If you don’t know what story cubes are, see the introduction to the story cubes series.
To see the original roll of the story cubes, see yesterday’s post.
A couple of years before the Great Depression, the 1920s were still the Roaring Twenties. In this buzz, a man named C. C. Pyle came up with something that seemed like a magical stroke of genius at the time. He was competing with the sorts of entertainment that prevailed in the age before cell phones and instant gratification: flagpole sitting, dance marathons, and other endurance events.
His idea was one that was insane in concept and even more insane in its execution: a long, long, months-long run across the United States. Its first 2/3rds would follow a brand-new stretch of road still in its infancy: a then little-known and still barely-paved highway called Route 66.
On March 4, 1928 (the date was picked because of the pun on “march forth”), they set off. The runners then, unlike today, did not have support teams in vans to give them food, water, and medical attention. Instead, they plucked fruit off trees along the way, and the length and difficulty of many of the stages meant they were running at night. Rarely were they fast, and often they moved like a herd of turtles.
At the first stage, there were 199 men (they were all men then), and before the first 100 miles were up, the field was down to 150. At 300 miles, the field was 100, half of what it had been only a week before. But by then the foolish ones had been weeded out: at the 500-mile point, 93 remained. Then 700 and 92, 1000 and 88, 1300 and 81, 1700 and 75, 2100 and 70, 2400 and 64, 2600 and 59, 2900 and 55. Not a single other racer would drop out all the way to the finish, 3421.5 miles, two months, and twenty-two days later.
The winner, Andy Payne, a country boy from Oklahoma, used his $25,000 prize (almost half a million dollars today) to pay off the mortgage on his parents’ farm and buy himself a small house of his own.
The race was a mess from start to finish, both physically and organizationally. Although it ran again the next year, that was the last one. C. C. Pyle’s dreams of unlocking an annual spectacle collapsed through his own ineptness, his con-artistry, and the Great Depression.
I didn’t need to create a fictional story for this one because I couldn’t top the real one.
The comments section is the perfect place for what you came up with. I’m sure you did better than I did this week!
I'd love to hear from you!