AOP at Noon

 

AOP at Noon

This is the first installment of my attempt to capture our walk to Fenway Park.

A little background with what this (and future) posts are all about.

Without getting too deep into the weeds, in 1973 four fathers from South Portland Maine, decide to walk from said town to Fenway Park in Boston MA to raise money for the Jimmy Fund. The Jimmy Fund started in 1948 when the Variety Children's Charity of New England and the Boston Braves baseball team joined forces to help a 12-year-old cancer patient dubbed "Jimmy." I'll skip the background of how the dads landed on their plan. That's an entirely different story.

Here’s the original Jimmy – and a picture of our dads before their walk.

       


Those handsome devils – from left to right – are Norm Payette, Wilbur Wildes, Ge Erskine, and Dave McHugh. Those are our dads. 

Fast forward to 2019 – 46 years after the infamous walk to Fenway – four of the original walker’s kids decide they want to replicate the walk that their fathers did all those years before.

I could get into the details of how we made this happen, but I think you all will appreciate me not sharing those details with you once you suffer through all the minutiae I’m going to put you through as you read through our story. Cutting to the chase, I’ll just say after hundreds of hours of planning, their kids were ready to replicate the original walk. In addition to honoring our fathers, we also were doing this to raise, what we hoped would be, substantial money for this great organization. More on that later as well.

Time to introduce the main characters in this story. Let’s start with the walkers:

        Link                              Denise                  Pete                   Bob            Tom

·        Link Erskine – Ge’s son. Link was one of the fastest kids in the state of Maine in high school. Link stated early on that he wasn’t sure he could make it all the way due to some recent surgeries and other ailments directly related to being able to successfully walk around the block, never mind all the way to Boston. As you will see, he came through as a champ. I might refer to Link (his adult nickname) as Linky (his childhood nickname).

·        Denise Payette – Norm’s daughter. The smart money pre-walk was on Denise being the pacesetter. Denise wore weights around her ankles for the year before the walk, “to get ready”. I’ll probably refer to Denise as “Denise” throughout this story.

·        Peter Wildes – Wilbur’s son. This is me. I prepared by walking for a year leading up to our event. Averaged 40 miles a week early on, then kicked it up to 60 per week for the last month and a half. Still wasn’t sure if I was ready. I’ll refer to myself as me, I, or even the third person, Pete, in this.

·        Joe McHugh – Dave’s son. Joe also did a lot of pre-walk prep. His approach was a bit different than the others. Joe would bite off a solid 20-mile day during the week, which is approximately what we envisioned walking each day on our trek. Not a bad strategy. I’ll refer to Joe by name, or Handsome Joe, and maybe occasionally as Bob (more on that later) throughout.

We also had an additional walker:

·        Tom Hill – Tom is Joe’s brother in-law and Dave’s son in-law. Tom started out a year prior by volunteering to being our scout, but over time he became a key fund-raiser for us and ultimately, the fifth Beatle. Tom ended up walking every mile with us. I’ll be calling Tom, Tom in this story

One additional key player:

                            

John Cushing – John has been friends with the kids of the original four for over 44 years. Early on offered up (or was cajoled into) being our support driver. That role turned into being a combination Sherpa, pace car, Sacagawea, and main support structure for our walk. Basically, he was our savior, as you will be reading. Conveniently I will be referring to John as John.

Now that you’ve got the background and the key players, let’s dive in.

Tuesday July 6^th – First day of the walk.

Text from Pete at 4:01 AM

o   Anyone else can’t sleep?

o   Joe – 4:01 AM: This guy

o   Denise – 4:02 AM: This girl

o   Link – 4:03 AM: Up all night

That’s no way to be prepared for a 110-mile walk. What could you expect after 18 months of planning and 48 years of history hanging over our heads? This was the equivalent of trying to sleep the night before Christmas when you were ten years old…and the night before your wedding day….and the night before a cross country or an overseas trip that you had been planning for years... all rolled into one.

We had planned for AOP (ass on pavement – a phrase we used throughout the walk) for a noon start. If we all fell back asleep then we could have got nearly a full night’s sleep in. That, unfortunately, did not happen.

                                

Instead, things like showering, packing, worrying if you were forgetting something, wondering what we were thinking to begin with to try and pull off this crazy scheme, and the reality of what we had been planning for over 18 months (not for the last time on this day) and owning up to a debt we all felt we had to repay after 48 years was finally upon us, and starting to sink in.

Side bar – one thing Pete had to do the first morning was his daily interview with a local radio station - WBLM. Link was doing the same with another local radio station - WPOR. WBLM is Rock, WPOR is Country – so we felt we had our bases covered.

                        

Some time before, this station , WBLM, was kind enough to put me on for a few minutes to talk about our walk. This was all part of my imagined grand scheme to saturate TV, radio, newspapers, and the internet with our story. I’ll be damned if near the end of this thing, we almost did that.

The week prior to our walk the morning show host Herb (Captain) Ivy, reached out to me again and asked if I’d like to call each each morning of our walk to give a live update. Me, instantly reverting to my teenage dream of actually being a radio dj, of course said yes. So, in my first interview, between counting how many pairs of underwear I needed to pack and figuring the proper ratio of jeans vs. shorts, I once again did my best Les Nessman impersonation to spread the word. Oh, and as would become my schtick for the week, I requested a song for the walkers. First request for day one – Truckin’ – The Grateful Dead.

                      

   


By now it was time to roll. Plan was to meet a Link’s house before we all went deep into Sunset Park to begin our walk at the same location our dads did in 1973 – the Little League field at Wilkinson Park.

So, with backpacks, luggage, sleeping bags, and our families in tow we met at Link’s at 11:00 AM. We had a tight schedule and felt by adding in the hour buffer before we had to beat feet might be wise.

Upon arrival at Link’s, Joe let each new arrival know that the walkers were in the process of being interviewed by someone at the Boston Herald. This was great, one of the biggest papers in the city of our destination wanted to interview us. Like I mentioned, total media saturation. They already interviewed Link, Joe was in process when I got there, so only Denise and I left to do. We had an hour, no problem, right?

Wrong.

Little did we know (until it was our turn to be interviewed) that out interviewer, Marie Szaniszlo – a wonderful woman- could quite possibly be the slowest interviewer in the history of interviewers. Let’s just say, if she interviewed each of us any slower, we’d be interviewing her….and writing the sorry in long hand….and in cursive…and then mailing it via the postal service to the newsroom…and forgetting to put a stamp on the mail so it would come back to us…except we would have forgotten to put a return address on the envelope so it would be lost in the mail, until somehow, miraculously we would have somehow come across it, then do the whole thing again, only this time remembering to put a stamp on the envelope. That kind of slow.

I just googled Marie, and this is her intro on LinkedIn….

Experienced, versatile media professional who's skilled in researching, interviewing, writing, and editing; who has a sixth sense for what makes a good story and how to tell it; and whose managers deploy her for the most challenging stories when they need a "hail Marie pass."

God love Marie.

It was now about 12:15, but we figured there might be a dozen people at the park waiting for us, so no big deal, right?

Again, wrong.

As we drove down to the end of the street to get to our starting point, what to our wondering eyes did appear? A crowd of easily a hundred friends, family, and probably just neighbors that wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

   

A bit overwhelming. Gratifying at the same time. All these people had taken time out of their busy days to come support us.

Surreal, might be the better adjective. Was that Dave McHugh, the last of the original walkers giving an interview to not one, but two television stations?

Why, yes indeed, it was!

Then Link…and Joe…and Denise…and Pete. The AOP at noon was now starting to get away from us.

        

After many interviews…. many more photos with family and friends…and after all the excuses to delay the start of this thing were exhausted, it was time to get started.

  Ever heard the expression herding cats? That was how the start of or walk began.  

                                  

That, my friends are the events leading up to the start of our once in a lifetime walk to Fenway.

Next up:

The Eastern Trail Giveth and the Eastern Trail Taketh Away.