"Pop Tarts!" Jimmy Nicholson, Jimmy Jacobs, Mike Fanelli, Bill Sevald, and other Devotees of the Art of Everyday Giving

Friends over Decades of Distance-Running

Images from Top Left above: Jimmy Nicholson, 50-something, racing downhill within sight of the Marin side of the Golden Gate Bridge; Mike Fanelli, age 24, in the Finish-Chute ahead of Henry Rono in 1980; Bill Sevald winning the USA Masters National 15-Kilometer Championship at age 40 in 1987; Jimmy and his wife Maureen with children Jane, Danny, and David; John Cleese preseenté in a Silly Walk; Mike holding a T-shirt that honors Jim Thorpe as 1912 Olympic Decathalon Cahmpion; Bill Sevald’s first published novel, 2016.

January 23, 2024                                 

We begin this this reminiscence of the two Jimmies and longtime friends from distance-running Bill Sevald and Mike Fanelli, with the Checker Marathon station-wagon that was Jimmy Nicholson’s pride and joy.

Above, a stylized representation, but you can see how ample is Checker Marathon’.

As transportation to and from road-races in the San Francisco Bay Area, middle 1970s into middle 1980s, Jimmy Nicholson’s Checker station-wagon could not be beat. It was spacious! It was stable! It was distinguished by that square-at-every-perpendicular-and-horizontal angle Checker styling that heralded the banks of Cabs that mounted cross Manhattan beside the Plaza Hotel and its fountain (did Scott and Zelda still splash there in their dreams) every workday afternoon, circa 1980.

Above anything, Jimmy Nicholson’s Checker station-wagon contained the certainty of good cheer and an attitude earnest but not over-serious as regards road-racing.

We pick up here that singularly British white Checker wagon on a June morning of 1982, as Jimmy Jacobs, Scots, even shorter than his friend the English Jimmy, steps like a drummer down the walk from his Inner Sunset house to join Bill Sevald and me for the ride to a 15-Kilometer Pacific Association Championships race in Los Altos Hills, that Sunday.

Jimmy Jacobs, hair black as it was furze-wiry, holds tight in one of his hands a set of colorfully packaged energizers that he presents in an Edinburgh accent that’s thick as Highlands golf-course rocks: “Pop Tarts! They’re great! Will-yuh-have-one?”

Nothing could be finer than such company. I’d known it, through Jimmy Nicholson, over five-or so years then.

Jimmy was an independent house-painter when we first met. Later he worked for the City of San Francisco in Maintenance of Golden Gate Park. “A cushier job,” he said. Jimmy hailed from Durham in the North of England. He was King of the Hill one year as a bicyclist in the United Kingdom. “I was best at climbing. Kind of a goat,” he said. His wife Maureen emigrated from Ireland a few 1960s years after Jimmy, took work as a Nurse, and they met at Dances. They and their children Danny, Jane, and David lived in one of the thousands, adjoining-but-gated stucco homes in Avenues of the “Outer Sunset” of San Francisco.

Early in our acquaintance—1976, 1977 and 1978—Jimmy invited me to eat with “Maureen and the kids” after road-races in which we finished, panting, close together. I was then peripatetic, living no longer than two months anywhere over three years, but always felt the tug of the test that distance-running entails. I jumped into races two or so times a year, while smoking a usual half-a-pack of Marlboros per day, while working as writer, or logger, or roughneck, in the middle 1970s.

Jimmy ran for a Club named Pamakids in San Francisco. The Pamakids hosted a Run around Lake Merced on Wednesday evenings. The welcome habit for me, Summer into Autumn of 1978, was to race the Pamakids Run round the Lake and then join Jimmy, Maureen, Danny, Jane and David for meat and potatoes, a piece of pie or cake, and Tea. Conversation about everyday things flowed easily among them. Dinner with the Nicholsons for me stepped back into norms of Prairie Canada and Bellingham, Washington.

Jane, Danny, Jimmy, David, and Maureen Nicholson in an outing during the 1980s

The name Pamakids unveiled itself through explanation. For months I took the Club’s origin-story to be true. That is, Pamakids were a Tribe native to the 49 Hills of San Francisco—a peaceable lot, hunters and gatherers,—and their identity was happily adopted by the families and “Hotshots” (old Union guy Walt Stack’s name for fast young males) who made up Pamakids’ 80-or-so members.

“Did you really believe the story, Don?” Jimmy Nicholson asked my gullibility. “No, it’s Pa, Ma, and the Kids. Pa, Ma, and the Kids. Don. Pa-ma-kids. I thought you were intelligent.”

Mike Fanelli was Captain of Pamakids’ Men’s A Team and a frequent winner of the Wedneday evening Run around Lake Merced.

Mike’s bearing mixed his U.S. Marine Corps’ background with the East Coast Counter-Culture exemplified by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Mike, I learned at once, regarded distance-running as both a gift and an art, such as Steve Prefontaine handled his sport. Because Pamakids’ men ranked no higher than 5th among northern California teams in Autumn—after Aggies, Camino West. Excelsior, and at least one Club from the East Bay—Mike’s leadership pointed to our A Team having some big improvement. I remember’s Mike’s guidance in first runs round the Perimenter Trail of Golden Gate Park as if we’re there today. “If you’d run just two or three times a week, Don, there’s no telling what you could do!”

Mike Fanelli in the chute ahead of Henry Rono after a 15-K in. 1980; Mike and Daryl Zapata had by then founded the San Francisco Running Club.

Bill Sevald came into my acquaintance through races in the Fall and Winter of 1978. Bill ran for Excelsior along with Dr. Jeff Wall, “Rocket” Bob Darling,  Brock Hinzmann, and 180-miles-a-week 2:20 marathoner Ernie Rivas. Bill was about 6’2”—a consultant for Corporations such as McKesson in San Francisco’s Financial District—and he kept his hair in the distinct statement of a Big Auburn Afro.

Graduating from Kalamazoon College in 1969, Bill had played Linebacker for the Ottawa Roughriders in the Canadian Football League and Short Forward in Italian professional basketball. Distance-running challenged him. He too felt its purity of outcome-from-effort in training and in the raceHe dropped his weight below 180 pounds—ran 2:23 to win the Chico Marathon in February 1979and steadily excelled as a Masters runner in the Pacific Association into the late 1980s.

Bill Sevald wins the United States’ Masters’ 15-Kilometer Championships in San Diego, 1980, age 40.

Bill had done a lot that was blue-collar or esoteric. He’d picked apples in the Yakima Valley and lived in other Migrant Camps . He’d Ralph Chaplin’s Wobbly, the whole of Capital, Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, and Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power. He was as strong-willed and thoughtful in his opinions as you’d expect from a Linebacker. He had also a keen, quick sense of humor and irony. “Helllp,” he once called from a phone-booth the San Francisco War Opera House, “I’m three hours into the Rings, I’m seeing Helmets turn into Buffalo!”

MIke and Bill and Jimmy Nicholson offered the earnest but no-nonsense encouragement I could accept.. December 25, 1978 I returned to San Francisco after four days aboard Continental Trailways from Tallahassee, While in Florida I’d run the Final of Schlitz’s 10-K series and and cut my p.r. more than 2 minutes, to 32:09, placing 9th in a field that included Ric Rojas, Bill Rodgers, Garry Bjorklund, and Frank Shorter. “You did that, and you just started to run twice a week!” Jimmy Nicholson said. “You should think about putting more into it.”

Thereafter, I ran every day, an outing at least 5 miles from my Richmond studio and sometimes—for stiff exercise and presumable gain—over 25 miles round the Park and on Strawberry Hill, Having Mike, or Jimmy, or Bill, as company meant a lot.

Two Sunday runs on Mount Tamalpais especially opened vistas.

Again Mike and Bill were central in encouragement and giving. I write about that first Sunday trip across the Golden Gate Bridge intro Mount Tam’s other world here.

Every work-out that extended capacities helped. Repeat 200 meters at sub-35 seconds on a nearby earthen High-School track, broken by a jog around 100 meters, maintained oxygen-debt and increased efficiency, Two sessions that concluded past two-and-a-half hours of running, repeating steep up and then down on the Upper Loop of Strawberry Hill, were like the two runs on Mount Tam great for preparing to run a Marathon—the Marathon a race that had beckoned me since Abebe Bikila’s Olympic victories in 1960 and 1964. I learned what others knew and several more taught me (Henry Rono, John Campbell, Steve Spence, …) over the ensuing decade: a Workout of Redlining at a Pace and over a Distance greater than you wanted for your Goal Race could make Big Gains fast. Sometime soon I’ll post about Red-Lining—anyone can use its principles to improve as a distance-runner.

Mike Fanelli and Jimmy Nicholson and Pamakids are stars round which the West Valley Marathon revolved for me on February 11, 1979. The race worked out optimally. It was a 5-mile loop, one straight a lane of El Camino Réal, its parallel along a less gaudy but monotonous thoroughfare. 27:30 for five miles, 11th-or-so place; 54:30 for 10 miles and about 8th-place,. 1:48:25 for 20 miles, 3rd-place, and 2nd at the Finish behind Wayne Badgley of New Zealand.

Mike was ecstatic! As Marathon progressed and my position improved, Mike’s voice boomed more and across suburban San Mateo County and to shops and shoppers along El Camino Réal. “Balls of steel! Don Paul! Balls of steel!” Atherton would hear it! Hayward would hear it!

Jimmy Nicholson and Jimmy Jacobs also had satisfying, both under 2:50 in their Senior division. Mike joined us for celebration at the Nicholsons on 47th Avenue—cakes, breads and shortbread, tea, meats, and Guinness.

Our friendships continued, as runners’ friendships do. We sought each other’s company. For years of the 1980s dinner with the Nicholsons marked the middle of each Training-Week. Jimmy told me news from the Park crews’ jobsas we jogged down trails and walks then along Ocean Beach. I loved how he and Maureen kissed after Jimmy climbed the stairs from their garage (Checker Marathon crowding alloft bicycles there) and then how Jimmy kissed on their cheek Danny, Jane, and David.  His imiations of John Cleese made me laugh unto lurching sideways. He always walked to the Nicholsons’ front door so that we could shake hands

Mr. Cleese, an Authoritative Silly Walk, if you please!

Jimmy’s sudden death was a great shock. I learned about it three mornings after the 1986 City of San Francisco Marathon (Mike. Fanelli, Invited. Athletes’ Coordinator), when I called for a short farewell before a round-the-world trip that would. start with Flight to Hong Kong. Maureen’s tones were down in her throat. “You don’t know, Don. Jimmy died on Sunday.” He was pedaling along Irving Avenue that July evening, after cheering us through closing miles through the Mission District in the morning, and plunged off his steel Dawes bicycle with a heart-attack. “His Doctor warned him to not pedal fast. But you know Jimmy,” Maureen. said.

Above, from the poem ‘Jimmy Taken’ in the collection Just Like You.

I often had dinner with Bill. He insights remained sharp and deep and like realties accepted by the North American Indian leader, Tecumseh, he particularly admired. He had no use for Clintons and despised George H. W. Bush more than his son because, he said, “the father can think.” .

A combination of injuries (football, basketball, running) kept Bill from competing as an Excelsior Senior. He kept up with distance-running’s breakthroughs. He marveledt the careers of Haile Gebreselassie, Hicham El Guerrouj, and Kenissa Bekele for the landmarks that each athlete created

.

Mike I might see anywhere. He would be the same appreciator. Ric Sayre’s win in the 1986 City of Los Angeles Marathon. Houston in 1987 and a win in 2:11 by the Pacific Association’s and Crossing Lines’ Derrick May. Marin County’s Dipsea 1989 and the spectacular win by Eve Pell, coached by Mike, Eve’s back-surgery the previous year. Mike coached Eve to that comeback over a Mountain that was her and peers’ “backyard.”

Mike became in-demand as the Announcer for Road-Races. He was incomparable at welcoming Marathon finishers home. Thickly they bunched toward the Three-Hour Mark—but Mike distinguished each by name and home-place. His Voice Speaking across Bays and Malls, that Voice of an Old-School Fan, bid runners to their hard-won Finish at, say, the Big Sur Marathon.

“Look at these two! These two athletes are going to break three hours! They’ve been working all morning to see the Clock here! Two-fifty-Seven! ring them home! Joe Gilliam of Fresno. With—they must be Training Partners!—Jim Stefanik of Fresno! Come on! Bring them in! ‘Way under three hours! That’s faster than Seven Minutes Per MIle for 26 Miles! Jim is 47 and Joe is 52! …. Oh, and oh-my-goodness!—this morning’s seventh Masters Woman! One of the hardest-working. women in the entire Pacific Association—Irene Herman! Irene Herman—Secretary of the Pacific Association—a standout of the Impale Running Club—and she STILL FINDS TIME to break eight-minutes-a-mile for this Marathon, this very difficult Big Sur Marathon, climbing up the Highway of Big Sur! Irene Herman! I’m so proud—cause Irene is one of the Impalas I’m so lucky to coach!”

In the late 1980s Mike returned to San Francisco from working national and international promotions for Reebok out of Boston. He helped customers at Hoy’s Sports at Haight nearby Ashbury, He gave them the attention of an acolyte imparting keystones of footplant and posture. He directed the Hoy’s 10-K over several years. He met Renay and began to steadily build a clientele of home-buyers who valued the care that he also showed them.

With growth of social-media’s easy access to a public of fans, Mike began to post photos, clippings, T-shirt, and more the memorabiliia he’d gathered over days since he, a 12-year-old would-be sprinter in Philadelphia, caught George Young demonstrate Hard Work as Grace in breaking the Indoor World Record for 3 miles.

Who knew what Mike might field from his Track & Field Garage? It might be homage to athletes already legend for feats, such as Banister, Jim Ryun, and Lee Evans, Larry James, and Ron Freeman of the 1968 Olympic Champion World-Record Setting Team (with Vince Matthews) 4 x 400 Meters team.

Mike’s memory was likeliest to celebrate someone or something great but relatively obscure.

One thing sure would be the Soul in every highlight that Mike chose to display.

Bill Sevald…. Bill Sevald also stayed true to a course of giving. Bill began to publish novels in 2016. The Stuttering Jock’s Opera opened Bill’s series. You may pick up on qualities of Bill from his tales and their progagonists

From the goodreads.com website—

‘The Stuttering Jock’s Opera is a thinly disguised hero’s journey—complete with three challenges. The lead character is physically reckless, but socially shy because of his halting speech. He trains in the early morning, works temporary clerical jobs during the day, and grapples with an English libretto to a neglected German opera in the evening.

A victory celebration in a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant results in connections that take him to Windsor-Detroit, Toronto, the Russian Far East, and Beijing, and end with a Mandarin performance of his version of Der Freischütz in Xi’an, central China.

Of greater importance, along the way he earns what he had long dreamed of—but assumed he would never have—the love of a beautiful, accomplished woman. But not before he performs a couple of rescues, races the marathon of his life, and works a different kind of temp job, as a porter for a scientific expedition searching for a Chuchunaa, an indigenous Russian version of Yeti, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch.

407 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 4, 2016’

Fishermen from Heaven came out in 2018.

From the review on overdrive.com—

‘Fishermen from Heaven is an adventure yarn featuring two Icelander commercial fishermen, an American septuagenarian, and a Middle Eastern family on the run. Set in current times, it is the story of strangers thrown together in a raging North Atlantic storm. A diplomat, his expecting-any-minute wife, and their twelve and six year-old daughters are fleeing assassins contracted to kill them. The fishermen and the American do what they can to protect the family and themselves. Pressed into service as a midwife, the senior delivers the baby, and bonds with the youngest daughter cooking and singing at the fishing boat's tiny stove. The Icelander crewman is an Olympic class marksman with rifle and pistol, and he teams up with the captain and the old man to successfully bluff the killers the first time they board the fishing boat. The hired guns' second boarding is violent, as is their threat to the safety of the survivors after the vessel reaches Reykjavik.

The early part of the novel traces the routes the characters take to meet. The Icelander captain visits a seaweed-growing recluse on his way to the islands north of Scotland for a last bit of R & R before starting an office job. The American senior unintentionally steals the show in an Oxford Union debate before venturing north to check out the same islands. The Middle Easterners' route is more circuitous. With a promise of help from a long-time consular corps associate and friend, they travel by van, plane, and train through North Africa, France, and Germany before embarking on an ill-fated cargo ship destined for Iceland.’

And a noble dog, Sika, whose example reached the world in November 2021, one year before Bill’s passing.

The review for Barnes and Noble writes

’Sika was a Greenland Inuit's lead sled dog.  She lost her right foreleg battling the gigantic polar bear that killed him.  Marisse is an Arab-American girl who fought with her and is now more her friend than master.  Marisse gets in trouble when she doesn't follow Sika's warnings, such as having a sexual relationship with a Copenhagen zillionaire named Jorgen.  Ilse and Mesi are archaeology grad students who agree to have Marisse do scut work at their dig so she can get Sika back to Greenland. Armed with a handgun and rifle, can they protect Sika and Marisse from the vindictive Jorgen when he travels to Greenland to exact his revenge?

Bill passed away in November 2022. The Detroit News / Detroit Free Press wrote about Bill with respect and affection.

Mike Fanelli passed one year later, on November 25, 2023.

The San Francisco Chronilcle memorialized Mike and his battle over one year with a brain tumor, diagnosed as glioblastoma, and how he’d tallied a final running-log entry, having crossed 115.000 miles (think about that for daily diligence) over 53 years.

Appreciatons quickly mounted into hundreds. Teammates over decades, runners whom Mike had coached, colleagues in business, neighbors, and Internet penpals, posted tributes..

I see them now on the San Fransciso State Track—the Jimmies, Bill, Mike, ... I see them streaming as in a cavalcade, individuals grouped and going round and round the Track nestled among sunset and Eucalyptus, and I see them emergent like diamonds in incidents of revealed character.

Precious, either way.

The S.F. State Track on twilit evenings, Autumn or Summer, for that cavalcade. Dozens running in their sets of “intervals .. The Impala women in their A, B, C, … groups, files a-striding, as Mike Fanelli booms out their splits … (Is that Nathan James, miler, with head-phones like an North Atlantic aviator’s in his sole series?) … There for sure are the Jimmies, Jimmy Nicholson and Jimmy Jacobs, tight beside the also stubby Senior Norm McAbee, in T-shirts and shorts, their arm-swings compact as bread-loaves before their chests, hustling down the backstretch under the bullhorn of Coach Don Bajema … Smoothly overtaking the Seniors’ work-out are the Open “hotshots”, lean and smooth and flowing in 63-second laps under the watch of Coach Daryl Zaptaa—13:42/28:19 guy Roy Kissin of Mill Valley, multiple Marathon winner and 2:12 guy John Moreno of Pacifica, Dan Buntman of the Podiatric College … and, hanging on some 10 strides behind these two-legged gazelles, Bill Sevald, hewing his linebacker’s frame to be like a T-square….

Beautiful as indelible, these scenes from 40 or so years ago.

Then there are the Pop Tarts.

You have not forgot our Pop Tarts? After all these years of Matketing and Packaging, multi-color as Jelly Beans and the Circus, “Frosted” or not. with or without ‘Milton the Toaster’, Pop Tarts of Saturday mornings and another kind of cavalcade.

Jimmy Jacobs of Scotland in his sweatpants and hooded sweatshirt drum-steps down his Inner Sunset house’s walkway and climbs into the back-seat of Jimmy Nicholson’s Checker Marathon station-wagon with a thunk-shutting of his door. In one fist in that favorite race-morning perk, a tight bouquet of cartoon flavors.

“Have you got your treat?” Jimmie Nicholson asks his rival and fellow emigrant.

“Pop Tarts!” Jimmy Jacobs, Accountant, raised in Glasgow, Scotland, affirms. “Never doubt! They’re great! Will yuh-’ave-one?” Jimmy Jacobs’ delivery is fast as those rocks offloaded from Highlands Golf Course.

“Wow,” I say. “Pop Tarts.”

“What kind this morning, Jimmy?” Jimmy Nicholson asks.

“It’s the Blueberry, Strawberry, and Apple Cinnamon. I got two ‘uh each and you’re welcome! All ‘uh these are Frosted!”

“Frosted,” I repeat. “Wow and Double-Wow.”

“More energy when they’re Frosted!” Jimmy Jacobs tells me

Jimmy Nicholson engages the Checker’s stick-shift on its steering-column and we ease toward 19th Avenue and Interstate 280 for the drive to Los Altos Hills and that morning’s Pacific Association Championships. I feel Bill Sevald’s smile rise behind me at the “Pop Tarts!’ and their “Frosted!”

Bill. looks out his window to avoid showing a reaction that might offend Jimmy Jacobs.

“Will yuh ‘ave one?” Jimmy Jacobs asks his companion on the back-seat expressly/

“No, thanks,” Bill Sevald says. “I’ll wait.”

Ringmaster of Blueberries (Could it be Groucho Marx in a new Line?) for Pop Tarts circa 1982.

Other Pieces about Friends over Decades in Distance-Running and Track & Field

This “Pop Tarts!” post continues a series about Distrance-Running and Track & Field that began on the Stands the Human Being substack last March with a profile of Bill Rodgers in Autumn of 1980—

Also in 2023. “Wa at the World Championships of Track & Field’—

And ‘To Athing Mu and More’ of athletes who perform without boundaries—

From the We Are Revolutions and You Are Here to Shine website are these pieces from 2018 or earlier (I forget exactly when ‘First Sunday on the Mountain’ was written.)

‘Young Giants Are Coming: Track & Field 2018’

Returning to the San Francisco Bay Area circa 1979.

One last word. Over the past few days of writing this pieces and convalescing (broke left hip in fall from bicycle Thursday evening here in New Orleans January 11; operation and full replacement Jan. 13; steady mending since), lines from a poem written about two friends from writing and music, Chuck Kinder and John Sinclair, have recurred to me as fitting Bill Sevald, Jimmy Nicholson and Jimmy Jacobs, and Mike Fanelli. The lines, occurring late in this long poem that’s titled ‘It Must Be.Love (Word Come Down through Forbidden Radio)’ and referring to players of the music called Jazz, go: ‘What lifts the horns of devotees / Who play to be a force for good? / [… ] / It must be love. / It must be love./ It must be love. / […] ‘

(Kidd Jordan, Morikeba Kouyaté and I recorded ‘It Must Be Love …’ as the concluding Track for our album Women Center Earth, Sea, and Sky.)

Over these past few days I’ve understood better what moved these folks. They were in fact devotees of giving.