10 FEBRUARY 8-14, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Miles to Go PIONEERING TRACK STAR KELLEY DOLPHUS STROUD MADE A RUN AT THE OLYMPICS...BUT CAME UP SHORT. BY JOHN FL ATHMAN At 4 a.m. on June 25, 1928, an hour and a half before sunrise, Kelley Dolphus Stroud got up to run. Morning jogs weren’t unusual for the Colorado Springs athlete, and they mostly took place at his preferred training ground, the nearby slopes of Pikes Peak. This time, however, he wouldn’t be heading west toward the moun- tain, but in the opposite direction — across the plains of northeastern Colorado and on to the East Coast. With around forty pounds of gear on his back, $10 in his pocket and several pairs of shoes to wear through, he intended to run all the way to the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This spring, nearly 96 years later, his overlooked story is fi nally being unearthed in a Colorado Springs-based documentary called Running to Harvard, which is currently in production and seeking support through a crowdfunding campaign. Stroud, who went by Dolphus, was aim- ing to reach the 1928 Olympics, an attempt he made eight years before the celebrated Berlin Olympics performance of fellow run- ning pioneer Jesse Owens. He was drawn to the solitary comforts of competitive running during high school after being denied a spot on the football team because of his race, a common experience for African-American athletes in the segregated 1920s. Pikes Peak became his training ground and his escape; it was where he set a round- trip climbing record in March 1928, breaking one that had been held for 25 years, with a time of three hours and ten minutes. He then went on to win the 5,000-meter run at the Rocky Mountain Olym- pic Track and Field tryouts in June, which granted him entry to the Olympic trials held in Boston that summer. While the tryouts’ orga- nizers had promised the win- ner transportation expenses for the Boston trip, that offer was rescinded when a Black athlete came out on top. Dismayed but un- deterred, Stroud decided that he would still attempt to reach Boston by the one mode of transportation he knew he could defi nitely rely on: his feet. Through a combination of walking, run- ning and hitching rides by buggy and car (which were still relatively rare), Stroud trav- eled 1,765 miles in twelve days, successfully reaching the trials six hours before the fi rst race. It was a death-defying trip that pitted an unforgiving schedule and the summertime heat against Stroud’s physical and mental endurance, taking him to the very limit of his capabilities. Running to Harvard details this incredible journey and its aftermath against the back- drop of Stroud’s large, equally groundbreaking family. The fi lm’s executive pro- ducer and creative engine is none other than Stroud’s great-nephew, Frank Shines. Shines has been waiting years to tell Stroud’s story, and he’s assembled an experienced creative team from the Springs area to help him do so: Execu- tive director Ralph Giordano has been producing fi lm and video independently and has been active in fi lm preserva- tion there since the late ’80s; Mike Pach, the assistant direc- tor on the project, is a photographer, author, teacher and the founder of the Colorado Photography Learning Group; and cinema- tographer Ky Hanchette is a longtime local director of photography who has worked for clients ranging from Space Force to the PGA. For Shines, who currently resides in Tampa, one of the twists in telling this particu- lar story is that for many years, he wasn’t even aware of it. The Stroud clan is deeply rooted and widespread, even by American standards, and Shines’s branch (his grandfather was Stroud’s brother Tandy) was fi rst extended to Oakland, California, then fractured. As a consequence, he grew up in the Bay Area without learning about his Colorado connec- tions until he came here as a cadet at the Air Force Academy in the late 1980s. “I knew nothing about the family until I got to the Air Force Academy,” he says. That was when he received a phone call from a stranger who claimed to know him. Perplexed, he as- sumed it was a wrong number, but the caller insisted: “No, I know you. Don’t you know the history of your family in this city?” Shines was unconvinced and about to hang up when she rattled off the names of his mother and grandfather, Vanessa and Tandy Stroud. “And I said, ‘Oh, my God, okay, so who are you?’” Shines recalls. “She goes: ‘I’m Lulu.’” “Lulu” was Lu Lu Stroud Pollard, Dolphus Stroud’s younger sister, the eighth of eleven children total, and a signifi cant trailblazer in her own right. Gifted in fi - nance, she became the fi rst Black employee of the Civil- ian Offi ce of Personnel at Fort Carson, then rose to become head of the entire account- ing department there, among other supervisory roles. Once she retired, Pollard returned to Colorado Springs and, upon fi nding a dearth of informa- tion about African-American Coloradans, decided to col- lect some. Together with her second husband and some friends, she formed her own historical soci- ety dedicated to preserving stories, artifacts and photographs documenting Black history. Their invaluable preservation work became a foundation for later local collections, includ- ing that of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. Shines couldn’t have been cold- called by a better family mentor, and in time, he even stepped into her shoes. “My avocation is [being] the family histo- rian,” he says. “I’m trying to get as much of this information put into different types of media that will last and tell the story. Because otherwise, the kids just won’t know. It will disappear fi fty years from now.” Since graduating from the Air Force Academy, Shines has cultivated a diverse background that is well suited for the job of fi lm producer, a role that requires a little bit of everything. Besides his time spent as a pilot, he’s been an industrial engineer, a man- agement consultant for such fi rms as IBM, a fi lmmaker, an author and a speaker; he also founded his own mentorship program, the Stroud Leadership Academy. Running to Harvard is just one version of Stroud’s story that Shines is producing this year. He’s also developing it as an opera with the Interna- tional Brazilian Opera Company. A key theme of both the cross-country adventure and Shines’s own life is familial dialogue that carries victories and stories through generations. This connection is not just an oral history, but a sharing of strength, which he illustrates with a telling anecdote from Stroud’s story. The athlete was just outside of Ohio, and “at that point, he ran the calculations, he’s working out the math and the distance, and he’s not there yet, and I can’t remember how many days there were left, but he said: ‘There’s no way I’m gonna make it,’” Shines recounts. “A storm came, he huddled up underneath some tombstone in a cemetery, and he was ready to turn back that night. And he had some hard conversa- tions with the images of the Stroud family past, so to speak.” CULTURE KEEP UP ON DENVER ARTS AND CULTURE AT WESTWORD.COM/ARTS Kelley Dolphus Stroud (top center) and family, photographed for W.E.B. DuBois’s The Crisis magazine. An AI rendition of Dolphus Stroud in Paris created by Frank Shines. FRANK SHINES FRANK SHINES
