union guy, and I was very, very
independent," he says. "I wanted to be more entrepreneurial, even
though I didn't know that word existed back then." Tom went to
college--but not some exclusive, leafy private school. He took night
classes at Northeastern University, in a working-class section of
Boston. After three semesters there, young Tom transferred to
Merrimack College in North Andover, where he earned a degree in
marketing. He graduated in 1972 and landed an interview with a large
insurance company, Provident Mutual Life. The insurance industry
ruled in Boston back then; insurance companies were the ones
responsible for the city's largest buildings, the Prudential Center
and, later, the John Hancock Tower, which for a few years was famous
because of a design flaw that occasionally caused its windows to
fall out.

Gilligan got a job as a sales trainee. This was the kind of job that
young men from large Irish Catholic families in Medford were
supposed to get--and be grateful for getting. He quit after eight
months. "I learned quickly what I did not want to do for the rest of
my life," he says. Tom wanted to walk to the zoo again. He wanted to
wander--and while Boston is as much a part of him as his chowder-
thick accent, he knew he wanted to go a lot farther than Meffa. When
he saw an ad in the "Globe" for what was then called BOAC--now
British Air--he immediately responded. The airline was expanding its
office in Boston and was looking for sales trainees. They hired
twelve people in March 1973, and Gilligan was one of them. For the
next three years he learned the travel business. "We trained first
as ticket agents, working at the ticket counters at Logan," he said.
"I loved it from day one."

During the slow winter travel season, BOAC laid off Gilligan and its
other trainees. He didn't mind; he went up to New Hampshire to ski
for a couple of months. This schedule continued for the next three
years. Seven months with the airline followed by five months on
unemployment, November-March. Perfect for ski season. "It was one of
the most fun periods of my life," he says. In the besotted 1970s,
that meant s ex, drugs, and rock and roll. "Oh yeah," he adds,
almost as an afterthought, "and skiing." The exception to this snow-
peaked bacchanalia came one day when the roads were clear and he
didn't feel like heading over to the lodge. Instead he impulsively
went for a run, something he had not done since high school. "I went
two miles," he said. "It felt OK. So two days later, I ran four
miles."

Back home in spring 1976, Gilligan decided to start jogging
regularly to combat the effects of five months of winter fun in New
Hampshire. He went over to the aptly named Marathon Sports store in
Cambridge to buy a pair of shoes--not sneakers but new, so-called
running shoes. Tom picked up a pair manufactured in Oregon by a
fledgling outfit named Nike. While he was trying them on, he bumped
into an old friend from college, Paul Sullivan, a runner who had
even started to enter local road races. Sullivan convinced Tom to
join him.