Lebow, Fred

(b. 3 June 1932 in Arad, Romania; d. 9 October 1994 in New York City), founder of the New York City Marathon who transformed the race into the world’s most popular marathon.

Lebow was born Fischl Efraim Lebowitz, one of seven children in an Orthodox Jewish family in the Transylvania region of Romania, near the Hungarian border. His father ran a wholesale produce business, and the family survived the Nazi occupation during World War II but scattered in advance of the postwar Soviet takeover.

As a teenager, Lebowitz made his way through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Ireland before arriving in New York City with his brother Michael in December 1949. Soon afterward, he changed his surname. Although Lebow claimed that he smuggled sugar and diamonds from continental Europe to England and Ireland during his years on the move, family members disputed the story. His brother said that the two studied in Orthodox Jewish rabbinical seminaries (yeshivas) in Czechoslovakia and Ireland and later in Brooklyn. After brief stays in Kansas City and Cleveland, where he ran a nightclub, Lebow returned to New York City in the early 1950s. He studied for a short time at Manhattan’s Fashion Institute of Technology before starting a business in the Garment District, specializing in moderately priced imitations of fashionable designer wear.

Lebow took up running when his friend and tennis partner Brian Crawford challenged him to a race around the Central Park Reservoir. Although he kept only an eleven-minute-per-mile pace around the 1.6-mile loop, Lebow defeated Crawford and was hooked. With no wife or children and no other hobbies to occupy his time, running became Lebow’s obsession. In the late 1960s he joined the handful of runners who then made up the New York Road Runners Club (NYRRC), and in 1970 he invested $300 to bankroll the first New York City Marathon, a four-loop race around Central Park in which he participated. The cash went to buy soft drinks for the 127 runners and inexpensive watches for the winners.

In 1973 Lebow became president of NYRRC, and in 1976 he executed the move that would catapult the New York City Marathon to greatness, dropping the Central Park course in favor of a route that went through all five of the city’s boroughs. The marathon instantly went from just another footrace to a 26.2-mile-long celebration of the city, and the number of participants surged to more than 25,000. While the older Boston Marathon demanded that its entrants meet tough qualifying standards, the New York City Marathon was open to anyone fit enough to run the distance.

Lebow’s ego was as much a key to the race’s success as were his boundless energy and ambassadorial enthusiasm for running. As longtime friend and fellow runner George Hirsch wrote, “Fred was the perfect person to put running on the map, a blend of priest of our sport and P. T. Barnum-style promoter. One without the other would not have worked.” In his early years of running the marathon, Lebow alone negotiated with sponsors and city agencies, dealt with the media, and issued invitations to elite runners, whom he personally picked up when they arrived at the airport. With that kind of dedication came strong opinions, and Lebow feuded publicly with marathon star Bill Rodgers, who said that New York did not pay enough, and with other leaders in the sport. “People devoted to a single cause are usually a little crazy,” said the New York Commissioner of Parks and Recreation Henry Stern. “That’s what you expect and you don’t judge them by normal standards.… If you’re asking me if New York City is better off because Fred Lebow is around, the answer is yes.”

Although the marathon was his passion, Lebow was the force behind other high-profile NYRRC events, including the Fifth Avenue Mile and a race up the Empire State Building’s 1,550 steps. By the early 1990s the club’s membership had grown from a few hundred to more than 30,000.

In 1990 Lebow was diagnosed with lymphoma of the brain, for which he underwent chemotherapy, and in 1991 he had surgery to remove a malignant tumor from his thyroid gland at Mount Sinai Hospital. The cancer went into remission, and though Lebow at first used a cane to walk the corridors of the hospital, he later ran in Central Park.

In 1992 Lebow—who had run in sixty-eight other marathons but not the five-borough New York City Marathon for which he was most famous—ran the race for the first time. Cheered by thousands, he and his escort, nine-time women’s champion Grete Waitz, finished in five hours, thirty-two minutes, thirty-four seconds. At the Central Park finish, Lebow embraced Waitz, then kneeled and kissed the finish line, joking, “I never believed so many people would watch a miserable runner two hours behind.”

It was his last marathon. The cancer returned early in 1994 and eventually forced Lebow to stop running. That August, in a special Central Park ceremony, he was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame. Lebow died at his home on New York’s Upper East Side less than a month before the twenty-fifth running of the New York City Marathon. He is buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, New York.

If Frank Shorter’s 1972 gold medal in the Olympic marathon sparked the running boom and Jim Fixx’s Complete Book of Running helped bring the sport to the masses, it was Fred Lebow who led the masses to the marathon. While the Boston Marathon remained only for those swift enough to meet its tough qualifying standards, Lebow’s New York City Marathon was a people’s race, embracing the city and its energetic diversity. Lebow’s 1992 run was one of the most inspirational moments in the history of the sport.

A collection of Lebow’s papers and memorabilia is housed in the library of the New York Road Runners Club. Lebow’s thoughts on running, particularly its importance in his battle with cancer, can be found throughout The New York Road Runners Club Complete Book of Running (1992). George Hirsch wrote a tribute to Lebow, “The Visionary,” in Runner’s World (Jan. 1995). Obituaries are in the New York Times (10 and 13 Oct. 1994) and the Houston Chronicle (10 Oct. 1994).

Tim Whitmire