Marathon founder takes the course less traveled

By Jim Dwyer
The Daily News
Sunday November 3, 1990

SUSAN WATTS DAILY NEWS

BRAINS behind the five-borough marathon, George Spitz.

TO TELL THE truth, today's marathon is not all that big a deal to me, but it does have a special place in the history of Crazy Ideas That Worked. That's because the author of this one, the great George Spitz, has a long and nearly perfect history of lost causes.

  "That first year, when I came down the Verrazano Bridge ramp in Bay Ridge, there were big crowds," said Spitz. "They never had crowds in Chicago. We had them right from the start."
  Of course it was a shock. It was a win.
  George Spitz has made a career of sprinting the wrong direction down one-way streets. He ran five times for office on the East Side of Manhattan, where he has lived for most of his 74 years.
  He lost all five.
  "Been fired many, many times," said Spitz, a note of pride in his voice. "I was fired well over 10 times. Would you like me to count them for you?"
  That won't be necessary. Let's talk, briefly, about the marathon.
  "In 1975, I was running the Boston Marathon and thought it would be great to have the New York Marathon go through all five boroughs," said Spitz. "We had been running marathons in Central Park, but it was just four laps around and around."
  At the time, the city was in a giant depression. Businesses were fleeing. The Bronx was burning. City Hall was bankrupt. The popular wisdom was that most people wanted to run away from New York, not around it. But Spitz' devotion to the good and earnest makes him almost irresistible. He carried the idea of a five-borough marathon to Percy Sutton, then the Manhattan borough president, who realized it would be a first-rate spectacle.
  They approached the Rudin real estate clan, then Charlie McCabe of Chase Manhattan. Soon, the mightiest icons of American capitalism were under the spell of Spitz' grand vision.
  With the triumphant first race notched on his belt, Spitz returned to work as an auditor for the state. He was promptly fired.
  "They said I didn't have a driver's license," said Spitz. "I sued on age discrimination and won. At the hearing, they said I was a 'security risk' because I wrote a political column in Our Town, a weekly in Manhattan."
  No hard feelings, says Spitz. "I became very friendly with the guy who fired me, Mike Comiskey from the state. He didn't lie under oath about why I was fired."
  Spitz was born in New York in 1922. then waited a decent interval before losing a job. "The first lime I was fired was 1939," he said. After two stints of military service, he settled on Manhattan's upper East Side. As a matter of style, he joined the Lexington Democrats, a reform-tilted club. He also joined the Citizens Union. It did not take long for the reform movement to let him down.
  "Reformers are fascinated with all aspects of politics and government. Except those aspects dealing with the past, the present and the future. And the Citizens Union -- I call them No Change N.Y. Roy Goodman owns the group, though. I do like him -- he's an engaging rascal."
  In 1968, during one of his races for office, Spitz proposed that welfare checks be deposited directly with the banks. "That took about 10 years," said Spitz. "There was a lot of resistance from the check-cashing services. I got an award for that one."
  Nearly alone in New York, Spitz has unraveled the unholy fixes of cable TV --not just the tedium of which conglomerate owns what politician, but why you can't get a decent Turner movie on Turner's own cable system. Instead, we are stuck with American Movie Classics, which provides, Spitz notes, "constant reruns of Ronald Reagan and Rhonda Fleming 'starring' in 'Hong Kong' and similar 'gems.'"
  Spitz now volunteers in the mayoral campaign of Sal Albanese, the Brooklyn councilman who is worth his weight in common sense, if not campaign money.
  At 74, he eats one vegetarian meal a day, runs regularly in Central Park, and is not married. "Not quite yet," he says. "But my family has always been slow on that front"
FEW PEOPLE ARE more useful than the contrarian, the independent souls who don't mind a box score that reads one hit, 10,000 swings.
  "I like to think some of my ideas are constructive," said Spitz. The marathon and the U.S. Tennis Open may not be the World Series, but they are the only national sporting events held every year in New York.

The Progressive, Pro-Peace choice in the New York City Democratic Primary for City Council 5th District on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island.