The “GOOSE” is to return to Boston some time this year! It seems like yesterday.  A bright, cold day has broken in Boston, Massachusetts. This is to be the day when I will defeat all of them – my fellow competitors from Boston English High School and the best runners from all other high schools in the Greater Boston area i.e., Boston Trade, Boston Technical, Boston Latin.

Is it really forty years ago!  It is October 24, l950   Did I really listen to the voice within – yet not a voice but surely an emotional structure without a known location within the human body.  It seems to come from my heart – yet the voice isn’t located there.  It has components known to me made up of ambition, duty, excellence, will, a mixture of emotional structures, some without a name but full of pregnant meanings. 

The result of the voice is action on my part.

Though the track team trains three times a week, instinct and the voice is demanding something else.  Its essence says to slip out of the window at three in the morning when everyone else is asleepl.  I am running over the course at White Stadium and Franklin Park.  

Springing up hills preparing muscular structures for a quality of pain commensurate with winning.  I learn later that there were 42 runners. One wouldn’t finish. I am but sixteen years old, the others are older, stronger and surely wiser than I. Yet I know in my heart of hearts that I will win this race. 

Could it be a compensation for being unable to speak my name. I was a stutterer, beating my leg with my fist or turning twice in class in order to repeat a short phrase from the teacher.

A family torn apart by God knows what. One day my four brothers and I with a sister are together, the next day I am alone on Massachusetts Avenue with another family relation.  Why?

Who understands at the age of fourteen or fifteen. A word in the house is overheard. Your Uncle was a great runner. Your brother is a great runner. You should not run. You finish so far back that you are disgrace to your school team!  

I shall show them.

The gun off and I am free to win. There are so many in front of me. They have given me 50 yards because of my age and times recorded in the past. The best of the older boys are on scratch.  

Boston Latin School is there, the oldest high school in America. What a tradition  My school, Boston English High School, is the second oldest in America.  

After the first mile I have only passed twenty or so.  There seem so many in front of me.  Then suddenly I remember the cold nighs and the quality of pain I have endured.  I realize that I must spring past the four in front of me; the immediate task.  Then another five; finally I am told “There are only four more In front of you.”  

I pass two more, then only two in sight; yet the stadium looms ahead of me. I must enter it first; I must surprise them as I did in the dream – as the voice said I would.  But no this boy in second place is challenging me, I must sprint again and again until I break him.  He finally breaks off; he is finished.  

One more to go. I catch him and finally have the lead!  

To be sure of my position, I must sprint again in order to have an insurmountable lead as I head into the Stadium. The photographers will be there.  My photograph must be in the paper so they will not forget me. I must restore something; I must establish a standard.

What does it all mean; why am I so fiercely driven?  I hear them shout out, ‘It’s Tatum” -   “It can’t be  – Impossible! But it is me.  A glow begins within me and I have suddenly no fatigue; I have shown them.  I am somebody.  I win.

The voice, yet not a voice, would send me to New York to find the New York Pioneer Club and run for them.  I would leave Boston with five dollars and find a room in Harlem for $5 per wek and a job for $28.00 per week typing.  

Later the voice wouldsend me to Africa and Europe; it would instill excellence in my sons, but that is another story.  I am coming home, the voice has said so this year.  

I owe Boston a debt, how best to repay her?  Without her where would I be?  

Charity will be my strong card.  They won’t believe it.  Yet as sure as they now call me “GOOSE” it will happen.

You see the voice told me so…

William D. Tatum
c/o The Ritz Hotel
Piccadilly, London Wl

April 7, l990    
Note: Retyped From Original For Clarity.