Sports Fact and Book Rec of the Day 7/19/2007

7/19/1952:
Runner Paavo Nurmi, Finland's greatest sports hero, lights the Olympic flame to inaugurate the Summer Games in Helsinki. Competing in three Olympiads from 1920 to 1928. Nurmi won nine Olympic gold medals (six individual) and posted innumerable world records at distances ranging from 1500 to 20,000 meters. At the Paris Games in 1924, he won the 5000 meters and 55 minutes later ran the 1500 meters for another gold.

Birthdays:
Alex Hannum b. 1923
Ilie Nastase b. 1946
Billy Olson b. 1958
Teresa Edwards b. 1964
David Segui b. 1966


In 1838 some 18,000 Cherokee Indians were forced from their homes in the South to reservations in Oklahoma. In 1989 Ellis, a failed screenwriter with Cherokee roots, decided to walk the 900-mile Trail of Tears, this time from Oklahoma to his home in Alabama. His account of that journey evokes William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways for the thoughts on the Cherokee and their struggles, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for the personal journey with an array of oddball sidekicks. An original, raw portrait of one man’s America.

WALKING THE TRAIL: ONE MAN’S JOURNEY ALONG THE CHEROKEE TRAIL OF TEARS, by Jerry Ellis (University of Nebraska Press, 2001)