“Johnny was the first modern American marathoner,’’ Amby Burfoot, the 1968 Boston winner who was coached by Mr. Kelley at Fitch High School in Groton, Conn., said yesterday. “He was the direct link to Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers.’’
From the time that he and a high-school friend entered the 1949 race on a lark, Mr. Kelley was both entranced and haunted by the 26-mile distance. “I had a love-hate relationship with it,’’ said Mr. Kelley, who made a living as a Connecticut schoolteacher in a day when amateur rules forbade payment to runners. “I was driven to do it.’’
His first serious hardtop foray came when Mr. Kelley was 16 and his father suggested that he race with Johnny the Elder in a 10-mile handicap race on Labor Day in Littleton, Mass. “My feet were all bloody at 7 miles and they hauled me into the meat wagon,’’ Mr. Kelley once recalled. “I’m sitting there soaked in sweat and blood and tears thinking, ‘My God, what did I do?’ ’’
“Kid, you’ve got runner’s legs,’’ the elder Kelley told him. “You’re going to do all right in this game.’’
Mr. Kelley’s first marathon attempt ended with him sitting exhausted on the curb at Heartbreak Hill. “I could see the city down below and I couldn’t get there,’’ he said. “Someone came around with a newspaper extra that said ‘Swede Wins Marathon.’ I’m still in the race, I thought, and the race is finished.’’ But Mr. Kelley was seduced by the lure and lore of the event. “I was so imbued with the marathon,’’ he said. “I’d studied [Clarence] DeMar, [Gerard] Cote, Kelley. I was ahead of my years in my appreciation for the race.’’ Though he was at Boston University on a track scholarship, Mr. Kelley worked out with road racers on weekends at Jamaica Pond. When he tried the Marathon again in 1953 he finished fifth in the best time by an American at Boston in more than a decade.
