It was another bitterly cold morning in Everetts, Kan., a rural farming town like so many hundreds of communities throughout the American Midwest as the world was waging the Great War, World War I.
The residents in those small towns were not strangers to hard—often back-breaking—work, and from early childhood, they learned to value, even to love, hard work. Chores were doled out nearly as soon as a child could walk.
Such was the life of the Cunninghams: father Clint was a water-well driller who moved his family around a lot in a struggle to keep them fed.
On Aug. 4, 1909, while living in Atlanta, Kan., Clint’s wife bore him a son, whom they named Glenn. By the time he was six, little Glenn was already working.
He and his nine-year old brother, Floyd, were assigned the onerous duty of walking almost two miles to the schoolhouse (that’s what they still called them back then, and many really were just abandoned houses that were converted to schools) to start the fire in the stove.
That way, the room would be warm by the time the teacher and other students arrived.
One cold morning in February of 1916, Floyd and Glenn arrived at the schoolhouse and unlocked the door, and were slapped in the face by the bitter cold wafting out of the still structure.
The two boys loaded the large, pot belly stove full of firewood, and took the kerosene can and soaked the logs thoroughly, as they always did. The kerosene accelerated the process of ignition, while also soaking into the logs enough to allow the flames to begin consuming the wood.
This morning, though, something went terribly wrong.
After letting the logs soak in the fluid for a bit, Floyd struck a match and dropped it into the pot belly stove. Almost instantaneously, the fire took on a life of its own. With a percussive “whoomp,” fire exploded everywhere, engulfing Floyd in a horrific sheet of flame.
Someone had mistakenly filled the kerosene container with gasoline.
Both of the boys were knocked to the ground by the mini-explosion, writhing in unspeakable pain. The flames quickly escaped the confines of the stove and violently swarmed throughout the front room of the schoolhouse.
On this day, their older sister Letha had accompanied them to school. She had been tending to other duties nearby, and heard the commotion coming from the schoolhouse. She saw the menacing flames and rushed to the front door, her horror growing by the moment.
She managed to open the door and coax her siblings out of the inferno. She ran for help; by the time she got back, Floyd was barely alive. He died shortly thereafter.
Little Glenn was mercifully unconscious for hours, as local doctors proclaimed him more dead than alive. His lower body had been ravaged by the flames.
He awoke in the local hospital, his legs swathed in bandages. The pain was unspeakable. He thought suddenly of his older brother, and tried to spring out of his bed to find him, but he could not move his legs.
He was crushed to learn that his brother had passed.
He was forced to stay in the hospital for weeks. His legs remained bandaged and lifeless. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he overheard whispered conversations between his mother and doctors. First, they thought he would not survive. Later, they said he would never walk again, and urged amputation of both his legs.
His mother, mindful that her son had already lost his brother, refused to let him lose his legs, too.
When the bandages were finally removed and Glenn was sent home, it was easy to see why the doctors had been so pessimistic.
Glenn had lost all the toes on his left foot, and the transverse arch of the foot was ravaged. The flesh on his knees and shins had been eaten away by the flames. The right leg was grossly misshapen and was now a full two inches shorter than the left leg.
He still could not walk.
The doctors had done all they could. There was no such thing as transplants and skin grafts in those days nearly a century ago, and even if there had been, the Cunninghams were not likely candidates to afford the processes.
They sent him home with a wheelchair and crutches, advising the family to massage the legs to stretch the muscles and restore suppleness to his lower limbs.
Cunningham commented on the arduous regimen in his autobiography, American Miler: The Life and Times of Glenn Cunningham, by Paul J. Kiell.
“It hurt like mad,” Glenn said, “especially when my father stretched my legs...When my father would get tired I’d ask my mother to do the massaging and stretching and when she couldn’t do any more I’d start doing it myself.”
Glenn was determined to walk again, and endured the excruciating routine as a necessary evil.
One sunny day, during the summer of 1919, his mother wheeled him into the yard for fresh air, as was her custom. She went back inside. A few minutes later, she was astonished to see Glenn crawling on the ground!
She rushed outside, thinking something was wrong. By the time she had reached her son, Glenn had pulled himself across the grass and raised himself up on the picket fence.
He then proceeded to drag himself along the fence, stumbling as he tried to will his legs into functioning, determined that he would walk, all the while resisting his mother’s attempts to help.
He did this every day for weeks, until he had worn a path along the fence.
Slowly—over a period of months—Glenn’s legs began to function, to the astonishment of the doctors. After he began walking again, he made another discovery:
“It hurt like thunder to walk, but it didn't hurt at all when I ran. So for five or six years, about all I did was run.”
Well, he actually started doing something more akin to hopping fast than running. But before long, young Glenn Cunningham was known throughout the community for his running. Because he ran everywhere.
He once said, “I didn’t move 10 feet without breaking into a run. I ran and ran and ran.”
By the time he as 12, Glenn—running despite having legs that were still riddled with scars—was outrunning everyone in his age group in Elkhart, Kan., where his family had set down roots.
He went on to run track at Elkhart High School, becoming a miler. In his last schoolboy race, he set a national record, running the mile with a time of 4 minutes, 24.7 seconds
It is reputed that Cunningham ran a sub-four minute mile at Elkhart, but such outrageous rumors are unsubstantiated.
Cunningham took his incomparable determination and will to the University of Kansas in 1930, running for legendary track coach Brutus Hamilton, who himself had been a famed decathlete, winning a silver in the discipline at the 1920 Antwerp Games.
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