She has, however, been devoted, in her own unique way, to the New York City Marathon for almost 50 years.
Two years after her husband, Gary Muhrcke, won the first New York City Marathon, in 1970, she started making the laurel wreaths for the winners. She’s done it every year since and will for Sunday’s race.
She has always shied away from the spotlight, despite the marathon having grown in prominence over her many decades of service. She was even hesitant to be interviewed for this article.
I would know, I’m her grandson.
This is her process. The day before the marathon, Jane, who is now 75, picks the most attractive mountain laurels — hearty evergreens that require little maintenance — from her backyard in Huntington, New York. She assembles the wreaths by placing laurels around a wire base until the base is no longer visible. Their construction must take place at the last minute, to avoid any wilting.
Originally, Jane used twisted coat hangers for the base of her wreaths, but learned in 1976 to use better materials. After winning the first marathon on the current five-borough course, Bill Rodgers winced in pain when the wreath was placed on his head; the jagged coat hanger tips scratched his skull. “It must have felt like a crown of thorns,” Jane said.
Rodgers said that he will forever remember “Tiny Mayor Beame” (Mayor Abraham D. Beame was 5-foot-2) reaching up to him on the winners stand and trying to scrunch the laurel wreath onto his head.
Laurel wreaths first appeared in Greek mythology as a symbol of triumph when worn by Apollo. Olive wreaths were used as awards in Greece’s early Olympic Games.
The idea for laurel wreaths at the New York City Marathon came about during a walk along Huntington Bay. My grandparents were good friends with Fred Lebow, the founder of the race, who was trying to come up with ways to distinguish his event. He wanted the marathon — which only had 127 runners the first year — to be on par with the premier American road race at the time, the Boston Marathon.
“And our marathon needed to be classed up, too,” Jane recalled, as we walked past her mountain laurel shrubs on a recent visit.
At the first New York City Marathon, runners ran loops around Central Park and were given cans of soda at the finish — but no can openers, Jane recalled (this was early in the pop-top era). “It was a mess,” she said. “Runners were running in and out of the kitchen at Tavern on the Green looking for can openers.”
Hidden in a dusty corner in my grandparents’ home is my grandfather’s marathon trophy, engraved with his name and time: 2.5 hours and change, a respectable time for a committed amateur these days, but half an hour behind today’s top finishers. The trophy is about half its original size. As a child, I broke it while playing in the rec room with my cousin. Now the top half is a miniature Statue of Liberty that Jane purchased in Times Square and glued on.
In Jane’s photo collection there is just one picture of my grandfather winning the marathon. “Only two reporters showed up that day and one left before the race was finished,” she said.
There is also a photograph from 1972 of a group of women sitting on the start line to protest special rules for women running the marathon. Jane, who was part of this group, wore a T-shirt with a Superman logo. Four years later, it inspired the logo for Super Runners Shop, the business my grandparents started in 1976.
At first, they sold shoes out of a van — but Super Runners, like the marathon itself in those days, rapidly expanded.
At the company’s height — it grew to 11 stores — its “booth,” in partnership with a sneaker manufacturer, at the pre-marathon expo from 2003 to 2013, took up half the Jacob Javits Center. After helping Gary move flatbed trucks filled with shoeboxes and T-shirts into the convention hall, Jane would start making the wreaths in a cubicle hidden by a curtain.
In 2011, Gary and Jane sold the business but kept one store in Huntington. Gary, now 79, goes to work four days a week and considers maintaining the single shop a hobby. Jane, however, is enjoying retirement.
During the years Lebow directed the marathon, Jane would hand all four wreaths — two for the runners who won and two for the winners in the wheelchair race — to him directly, on race day, in Central Park. “I used to go straight to the finish line, but now you can’t get past security in the park even the night before,” she said. Since Lebow’s death in 1994, Jane has turned them over to New York Road Runners Club officials, through a variety of improvised ways, usually the night before the race.
In a series of phone calls to the club, I was repeatedly told that no one knew who received the wreaths — or when or where. When pressed for details about the exchange, even George Hirsch, leader of the club’s board of directors and a longtime friend of my grandmother, said, “I know she is doing it, but I have absolutely no idea what the logistics are anymore.” According to Jane, it’s been a different procedure almost every year for two decades now.
During our last talk, she recalled a close call in the late ’90s: time was running out before the awards ceremony and she resorted to waving the wreaths at a police officer to open a path toward the finish line.
Last year, Jane went to the New York Road Runners pasta dinner in Central Park the night before the marathon to hand off the wreaths and plans to do the same this year. “Everyone is always changing at the Road Runners Club,” she said. “I just try to find someone I know.”
Jane has never been paid for her wreaths and has never asked for a dime. Eventually she expects her homemade wreaths to be replaced by something more extravagant. She hasn’t received a call from the Road Runners club yet this year, but she will continue to make them, she said, until she is told to stop.
This article originally appeared in
.