Tuesday, July 24, 2012

An Olympic Connection..about as close as I'll get!

My grandfather, Peter  Patrick Carney was an avid sports enthusiast who competed in many sports and wrote about others as a writer for several magazines and newspapers.As many of you know both my Mom & her sister passed away last year & my brother & I ( & his family) cleaned out both places. 
My Aunt had a treasure trove of family papers--photos & many of the originals of the stories & articles that my grandfather wrote.  He died when I was about 4 or 5 so I have few memories of him....so going through all these articles has been great--I found out things I never knew!  I just want to quote part of an article he wrote





"Teams I captained won the five man bowling championship  of Trenton (NJ) for 5 successive years.  I was never less than second in the individual championship and one year had an average of 199 for 177 games.  Whether this is good or not I will leave to you.  I could clip out a quarter mile in better than 50 seconds, run the half in better than 2 minutes and do some other things on the track.  I had aspirations of being a member of the 1908 Olympic team to Athens but in the spring of 1907 I broke down and haven't ran a race since.  Hopes of glory in an Olympic meet went with the straining of tendons in the thigh"


Not sure when he wrote this--one of the few things that's not dated.  I would guess the photo is from the early 1900's--my Aunt was born in1913 & all took place before.

1 comment:

Judith Kane said...

What a handsome man! While he may have lost his Olympic dreams, he never lost his love of sports. Can you imagine where his talent--developed with what we have available to elite athletes today--would have brought him? What a treasure you have discovered, Ann.

Now, I was wondering about his shoes: are they slippers, or some sort of early 20th century track shoe?