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Dave McGillivray — Boston Marathon Race Director
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| Bobbi Gibb is best known for being the first woman to start and finish the Boston Marathon, which she accomplished in 1966, earning her the title, ‘Matron Saint of the Boston Marathon.’ She won the 1966, 1967 and 1968 Boston Marathon prior to the Women’s Division being added in 1972 and these finishes were made official by the Boston Athletic Association in 1996 on the occasion of the 100th running of the Boston Marathon. Bobbi also ran the Boston Marathon in 1986, on the 20th anniversary of her first run, and in 2001 to raise money in the battle against ALS, also known as ‘Lou Gehrig’s disease.’ Track and cross country were not widely available when she was a teen and young woman, so the 1966 Boston Marathon was the first race she ever ran. In 1982 she was inducted into the Road Runners Club of America Long Distance Running Hall of Fame. Bobbi was included in the 1999 HBO Sports documentary Dare to Compete: The Struggle of Women in Sports, received the 2009 Tufts University Athletics Distinguished Achievement Award and was inducted into The Sports Museum of New England HOF. She has written three books including a memoir entitled ‘Wind in the Fire: A Personal Journey.’ A film based on this memoir and with the same title is in development. Bobbi is a renowned sculptor and sculpted the 12-inch bronze figurines of a pony-tailed girl running that were given as trophies to the top three women marathoners at the US Olympic Trials in 1984. She is a graduate of Tufts University and New England Law School. Bobbi was kind in spending an hour and forty minutes on the telephone for this interview. |
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| GCR: | Fifty years after you broke the Boston Marathon's gender barrier, the Boston Athletic Association recognized your accomplishment by making you the grand marshal this year’s 120th edition of the race. You rode a sports car into Copley Square and broke a ceremonial finish line tape. How amazing and surreal was this entire experience as you reflect back only three days ago? |
| BG | Oh, wow! It was a fantastic time. It started two or three weeks before the race. It’s been the most wonderful people that I’ve met – the runners, old friends, new friends, people in the press and the media, the police, the National Guard and the marathon organizers. They are just such incredibly, wonderful people. It’s hard to express. Uta Pippig was there and this woman, Atsede Baysa from Ethiopia who won, was just phenomenal and meeting her very moving. |
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| GCR: | There was a Boston Marathon ‘50 years of women 1966 to 2016’ logo at the finish line area which was in recognition of your feat. When you saw this, what thoughts, memories and emotions went through you? |
| BG | It’s amazing because fifty years ago it was thought that women were not physically strong enough to run marathons. Now today almost fifty percent of the field is comprised of women. There has been a huge amount of progress. |
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| GCR: | It’s interesting your mentioning this as Race Director Dave McGillivray, in his post-race summary, noted that nearly half of the more than 27,000 runners who started the race were women. Can you believe how in fifty years the race has grown from less than 500 men and one woman to so many runners and over 13,000 women? |
| BG | This is exactly what I wanted to happen. I wanted to draw attention to running as a way of life for everyone. I also wanted to show that women could do things that were thought impossible for women to do like run marathons, go to law school, study neuroscience and all of the things that women now do that fifty years ago were off limits to women. At that time women were very constrained as to what they were allowed to do and had a very narrow social role. There was no economic or political power and I was frustrated with that. I had an opportunity to open some doors to women, to try to end the war between the sexes that was going on, to show that men and women could share all of life and that we can all be individuals no matter who we are. |
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| GCR: | You mentioned meeting three-time winner Uta Pippig who I understand was at the race, was not planning on running and was so moved by this fifty year celebration of women at the Boston Marathon that she registered for this year's race on Sunday and ran on Monday. She finished in 3:39, and was crying as she crossed over the special logo painted on the street to commemorate the 50 years since your first run. How was your meeting with Uta and how does the flow of emotions from runners such as her resonate with you? |
| BG | We are really good friends and had a lovely dinner together with a number of other people. We talked and the whole time it was like a lovefest. Back in the 1960s we used to have love-ins and we haven’t had those for a long time. It’s about time we started having them again because it was so wonderful. People from all over the world, I think over ninety nations, were at the marathon. All of these different nationalities and ethnic groups and political persuasions were there. We were all just loving each other and hugging and crying and laughing together. It was the most wonderful experience and I thought this is how the whole world could be. We don’t need to have these boundaries and barriers and put each other and ourselves into stereotypes. We went across all boundaries and it was a wonderful thing. Uta kept coming up to me and hugging me and telling me she loved me and I’d hug her and we’d both be crying. I’d say I loved her. Someone else would come up and we’d hug and cry and laugh and say we loved each other and it was just so remarkable. |
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| GCR: | This year at the Boston Marathon the world and the distance between the years both really seemed to come together. Maybe the hallmark of this is the day after the race when 2016 women’s champion, Atsede Baysa of Ethiopia, presented you with her 2016 Boston Marathon trophy, and spoke about you through a translator saying, ‘She's inspiring for us, being women and runners. Now we are running around the globe. Her story is very touching.’ Could you describe what this means and how it connects the fifty years of women at the Boston Marathon? |
| BG | This was an amazing moment. It was at the press conference the day after the marathon. I was completely surprised. She had asked to speak with me before the press conference and I went down to talk to her through a translator. I gave her one of my books, ‘To Boston with Love,’ and I’ll probably send her the other book, which is ‘Wind in the Fire.’ Then we went into the press conference and all of the trophies were presented. To my great surprise, Atsede said she was so moved by my story and my struggle to open running and the world to women that she was going to give me her trophy. I was crying and there were tears running down my face – not because I need a trophy. It wasn’t the trophy – it was this woman’s love. She loved me and this was something she was doing out of her heart. We had just met a few moments before. We totally connected and love each other and she did this amazing, giving from the heart. To me this is the best of humanity. This is empathy. This is the kind of consciousness the world needs. What we are all striving for is this love that surpasses all boundaries – different ages, races, ethnic backgrounds, nationalities and religions. There was absolutely no barrier between us and this love is between us now. I couldn’t say that I didn’t want the trophy, but I said ‘I will keep it for a year in honor of you and then I will return it to you. If I have to I will go to Ethiopia and bring it to you.’ I hope I am going to go to Ethiopia in a year with the trophy and give it back to her as it is by rights hers and I want her to have it. I can’t possibly keep it, but I will keep that love in my heart forever. It was an amazing conclusion to what had been an amazing time of almost three weeks of marathon activities. |
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| GCR: | You are in a group of women that are referred to as ‘Pioneers of Women’s Distance Running’ or the ‘First Ladies of Distance Running’ along with Kim Merritt, Kathryn Switzer, Doris Brown, Miki Gorman, Jacqueline Hansen, Marty Cooksey, Sara Mae Berman, Sue Petersen and others in the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s. Was there much camaraderie at the time, has it increased as the years have passed and how was it reuniting with some of these ladies at this year’s Boston Marathon? |
| BG | It was very strange because we didn’t know each other at the time. Of course, the first year I was the only lady. We were all running in the Women’s Division race which had not been sanctioned yet. The marathon was a Men’s Division race. Women weren’t qualified to run in men’s races any more than men to run in women’s races. In 1966 I was the Women’s Division. In 1967 there were two of us in the Women’s Division as there was Kathy Switzer along with me. She was the second woman to run the Boston Marathon and she finished second that year. Then in 1968 there were five of us, but we didn’t know each other. We didn’t meet at that point. Then Nina Kuscsik brought the petition to the AAU and they began to sanction the Women’s Division in 1972. It was only later that began the camaraderie and the effort to make more official changes for women in running. A lot of these women were at the race this year including Jacqueline Hansen, Kathy Switzer, Sara Mae Berman, Nina Kuscsik and Cheryl Bridges Treworgy. |
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| GCR: | For anyone under the age of 40 or 45 who came up after implementation of Title IX, it is difficult to fathom the lack of opportunities that girls and women had to compete in sports until sometime in the mid-1970s. What it was like for you as a teenager starting to run in the 1960s, how did you get started and who were your early mentors? |
| BG | Not only were opportunities limited in sports, but opportunities were limited, period. All of the Ivy League colleges, for example, were open to men only. It was very difficult for women to get into medical school or law school. For women to have a profession in those days was not the norm. Women were pretty much confined to the house. They were expected to be housewives and to take care of the kids, which was fine. I wanted to marry a man that I loved and to have children, but I wanted to do a lot more. In school there wasn’t much for women in the way of sports. I played field hockey and there was tennis and half-court basketball. But I loved to run from the time that I was just a little kid, a toddler, only three or four years old. I always loved the feeling of running across a field and leaping into the air and feeling the life force of the universe and the sunshine and the wind. It just was a magical time for me to run. Even though there wasn’t track and field for women, I used to run. I would go up into the woods behind our house and run for miles and miles with the dogs. I loved being in nature and found a very special time that was away from the social strictures that were confining women. I was actually rebelling against all of these social norms that kept women boxed in and prevented them from using their minds or their bodies in the way that they wanted to develop their opportunities. Running, for me, was a way of harkening back to some ancient time when women did run through the woods. It must go back to the ancient Greeks. It was Artemis that used to run through the woods with her hunting dogs. I was finding something that was healing me. It was making me feel free. |
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| GCR: | How did you take your love of running and decide to run the Boston Marathon? |
| BG | I was studying at Tufts in math and physics and biology and all of the things that girls weren’t supposed to be studying at that time. I was trying to break out of this cage that women were in. I knew next to nothing of track and field and then I met a guy who ran track. He said he ran five miles at a time. I thought, ‘Wow,’ and started practicing and pretty soon I could run five miles with him. In 1964 on April 19th my dad and I went out to Wellesley and I saw the Boston Marathon for the first time. I was so in love with it and I didn’t even realize that it was a sporting event. I just thought it was a bunch of guys who got together in Hopkinton and ran to Boston to celebrate spring every year. I thought this was neat and I wanted to be a part of it because these people felt the same as I did about running and life as I did. It was totally irrational and way outside the social norm for a woman. But I started training. I had no coach and no books and no idea how to train. I didn’t even know if I could do it. I just kept running further and further distances. My boyfriend would take me on his motorcycle, we would measure out a couple of miles and I would run back. Then it went to five and six miles and I kept expanding the number of miles. |
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| GCR: | Didn’t you training really take a different turn when your parents were away for a lengthy time? |
| BG | I was training for this marathon and the bulk of my training was very unique. I had my dad’s Volkswagen Microbus which he had outfitted as a camper. He and my mom had gone to England as he was on sabbatical from his professorship at Tufts. So he gave it to me to use and he never dreamed what I would do with it. I took my malamute puppy and headed west across the country. I was in love with America – the country, the people, the whole idea of a democracy and the openness of the west and the frontier. I headed west and at night I slept out under the stars. During the day I ran wherever I was from western Massachusetts, across New York, down to Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, across the Mississippi River and across the Great Plains. It was just so open and the wind would blow through the grass and the sun would shine. I would run for miles and miles and miles. I ran in Colorado and over the Rocky Mountains up into Wyoming. I was getting stronger and stronger. I’d see a pale blue mountain way off in the distance and I’d spend all day running to the mountain and then back. |
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| GCR: | How did this trip and running take your feeling toward life to a different place? |
| BG | It was also kind of a spiritual journey as I was looking for something that would give me answers. I was always amazed that this entire universe existed – the sky and the trees and the planets. At night I would look out into the universe and there were stars and starts and more stars than I’d ever seen and it was so beautiful and so amazing. I kept wondering how this could all be and why bother with it – why not just one big void. The more I learned in science about atoms and molecules and cells and biology and how life evolves from a single cell into mammals and human beings; I thought it was the most miraculous thing. It was a spiritual experience for me to think about this and to see this and to realize this whole thing existed and I had no idea how it existed or why it existed. I wasn’t satisfied with what I had learned and I was looking for a deep, deep experience of what it was to really not know why or ho, but to marvel at the incredible beauty and the amazing fact that everything exists and that I exist and that you exist and that human beings exist and live on this earth for a short time. It was amazing to me and my running was a part of it that was weaving into this incredible tapestry of this mysterious, wonderful, miraculous existence of putting one foot on the earth and another foot on the earth and breathing and watching the trees go by and the mountains. It was one vast physical and spiritual and emotional experience all blended into one. This was the way I trained for the marathon. I went all across the country through Utah and the Sierra Nevada mountains and down into California. I jumped into the Pacific Ocean and ran on the beaches. That was how I trained for the Boston Marathon. |
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| GCR: | How did you channel all of this physical, spiritual and emotional energy into this race that you had marveled at in watching it in 1964? How did you take this great energy that encompassed your being and focus it toward the Boston Marathon? |
| BG | These men who were running in 1964 seemed to be harkening back to something so primal and so basic about what it was to be human on this earth from the time our ancestors first stood up on two legs in the plains of central Africa millions of years ago and how we came down and evolved over the centuries and thousands of years. And now, running Boston was part of that primal wonder of existence. I felt something basic about what it is to be human and what it is to be alive on this earth. I was going to run in 1965, but I sprained both ankles so I went another year and trained some more. I actually married the man who I met who was running track at Tufts. He was in the Navy and was assigned to San Diego so we moved there in January of 1966. Of course, the Vietnam War was going on, and I was against the Vietnam War. He and a lot of the people he served with were also against the war. It was very confusing because he felt that he wanted to do his duty and what was right, but it was hard to tell exactly what was going on at that point. I wrote for my application to run in the marathon because Bill Gookin, a runner I had met, said that I had to apply to run and to get a number. I wrote and Will Cloney, the race director, wrote back and said that women were not physiologically able to run a marathon and, moreover, it was a men’s division race. He told me that the longest sanctioned distance for women was a mile and a half. |
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| GCR: | Did this discourage you or increase your resolve to run the Boston Marathon? |
| BG | Suddenly saw a way, a chink in the armor, a way to change some of the things that I had been fuming about. I realized that if I could run this marathon and run it well, I would throw into doubt all of the other false doubts about women that had been used to keep women down and as second class citizens who had been pretty much subjugated for centuries. It was a catch-22 as women weren’t allowed to do certain things because it was thought they weren’t able to do them. If you aren’t allowed to do something, then how could you know if you were able? A woman wasn’t supposed to be able to withstand the rigors of medical school. These restrictions in running were just one more way that we couldn’t do what we loved. We didn’t have the opportunity to develop our potential as a human being because we belonged to a certain category or class of people – whether it was based on race, ethnic background or gender – it was a terrible tragedy of prejudice. I felt that if I could prove that this false belief was wrong that I could throw into question all of the other false beliefs. I was also hoping that once they saw that a woman could run a marathon that they would open up the race to women since the reason they weren’t allowing women is because they thought we couldn’t do it. |
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| GCR: | When race time approached, how supportive were your husband and your parents and did many people know you were going to race? |
| BG | Hardly anyone knew I was going to race. I hadn’t told my parents because I knew they’d think I was nuts. My best woman friend knew I was going to run. My husband was in California and knew I was going to do it, but he wouldn’t even help me get to the bus station three or four days before the race. I took a Greyhound Bus across the country. He was not very supportive. When I got to Boston I called my parents and told them I was in the city. They asked what I was doing in town and I told them I was going to run the Boston Marathon. My dad thought I had gone nuts and that I had gone around the bend – poor girl, she’s delusional wanting to run the marathon. I went home and my mother made a big roast beef dinner. They were very worried about me. They didn’t want me to run and of course I hadn’t told them I was training. The next day my father went storming out of the house, really upset thinking that I might run, but he had an appointment at a sailing regatta. I convinced my mom to drive me to the start. She’s a very beautiful and talented woman who had been very frustrated at not having any opportunities for her whole life. I said, ‘mom, this is going to help to set women free,’ and that rang a bell with her. So she drove me to Hopkinton and dropped me off. |
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| GCR: | You had hopes and goals you wished to accomplish so that you could help women move forward, but you must have also had fears that day? |
| BG | My biggest fear was that they would stop me from running and I wouldn’t be able to demonstrate what I’d come to demonstrate. I was wearing a blue hooded sweatshirt, my brother’s Bermuda shorts and a new pair of boy’s running shoes, size six that my friend, Bill Gookin, had suggested I wear. He said that the nurses shoes that I had trained in were way too heavy too race in. My mom left me off in the outskirts of Hopkinton, I had the hood of the sweatshirt pulled up and I looked at the setup to try to figure out how I was going to do this. I knew I was going to do something I wasn’t supposed to do and I was afraid I would be arrested. I knew if the race officials saw me they would throw me out. I didn’t know how the runners were going to act or how the spectators would react. Sometimes when you do something outside of the social norm people can be hostile. So I ran around and found a little clump of bushes as close to the start as I could get. |
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| GCR: | Did you warm up for the race or just bide your time? |
| BG | I went out behind some buildings and I ran up and down laps for about forty minutes warming up. I’d just come three thousand miles on a bus and had eaten mostly bus station chili and a bag of apples I brought with me. I thought you had to get warmed up so I probably ran a few miles before the start. As the race time drew near, the men started to gather together and I went back and hid in the bushes. |
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| GCR: | What happened at the start and in the first few minutes of the race after you started running? |
| BG | When the gun went off I waited until about half of the pack had gone by and then I jumped in. This was really a critical moment. The men easily could have shouldered me out. I was there alone and unprotected. I knew I wanted to keep it upbeat and positive and non-threatening. Some of the men behind me realized I was a woman. I have to give them credit for studying my anatomy from the rear. I heard some saying, Is that a girl?’ I smiled and turned around and heard, ‘It is a girl!’ Then some were saying things like, ‘I wish my girlfriend would run’ and ‘I wish my wife would run.’ I said, ‘I’m getting hot, but I’m afraid if I take this hood off, if they see I’m a woman, they will throw me out.’ They said, ‘we won’t let them do that.’ The men were very friendly and protective. I thought this was what I wanted to end this war between the sexes and to show that men and women could share all of life together. |
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| GCR: | Describe how it was when spectators realized a woman was racing. |
| BG | As soon as I took the sweatshirt off, which was very early, within minutes of the start of the race, there was sort of a stunned silence before spectators started to clap and cheer. The guys were yelling, ‘way to go girly,’ and the women were jumping up and down and screaming, ‘it’s a woman’ or ‘it’s a girl!’ Then the press spotted me and started to phone ahead. Next a local radio station started to broadcast my progress as I was running stride for stride with many of the men. I was reigning myself in and running much slower than I would have on a training run because I knew I had a huge weight on my shoulders. I knew if I failed to finish I would be setting women back many years so I wanted to make sure I had plenty of energy left for the finish. This was the first race I had ever run in my life and I had no idea what the course was going to be like. |
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| GCR: | Once you got into the flow of things, were you feeling pretty comfortable? |
| BG | I was in fantastic shape. I had been running thirty or forty miles at a stretch. I ran up over the Rocky Mountains. Then in California I ran twenty miles to the top of a mountain and back. I was in incredible shape. I didn’t have a watch on me, but according to men around me, we were on a sub-three hour marathon pace for most of the race. I was holding on, wasn’t tired and wasn’t out of breath. |
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| GCR: | How were the crowds along the way, especially at Wellesley College, and what was it like as when they realized you were a woman? |
| BG | I was feeling really good and almost frolicking at that point. In those days the women came right out into the street and they made the scream tunnel. They stood in two parallel lines to each other and put their arms up. The runners kind of scrunched down and ran through the tunnel and out the other side. I could hear a noise as I was coming up the hill. It sounded like a day at the beach. I could hear people laughing and screaming way up ahead. The women were just fantastic. Diane Chapman-Walsh, who later became president of Wellesley College, was a student at that time, and she was there. In 1996 when the Boston Athletic Association awarded me a medal commemorating those three wins, she was there and we met each other and talked. She wrote a very nice article about me for the newspaper and she said that the women knew I was coming because it was being broadcast on the radio. They were watching me and scanning every figure for me. When I came into view she said they let out a scream and screamed like never before. I was moved. There was one woman with a bunch of kids saying, ‘Ave Maria. Ave, Maria,’ and there were tears in her eyes. There were tears in my eyes. People were laughing and crying and we all realized that something was changing. Something had changed for women at that moment and we were never going to go back to the way we were before. We weren’t going to be put back in that box again. This was the beginning of a whole new era for women. They felt it and I felt it. I was incredibly moved by it and it is still very vivid in my mind when I think of it. |
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| GCR: | After that excitement in Wellesley, how did the race progress? |
| BG | I was feeling good and ran on. At 17 miles I was feeling good and even on Heartbreak Hill I felt good. It’s funny as the hills go up in levels. You go up the first level and think wasn’t bad, but it goes up another level and another and whoa! It actually was a relief as most of the course is downhill and it was nice to be going up. I was beginning to push to get up the hill, but it wasn’t anything like the mountains where I had trained. |
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| GCR: | Marathon racers usually experience some combination of difficulties in the latter stages of the race. What challenges did you face? |
| BG | The three problems I had were the new shoes which were giving me blisters, I wasn’t used to running on pavement so my feet were starting to hurt and I didn’t know you were supposed to drink water and so I drank no water for the entire race. I ran the whole Boston Marathon without drinking a drop of water. The other problem was I had eaten a huge roast beef dinner the night before and it was still sitting in my stomach like a cannonball. I knew nothing about carbo-loading. Those things were affecting me and coming down the other side of heartbreak Hill my feet were killing me. That’s when I began to notice I was feeling all of the miles. The last three or four miles my feet were hurting so badly that I was virtually tiptoeing along. I could barely put my feet down as they hurt so badly. The blisters were raw, bleeding blisters. My time spun out of me and I felt very disappointed. I could feel myself slowing down and felt like a failure. I wondered if there would be anyone at the finish line when I got there. I went on and on – I pushed on. I couldn’t stop as I was making this incredible statement. There was no way I could stop and I went on even though I was disappointed. |
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| GCR: | What were the crowds like as you approached the finish? |
| BG | People were hanging out of their windows and yelling. Spectators were pushing into the street and there was just a narrow passage for the runners to go through. We turned onto Boylston Street and, much to my surprise, people were still there. The bleachers were still filled. A huge cheer went up from the crowd and I went down that last stretch. In those days it finished in front of the Prudential Center. I ran down that last stretch and somebody came out and put a blanket over my shoulders. |
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| GCR: | What was the reception like from race officials, dignitaries or the press after you crossed the finish line? |
| BG | It was just wild! The Governor of Massachusetts came down and shook my hand – Governor John Volpe. The press closed in around me and wanted to know why I had run. They knew who I was because it had been relayed out early in the race. So they knew my name, who my parents were and where I lived. They wanted to interview me. One of the runners who had run with me came up and put his arm around me and there is a great picture of that. All of the runners were congratulating me and were happy because we had run on and off together during the race. After the marathon in those days there was the traditional post-marathon stew. When I got to the door where you went to get the stew, they said, ‘Sorry, no women are allowed.’ Even though I had run this whole race with them, I wasn’t allowed to have the stew with them. My friends, the runners, were very apologetic and they felt so embarrassed. They told me they were sorry and that they didn’t make the rules. Then I was taken into a hotel room where the press interviewed me for a while. |
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| GCR: | What was the reaction from your family and friends after you got home and in the days which ensued due to press coverage? |
| BG | I took a taxi back to my house. When we got to my street, all up and down the street there were cars parked. I thought somebody must be having a party. It didn’t occur to me that they were at my house. When I got to my house there were dozens and dozens of people from the press there. They had cameras and notepads. I went inside and it was packed, jammed, filled with people from the press. My poor parents were standing there in the middle of the living room absolutely bewildered. The phone was ringing off of the hook with people giving them congratulations on their daughter. My dad kind of put his arm around me and said something to the effect of, ‘We knew she could do it.’ And my mom was busy trying to give food or tea to people as she tried to take care of everyone who was in her house. They were very, very proud of me and we had our picture taken together. The next day it was on the front page of the newspaper. The front page headline said, ‘Hub Bride First gal to Run Marathon.’ Hub means Boston – the hub of the universe, sort of tongue in cheek. The article described me as a shapely, blonde housewife. Can you imagine? My idea was that if a shapely, blonde housewife could run this marathon, it would draw attention to the fact that we can all run marathons. In those days the marathon had only about 400 men and it was the only major city marathon in the country. There was no New York, no Chicago, and no Washington marathon. Boston was it. I thought this would draw attention to running for everybody. Since I got such a huge amount of benefit and pleasure and health out of running, I thought that if everyone could run, how much better everyone would feel. And I thought this was a pivotal point in changing the consciousness of women. That’s what I like to do. That’s what I’m still trying to do – to find false beliefs and to show people what’s true, to change people’s consciousness and to make the world better. |
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| GCR: | How did the Boston Marathon change your life as far as recognition and opening doors or your outlook on life’s unfolding adventures as far as not knowing what was coming, but looking forward with joy? |
| BG | It was the first time in my life, when I fell in love with that marathon, that I decided what I wanted to do. Everything else had been what I had to do in school, what my parents wanted me to do and what I had to do to earn money by getting a job. This was the first time I set a goal and worked towards it. Every single day I was out there running. It taught me that you can set a goal that seems impossible and then you can work at it a little tiny bit each day. You work at it and work at it and work at it, finally you achieve that goal. And so, I thought if I could do that, then I could do other things like go back to the University and get me degree which was another goal I had. I began to have a sense of autonomy that to a degree we can create our own lives, at least in this country, where we have incredible freedom. We can set our own goals and do things that we believe in. |
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| GCR: | You returned to the Boston Marathon and were first woman in both 1967, when two women ran, and in 1968, when five women ran. What were you doing for training, and how were those two years different from your first effort in 1966? |
| BG | The next two years were different in that I didn’t train for the marathons. I had been at Tufts School of Special Studies and had courses in physics and biology. I also was at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts studying sculpture. Then I went into a very challenging program of pre-medical studies. For my undergraduate degree I majored in Philosophy and minored in Mathematics, but I also took all of my pre-med requirements. That studying was my first priority. Just as the Boston Marathon had been my priority in 1966, getting really good marks in school and hopefully getting into medical school was my priority and goal the next two years. I still ran – I ran an hour or two every day – but it was nowhere near the kind of training from the first year. I would go out and run on the beach or run out to the top of Black Mountain and do a twenty mile run every once in a while. But I was just coasting. I was in really good shape. |
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| GCR: | So it must have been different in 1967 as the press and public knew you would be running. |
| BG | The second year I came back and everyone knew there was going to be a woman in the race. Reporters were calling the house and I was sick with the flu. I really thought I wasn’t going to be able to run and then I thought, ‘I have to run because I have to keep proving that a woman can run this and run it well.’ In 1967 I stood out with the men in plain view and nobody tried to stop me. It was cold that year- kind of drizzly rain and cool. The gun went off, I waited until about half of the pack left and then I started running. Maybe about twenty minutes of a half hour into the race, suddenly I couldn’t breathe because of my flu. I was really congested and actually lay down on someone’s lawn. They were calling the doctor and the medical squad. I lay there for I don’t know how long. Then whatever was the cramp or knot in my breathing apparatus released and, to everyone’s amazement, I leapt up off of that cold, soggy ground and ran all the way to Boston. I still finished in a pretty good time of about three and a half hours and that included all of the time I lay on that front lawn. |
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| GCR: | Describe your third and final win in the Boston Marathon in 1968. |
| BG | The next year I came back and hadn’t trained that much again and I was tired as I was getting into the final stretch of my college. I had worn a sweater that morning because it was freezing cold and then it turned into an extremely hot day. I couldn’t take the sweater off because I didn’t have anything under it except my underwear. I absolutely sweltered. But it was okay as I ran and did a fairly good time. |
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| GCR: | You came back to run the 1986 Boston Marathon on the twentieth anniversary of your first run there. What was it like training and getting a qualifying time and was there much recognition of you that day for what you had done as the first woman finisher twenty years earlier? |
| BG | For the first decade after I ran in 1966 I was known as the ‘Matron Saint of the Boston Marathon.’ Everybody knew the story and it was out there in the press. I had no access to the press and I depended on them to come to me to carry the story. In the 1970s I was going to law school and working at M.I.T. in the field of neuroscience and then I was pregnant, had a baby and a small child. So the 1970s were all taken up with that. I was still running every day, but I wasn’t training for the marathon. By the 1980s the story had got all distorted. There was some press interest on the twentieth anniversary. I had gone down the previous fall to New York to run the New York City Marathon, which was a lot of fun. But I had seeded myself way too far back and I never quite got my stride. There were always people in front of me and it was so densely packed that I couldn’t pass anyone. Wherever you were you kind of just ran along. I ran an okay time and it qualified me for Boston. I don’t think I’ve ever run a marathon where something hasn’t happened right before the race and this time I was carrying my son up several flights of stairs and I pulled my hamstring a few weeks before the race. I tried everything to get the hamstring better, including massage. So, I ran the Boston Marathon in 1986 with a pulled hamstring. It was stupid thing to do, but I had trained and gotten in good shape. I casually dropped in twenty years later and ran about the same times which makes me wonder if I had had a coach and focused marathon training what I could have done, but you can’t do everything and I was hacking myself through the jungle in the 1960s breaking barriers. It wasn’t a fast time in 1986, but I made it with that hamstring pull. |
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| GCR: | In 1996, at the 100th running of the Boston Marathon and the 30th anniversary of your first run, the Boston Athletic Association officially recognized your three wins in 1966, 1967, and 1968, awarded you a medal and your name was inscribed with the names of the other winners on the Boston Marathon Memorial in Copley Square. What emotions and feelings went through you when this recognition was finally given? |
| BG | It was wonderful. I actually became a member of the B.A.A. and still am a member. The B.A.A., in a lot of ways, has been my second family. This was a great time as I got to meet and know Sara Mae Berman who was the women’s winner in 1969, 1970 and 1971 when I didn’t come back. It was a wonderful feeling to be included and embraced by the Boston Athletic Association and all of those wonderful people that put on this incredible event every year and to begin to know them as friends. It was a sense of coming home. It was nice to get that recognition and that medal and to have those three years inscribed on the Memorial. Being officially recognized as the first woman to finish those first three years was lovely. |
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| GCR: | In 2001 you ran the Boston Marathon again to raise money for charity. How rewarding was this experience and how amazing is it the tens of millions of dollars raised by charity runners in the past couple of decades and to know that your helping to grow the race has been instrumental in this also? |
| BG | If I ever run again it will be for charity. One of my best friends had come down with Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS, and I was running with a team to raise money for the Angel Fund that helped to support Dr. Brown’s lab, which was then at Massachusetts General, and has now moved over to the Worcester University of Massachusetts Medical Center. We were raising money for that lab. I had a horrible case of bronchitis for that race. I had trained for that race and was in good shape, but you would never know it from my running time, because of the horrible bronchitis. But I had been featured on television and there was all of this publicity of my raising money and running with the team so I had to run as I had this obligation to run. So, sick as I was, I ran it. I actually stopped and got on the medical bus at the top of Heartbreak Hill and the bus took me all the way back to Wellesley as it was picking up people along the way. Then we turned and came all of the way back. This took maybe forty minutes or more. We got back to the top of heartbreak Hill and I said, ‘stop the bus. Stop the bus. I want to get off and finish the race.’ This is how crazy I am. They actually stopped the bus, I got out and this lovely woman from Harvard got out with me and surmised my condition. She was just in jeans as she had been a volunteer. So I ran all the way to Boston and finished the marathon. I had never seen the back end of the marathon. When I turned from Hereford Street onto Boylston Street it was a sea of paper cups. Street sweepers were on either side of me. I was cracking up laughing thinking, ‘The first shall be last.’ It must have been near the very end as the clock had stopped, it was freezing cold and these street sweepers were sweeping up the cups. But I did it and I finished, by George, and we raised over a hundred thousand dollars for the lab. Later I met the head of the lab and I became involved in doing research into neurodegenerative diseases. |
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| GCR: | Running has brought great joy to you, so what would you say have been the positive effects of the discipline, tenacity and joy learned from running on other aspects of your life? |
| BG | Learning to stick at something – you have be fairly tenacious to train for a marathon in the first place. But this idea that you can set a goal and you can reach it and change the world. I wanted to bring about a social change – but how does one person bring about a social change? I see social changes are often brought about by one or two people who look out in the world and see something is wrong. That’s the way the Civil Rights movement started. Somebody knew something was wrong, that it wasn’t right and we had to change. Then other people agreed and pretty soon there were hundreds of thousands of people saying this was wrong and we had to change the way we had been doing things. Then it becomes a social movement and then it becomes socially acceptable and then it becomes incorporated in legislation and law. There are these stages of social change and I’ve always seen my role as being a thinker. I think outside the box in creative ways. I look out into the world and see things that need to be changed and I try to change people’s consciousness and come with new ways of thinking and doing. It’s sort of like I was hacking through the wilderness in the field of running and the women who came after me were able to organize and to bring it into fruition. It was a huge effort of hundreds of women and men making changes and building these structures. It’s a group effort and so many millions of people are working to help other people and that is what gives life meaning – doing things to help other people and to help their lives become better – I’ve always believed that. |
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| GCR: | Outside of running you have led a very colorful life including a earning a degree in philosophy, a law degree, becoming a mother and pursuing interests in painting and sculpture. How would you describe how your life has unfolded compared to the hopes and dreams you had as a teen or when you were a young woman in your early twenties? |
| BG | I always knew that I loved art, biology and writing. I studied pre-med, but when I interviewed for medical schools I was told I was too pretty to go to medical school and I would upset the boys in the lab. They told me these schools were for men who were going to practice medicine and obviously I was going to get married and have children. That was in 1969 and I ended up actually doing what they predicted. I married a doctor, but what I did was while he was finishing up medical school and doing his internships I read all of his medical text books. And I loved neuroscience. I absolutely fell in love with neuroscience and I wanted to study it, but it was very hard for a woman to get into one of those programs those days. When he and I moved back to Boston I started to work at M.I.T. with Professor Jerry Lettvin in neuroscience and we were studying the visual system and other areas. I worked with him for about ten years and I was going to law school at night. |
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| GCR: | This is a change from the medical field, but didn’t you have family that practiced law? And once you started working in that area what were some interesting occurrences on your pathway? |
| BG | I liked law. It was easy for me as I passed the LSAT exam with flying colors and got a scholarship into my first year of law school. I was interested in environmental law. My grandfather had been a lawyer and I thought I could use my law degree to help protect the environment. I was also interested in civil rights law and using law as a tool to effect positive social change. I worked as an aide in the State Legislature for a while. It was so gratifying to work in that capacity. I would love to do that again now that I am kind of semi-retired from my law practice. I was doing all of the research and the writing to support various legislation that would help people live better lives and help society move forward. I love that kind of work. I was just at the Massachusetts State Senate as they presented me with an award. People are very cynical about politics, but I’m not as I met these people. They have a very hard job and have dedicated their lives. They are so incredibly well-intentioned. They passed legislation to help animals and children and the elderly. They have helped to make education more affordable and accessible and to provide hot lunches to students who can’t afford lunch. They are working so hard and I wish more people could see democracy working at this level. The representatives are voted in from towns and cities and we create the government by which we govern ourselves. This was a new evolution of political thought and we have to make democracy work as the alternative is chaos or totalitarianism. We can’t afford to segment ourselves into groups that are squabbling and fighting with each other. We need to move forward as a whole country to make this work and move forward as a whole world. |
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| GCR: | After you helped set the stage for women to run in marathons, flash forward to 1984 and women were going to run the marathon in the Olympics. What I found to be so cool was, that with your artistic talents, you sculpted the 12-inch bronze figurines of a pony-tailed girl running that were given as trophies to Joan Benoit Samuelson, Julie Brown, and Julie Isphording, the top three women marathoners at the US Olympic Trials in 1984. How did this come about and how neat is this as you look back three decades later? |
| BG | I’ve always sculpted. Even when I’m doing other things, I have a sculpture in progress on the kitchen counter. Laura James, who was organizing that first Olympic Trials Marathon in Olympia, Washington, contacted me as she knew I was a sculptor. She commissioned me to do those three sculptures. After I wound down my law practice in the 1990s, I was a full-time sculptor for a number of years. Now I’m working in neuroscience and still doing busts from photos and sculptures of athletes. Recently there is a group that formed out in Hopkinton, The 26.2 Foundation, and they have commissioned me to do a life-sized sculpture of a woman runner alongside the Boston Marathon route. They are raising money with crowd funding to build what will be the first sculpture of a woman runner along the marathon route. That is very exciting. |
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| GCR: | Another life interest you mentioned is writing, you have written books including a memoir entitled ‘Wind in the Fire: A Personal Journey,’ and a film based on this memoir and with the same title is in some stage of development. Could you tell us some of the highlights and focus of your book and let us know how the film is progressing? |
| BG | The book focuses on the two years I trained for the Boston Marathon and my trip across the country. I write the story in regular type and then when I go off on a meditation or a thought or follow a line of thinking it is in italics. If you just want the story of what was happening in the outside world it’s in the regular print. But if you want to know what I was thinking when I was running, you can read the italics too. I published that book myself and it’s available on Amazon. Yarrow Kraner from Montana and Los Angeles contacted me about a year and a half ago and he was incredibly inspired by my story and wants to make a film about it. He’s now got a producer located and is moving forward with the story. I think it could be a work of art – fantastic at showing how beautiful and wonderful everything is and also telling an inspiring story and the love story that was going on with the man in my life at that time. |
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| GCR: | With the renewed interest in your story in this fiftieth anniversary year of your first Boston Marathon, are there opportunities arising for you to speak at other races and events and to share your story and your philosophy of life? |
| BG | The events with the Boston Marathon this year in some sense were a transformative experience for all of us that were there this year, including me. I’ve made so many friends internationally and have been invited to speak in China and Ethiopia and Kenya and Amsterdam and London – possibly even in Iran. I’m beginning to form this idea that sounds very much like the 1960s and maybe ridiculous – a love and peace fund to take this spirit of this marathon and to take this love we have established among all these thousands of people and to move it into the world because the alternative to love and peace is hate and war. My next project involves how to create an economy that works for everyone which people say is what we need. I’m writing an economic book on that now based on based premises of the economy and also how we can create a world where there are other conflict resolving methods besides war so that we can end war. Then, hopefully, fifty or a hundred years from now people will look back and say, ‘I can’t believe there was a time when human beings actually killed each other over territory or ideas or ideologies.’ I think at the basis of every religion is the same core. We’re all talking about the same things and are taking different paths up the same mountain. Everybody is fighting over which path is best and they are so busy fighting that they’ve forgotten what the mountain is. The mountain is love. I want to get back to the idea of love that ties us together and that these political structures we need or otherwise in the United States, for example, New Jersey and New York would be at war. We need international political structures to help us avoid conflicts without going to war and that’s what I’m working on. These are my projects for the future. |
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| GCR: | We all have to be healthy to execute our future plans. What is your current health and fitness regimen? |
| BG | I run an hour or two a day. If it’s too hot or too cold or too late or if it’s dark out, I run on a trampoline inside and either watch an educational show or a video or I just think. I use it as a time to think and write. When I visit the doctor he tells me I have the physiology of a thirty year old and that he can’t believe it. My health is incredible and I know it’s because running keeps you young and healthy. Mostly I run, but I also do stretches and dancing and lifting weights. I do a lot of work around the house that keeps me fit. |
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| GCR: | In 1982 you were inducted into the Road Runners Club of America Long Distance Running Hall of Fame, you have and been interviewed countless times for news programs and documentaries, were included in the 1999 HBO Sports documentary Dare to Compete: The Struggle of Women in Sports, received the 2009 Tufts University Athletics Distinguished Achievement Award, were inducted into The Sports Museum of New England Hall of Fame and the list goes on and on. Which of these or other accolades stands out as especially significant to you? |
| BG | I never think about accolades because I’m thinking about how much more needs to be done and what’s my next project. What is means to me is I get to meet all of these wonderful people whenever I go to these events. I’m just so moved by all of the incredible, wonderful people I’m meeting. It’s lovely that they are recognizing me and I’m very honored and grateful, but what stands out to me is wonderful these people are that I’m meeting. |
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| GCR: | New England Law is going to award an honorary Doctor of Laws degree to you as they noted your ‘pioneering spirit is as inspiring today as it was 50 years ago.’ This continues a tradition of pioneering women at New England Law including the first African-American woman from Massachusetts to earn a law degree, the first female lawyer to argue before the full Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the first female police commissioner of Boston How special is it going to be on May 20th to be so honored by your alma mater and included in this group of pioneering women? |
| BG | It’s wonderful. I get to meet all of these wonderful women and to be reunited with my law school again. It is an amazingly wonderful law school. I went to school at night and there were many women coming back and getting a second degree or who were changing their careers. I had incredible teachers there. We were well-trained. I passed the bar exam on the first try and I think most of my classmates did. It is a wonderful school and I’m just so happy to be reunited with these people again. |
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| GCR: | Finally, what are the major lessons or what is the summation of your philosophy that you give to audiences in a minute or two to pull together what you have learned during your life from growing up when athletic opportunities were limited for women, the discipline of running and sharing your knowledge, your professional life and adversity you have encountered that you would like to share with my readers? |
| BG | I think the most important thing in my life is this sense of love. I’ve always had a sense of love - a love for people and a love for nature and this different sense of this sort of golden love being around and inside of me. I feel that the entire cosmos manifests out of this incredible, incomprehensible love that’s beyond our understanding. We don’t have the slightest idea of why we’re here or why it’s all here or how it all got here. And it just fills me with a sense of love and awe and wonder. I don’t try to explain the mystery. I just experience that incredible mystery of that love that is in every human being. Every human being has that sense of love and that sense of empathy. Sometimes people are psychologically imbalanced or mentally disabled in some way and they’re not aware of having that inside of them and they do really awful things. But in the end what is really important in life is love. |
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| | Inside Stuff |
| Hobbies/Interests | Thinking, reading and art. I’m pretty busy with my writing, my art and my research in nerve degenerative diseases. I research the literature every month and I try to put it together. I’m writing this book on fundamental economics. I’m also writing the sequel to ‘Wind in the Fire.’ I have half a dozen books on my computer that are in progress and in various states of disarray. Now I’m going to move forward with this international idea of love and peace and, hopefully, I’ll be working on that life-sized statue of a woman runner to put along the Boston Marathon route. I’m also working on sculptures as I have clients who send me photographs and I create a sculpture from them. I’m pretty busy and am doing exactly what I love. They are not outside interests, but are an avocation in addition to a vocation |
| Nicknames | My family called me ‘Bobbi Lou,’ which is short for my full name of Roberta Louise. All of my family and my early friends all know me as ‘Bobbi Lou’ |
| Favorite movies | I’m not sure I have a favorite movie. It changes from time to time. I know I don’t like violent movies. It pains me to see violence, so most of the movies I watch tend to be about love. I hope my favorite movie will be the one that I’m working on |
| Favorite TV shows | When I was a kid I used to love ‘The Lone Ranger.’ I listened to ‘The Lone Ranger’ on radio and then I’d watch it on TV. Recently, I have to tell you, my TV isn’t even hooked up. I like to watch CNN and C-Span and Sunday morning news programs. I love to watch what is really going on in the world. I like Charlie Rose and interviews with real people. I like to use the TV as a way of staying connected with what is happening in the world |
| Favorite music | I hate to tell you this, but I was brought up on classical music and I love classical music. I love Bach and Brahms and Beethoven and Mozart and Verdi and Vivaldi. And I love opera. There are a lot of popular songs that I like, but I think it is a diverse assortment. I go way back to the Sixties and like music by Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and The Beatles and other classic rock. Now I like music by Sting |
| Favorite books | My favorites I think are actually textbooks. I love reading about molecular biology and biochemistry. The more I learn about science, it is like a spiritual experience to me. The more I learn about the way these incredible cells work and how the molecules work together to make a living cell, the more amazed I am at this incredible cosmos and this creation in which we live that is such a mystery to us. How did everything get here and how does it work? I actually like reading books on molecular biology. I haven’t read a novel for years – all textbooks |
| First car | An old, old, old, old Buick that I got in California for fifty dollars |
| Favorite car | My favorite car was a Porsche that I had in the late 1960s. It was an old 1959 convertible, yellow Porsche with this black leather interior that I bought after I got a job. I bought that old Porsche for very little money |
| Current car | I don’t have a car now – no car at all |
| First Job | I actually had a business when I was in junior high school. My friend, Debbie Usher, and I had a dog laundry and walking business. We would go to neighbors and we would walk their dogs for them and we would wash dogs every week. We had a whole bunch of dogs that we groomed and washed and walked. That was my first business venture |
| Family | My brother. Paul, was born when I was two-and-a-half years old and I immediately adopted him as my own. I just absolutely adored my brother and always have. I was almost like a mother as I think I mothered him as much, if not more, than his real mother. We are still very close. Of course, he’s older than me now (laughing). I tease him about that. My father, Thomas, was a brilliant scientist. He was a Chemistry professor at Tufts University. My mother was a housewife. After I ran the marathon it was like she had a second rebirth. She went back to school and got her master’s degree in Sociology and worked for a bit in the field of Sociology. Then she and I both got involved in the peace movement in the 1980s and ending the Cold War. We were part of an organization that was working in this area as no one knew how to end this Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. We had peace groups and a grass roots movement started. We reached out to the Russian People and they sent people here, we sent people there and finally when Gorbachev and Reagan came into leadership the Cold War amazingly ended. Now Russia is becoming more of a democracy and is creating a more civil society. There is a lot of healing to go through as they have been involved in so many wars and so much tragedy, but are moving in the right direction. People can be cynical, but I have a lot of faith in Russia and the United States and Europe to bridge the gaps and to move forward. My mother was really a prime mover as she went to the Soviet Union. My grandmother, her mother, had been to Russia when it was still under the Czars, so one of my dreams is to go to Russia now and to keep up the family tradition of women going there. My son, Leif, was named after Leif Ericson. He is a neuro scientist. He got his graduate degree in neuroscience and is a post-doc. He’s been working for three years |
| Pets | Of course I had my Malamute, that I mentioned went across the country with me, and I had another Malamute. Then when my son was little we had a whole bunch of chickens and we had two goats called ‘Romeo’ and ‘Juliet.’ We had a dog and five white Angora cats. We had a mini-farm. I’ve also always loved horses and my boy loves horses |
| Favorite breakfast | A decaf latte. I usually eat very light during the day, and with that decaf latte, may have a banana, some almonds and some sunflower seeds |
| Favorite meal | My big meal is at night and I love raw fruits and vegetables. I make a huge bowl of raw fruits and vegetables and mix them all together. Some people say that you aren’t supposed to, but I put in strawberries, blackberries, apple, carrots, kale and others. I love raw fruits and vegetables and eat huge quantities of them. I try to eat grains and I like lentils and rice and sweet potatoes. But if somebody puts down a rare steak in front of me I will eat it though I do feel a little guilty. I eat some fish. All pretty healthy food |
| Favorite beverages | The decaf latte and water. I also love orange juice and cranberry juice |
| First running memory | My memory goes way, way back. I remember back to when my brother was born when I was two-and-a-half years old. When I was three years old, and we lived in Watertown, I remember going to a park in Waverly with my dad and running full speed across the grass in the park. There was a wonderful, magical feeling of how it felt to run. I remember running around the back yard under the chestnut tree and it was incredible. That same sense of love and presence and the life flow of the universe – I felt it then and I feel it now while we’re talking. It’s always there somehow. But when I was running at age three I had this wonderful sense of being alive. I remember that so clearly |
| Running heroes | Almost no one was running back then. Women weren’t running and very few men ran. The only other person I knew who was running was my friend, the track man that I met in the early 1960s. No women were running. For a grown woman to run was so far outside of the social norm that it was unheard of. The men who ran were mostly track runners. You didn’t see them out running on the streets. So I had no role model. I was just following my inner directive, my inner heart, and my inner soul |
| Greatest running moment | It would have to be finishing that 1966 Boston Marathon. That was just incredible. It was the end of an incredible odyssey - an incredible two year journey. Just coming down that home stretch and being greeted like that was such a delight and surprise as I had no idea how it would turn out. I was going into the unknown and for it to be like that and to have all of these wonderful people cheering me, the press coming around and the front page headlines – there’s just that incredible sense of coming down that last bit on Boylston Street and coming across the finish line. And then the Governor coming and shaking my hand was the end of a long, long journey. It was the beginning of a whole new era for women |
| Worst running moment | The last Boston Marathon I ran in 2001. This is so ironic because my worst running moment was coming down that same stretch on Boylston Street. The two orange street sweepers were coming down on either side of me and there was a sea of paper cups. Straggling in there in the freezing cold after the finish clock had stopped was my worst running moment. So, my best and my worst were both there in Boston |
| Childhood dreams | I knew what I wanted on the inside. I wanted to be a great writer, philosopher and scientist. But on the outside it was so impossible for a woman to even begin to do that sort of thing that I had to go through a lot of social change before that was even open or possible for a woman. So I was always pulled in that direction without knowing how to do it. I always had that sense that I wanted to lead and I still feel that way which is why I’m writing these books – to leave something that will help humanity |
| Embarrassing moment | I think I’ve pretty well repressed the many multitudes of incredibly embarrassing moments that are continually scattered throughout my life. Like I can’t remember where I put my keys and all of those things. But I’m pretty good at repressing them. I’m suppressing all of these bad memories. That’s why I stay so happy. I can’t remember anything bad |
| Favorite places to travel | There are so many places that I haven’t travelled to that I don’t even began to know. I travelled across the country, but now I want to travel around the world and see all kinds of other places. There are so many wonderful places and so many different kinds of places. I liked going to Florida when I was a kid and seeing the Everglades. I remember running on the beaches there and seeing all of the animals and birds. I loved California. I love New England which is beautiful and has the deciduous forests. The great Plains are beautiful and I’m in love with the Pacific Ocean. The desert is just incredible. So, I love all kinds of different places. I’ve been to England and Canada and Mexico. I love it all. It’s all incredible |
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