The Kansas Flyer

On a cold winter morning in 1917, two brothers walked across the Kansas prairie to their one-room country school. They were early. It was their job to light the stove before the other children and the teacher arrived.

Floyd was thirteen. Glenn was seven.

Nobody knew that the can beside the stove, which should have held kerosene, had been filled with gasoline. When the boys poured it on the fire, the stove exploded.

The fire

The schoolhouse burst into flames. Both boys were terribly burned. Floyd died a few days later.

Glenn survived, but his legs were badly damaged. The flesh had been burned away in places, and he had lost toes on his left foot. The doctors who saw him believed his legs could not be saved, and they spoke of amputating them.

According to Glenn's own account, he begged them not to, and his mother would not allow it. The doctors warned the family that even if he kept his legs, he would probably never walk normally again.

Learning to walk

For months he lay in bed. His mother massaged his scarred, stiff legs every day, working the muscles again and again, trying to bring life back into them.

At last he tried to stand. He fell. He tried again. In the stories his family told, he learned to move by leaning on a chair and pushing it in front of him, and later by holding on to the handles of a plough as it was pulled across the fields, letting it take some of his weight.

It took him about two years to walk properly again. And then he discovered something strange. Running hurt less than walking. So he ran.

He ran to school and back. He ran on the farm. He ran everywhere he could.

The schoolboy who beat the record

At high school in Elkhart, Kansas, Glenn began to race, and he began to win. His legs remained scarred, and they stiffened easily. Before every race, he needed a long, slow warm-up, much longer than other runners, just to loosen them. But once they were moving, he was very hard to catch.

In 1930, as a high school student, he ran the mile faster than any American schoolboy had run it before.

He went on to the University of Kansas, where he studied and kept running. People began calling him the Kansas Flyer and the Iron Horse of Kansas.

The fastest mile in the world

In 1932, he ran in the 1,500 metres at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles and finished fourth. In 1933, he was given the Sullivan Award as the best amateur athlete in the United States.

In 1934, at Princeton in New Jersey, he ran the mile in 4 minutes 6.8 seconds. It was a new world record.

At the Berlin Olympics in 1936, he ran the 1,500 metres again. He finished second, just behind Jack Lovelock of New Zealand, in one of the finest races of the Games, and won the silver medal. In 1938, on an indoor track in New Hampshire, he ran a mile in 4 minutes 4.4 seconds, the fastest mile anyone had run at that time.

He did all of this on legs that doctors had once wanted to remove.

After the races

Glenn Cunningham retired from racing in 1940. He had already earned a doctorate in physical education, and he went on to teach.

But the work he cared about most came later. With his wife, Ruth, he ran a ranch where they took in young people who were in trouble or had nowhere else to go. Over many years, thousands of children lived with them, worked with the animals and found a steadier start in life.

He spoke often to young people about the fire, about his mother's patience, and about never giving up. He called his autobiography Never Quit.

He died in 1988, in Arkansas, aged seventy-eight.

Want to read more?

Glenn Cunningham told his own story in Never Quit, written with George X. Sand. The Olympic website lists his races in Los Angeles and Berlin.