Dear Editor:
Once upon a time, track was a major and popular sport in Jersey City and it started early. Grammar school track teams were excellent in their organization and their performances. Saint Joseph School at Baldwin and Pavonia had a perennial powerhouse under the supervision and guidance of Father Walter Debold and Al Bundies. They had outstanding athletes and reigned supreme for a long, long time.
I was maybe a second grader when I first started to hear about this kind of stuff and it was about then that I first encountered somebody named Bob Karsh. He was much older than I, he being in a classroom on the top floor, probably eighth grade or so. I also knew him from seeing him around the neighborhood. You really couldn’t miss him because he was a very tall fellow, especially to a much shorter second grader. As I got older, I started to spend more time playing in the schoolyard and on the Court House lawn. I would run into Bob Karsh here and thereabouts, and I now had heard some of the stories about him. About how he used to be this great track star. And how he was pretty famous around the city. About how he won this scholarship to Saint Michael’s Downtown, and Saint Michael’s track was as good as it got. About how he had hurt himself somehow and couldn’t run for a while and how he lost that scholarship.
I heard those stories and didn’t pay them much mind. All I knew was that he was Pat and Joan and Linda and Ed Karsh’s brother. They lived on Court House Place, and I saw Bob in the neighborhood and he was bigger than I was.
As time went on, I got into more and more of the games we played. In the schoolyard and on the Court House lawn and in the Hudson Garden “projects”. Bob also played in a lot of these games and he wasn’t particularly good at any of them — basketball, touch football, box ball, stick ball or any of them really. What I always noticed, though, was that he could run. He sure could run. As I got older, I became more and more fascinated with this tall, gangly guy who wasn’t a good athlete, who wasn’t particularly agile or graceful in anything he did, including walking down the street. It always seemed that his bones were trying to find a comfortable place inside his body. However, when he ran, when he ran for any purpose — in any of the games he played or when I would see him simply running down Baldwin Avenue to church or along Newark Avenue to a store, I noticed that he became another being. Bob Karsh was the first real and natural runner I ever knew. When he ran for whatever purpose he ran, it was an exhibition of God’s hand and plan at work. As I would watch Bob run, I realized why he looked so awkward doing anything else. It was because he wasn’t supposed to do anything else. He truly was born to run. He was the first human being I ever saw run with the same wild abandon and sense of freedom usually reserved only for God’s four-legged creatures. Bob Karsh ran with the instincts of a cheetah, the leg strength of a tiger, the fluidity of a deer and the joy of a puppy. It was the time when he was most at peace, with himself, with others, with the Earth, with God and nature. He ran for the same reason he breathed, and as natural as breathing, he never gave it thought. He never practiced running. He never applied a technique or used special equipment. All he did was to run. Bob was the first runner whom I envied, not because I wanted to be that fast but because I envied what I knew he was feeling when he ran.
Of course, time does go on and, as it did, I saw less and less of him. I can’t tell you anything about what he did about school or work. I ran into him here and there and now and then over the years, and I noticed years after we both had grown into men that life had not necessarily been easy for him. Getting through every day was a severe struggle for him and his wife and his kids. When I became involved in goverment, he would write letters to me every once in a while. Nice letters. Never asking for anything. Always a little reminscent about the old days. Oddly, through all of those years and talks or letters, he never once mentioned running. I used to think that was a little strange and then I thought, well, he never wrote to me about breathing either.
He passed away last week. Maybe he grew weary of the tough life. I believe in Heaven so I am going to think that, for the first time in a long time, he is running again. Freely. Joyously. If Heaven is pure unending joy and peace, then the only reward for Bob would be running. Bob Karsh used to be a name in the newspapers all the time for his running but that was a long time ago. I thought that his name shouldn’t be there again simply as an obituary. It should be there as tribute to who he was and what he meant to a second grader who looked up to him. In lots of ways.
Tom Hart