The former professor is writing a book about the running scene on Long Island

eEileen Barnes-Corley’s eyes widened when the 6-pound, 1,225-page book fell with a heavy bang on her table at a café this summer in Oyster Bay.

“My God!” She said, when she randomly opened it, flipping pages full of pictures and texts chronicling people and genders from the ’80s and ’90s. “There’s Joe Cordero,” she exclaimed, as if looking at former classmates in an old high school yearbook. “There’s Lee DiPietro, and Barbara Gubbins. Wow, there’s Jane Peterson!”

Notable runners on Long Island, all of them. So was Barnes Corley, a resident of Syossette and one of the fastest female marathoners in the metropolitan area in the 1980s. They are included in this great book. “Glory Days: Still Running Against the Wind” may be best described as a long and detailed love letter to a sport and era on Long Island - written by a man who was in the midst of the scene.

Morey Dean, now 79, has taught English at Suffolk County Community College for 37 years. In early 2020, he retired and began splitting time between his home in Patchogue and his summer home in his hometown of Michigan. As a contributor to regional publications going on here and in Wolverine State, he had considered writing a longer treatment of the sport he loved and excelled in as an adult.

“The story had to be told, someone had to write this, and I thought I might as well,” he said. The epidemic helped. “Covid has not been easy on anyone,” he said, referring to stay-at-home orders in the spring of 2020. “It gave me that focus.”

The story that unfolds in Glory Days is a zigzag one. And unlike most of the contestants on his pages, he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to get to the end. The book also includes Dean’s own journey from midwestern rock ‘n’ roll boy to Long Island writing professor.

Born and raised in southern Detroit and Dearborn, Morey grew up a rabid fan of the Detroit Tigers and avid lover of early rock ‘n’ roll: Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard. As an indifferent student, he began his academic career at Wayne State University where, he admits, “I wasted my first two years in an ‘Animal House’ fraternity.” In 1964, he moved to Michigan, where he met Tony Piazza on the cafeteria line. They married a year later. “It was RA,” he said, referring to student resident assistants who work as mentors in dorms for younger students. “I was a dinar… a delinquent juvenile.”

Exaggeration: While he seems to have spent much of his time in college drinking beer and playing rhythm guitar in different bands, Dean was a serious enough student that he was accepted and completed a doctoral program at the University of Michigan.

Professor SCCC

He wanted to teach English and communications, so after stints at colleges in Detroit, he says, he went looking for a professor job, he jokes, “on an enchanted island.” Although there are no vacancies in Key West, Florida, he saw an advertisement for a job in the English Department of Suffolk County Community College and applied. “This was an island too, and it looked very interesting.”

Therefore, Detroit Deans moved with Tony and their young children to Ronkonkoma. It was 1972—the same year that 1969 Yale Law School graduate Frank Schurter at the University of Florida took the gold in the Olympic marathon in Munich, the first American to win the famous event since the 1908 Games. It was the spark that helped On illuminating what would become the underway boom that first swept the United States in the late 1970s. Inspired by short and emerging research showing the health benefits of jogging, thousands of Americans began hooking up rudimentary pairs of Nikes (they came on the market that same year) and jogging around their neighborhoods.

Dean was one of them. Having ballooned to 189 pounds at one point, he’s reduced his weight to 130 pounds in part through regular four-mile rides around Lake Ronkonkoma. “I thought that would do the trick,” he joked. “I didn’t need to run much more.”

But again, he drifted into the cultural tide. In 1976, the New York City Marathon, hitherto an awe-inspiring event consisting of four laps around Central Park, became a 26.2-mile run through the five boroughs. In 1977, Jim Fixx published his bestselling book “The Complete Book of Running”. A New Jersey cardiologist, Dr. George Sheehan followed up the following year with “Running and Being,” his own bestselling ruminator about the joys of physical and spiritual exercise.

Dean took everything. “I had marathon fever,” he said. “I started keeping a training log and started running more seriously.” His runs grew from four miles to 20, and he began signing up for the growing number of Long Island races. He also began to meet a growing number of like-minded souls. “I became part of a fraternal association of people committed to active living,” he said.

As in other parts of the country, running on Long Island has become a large and visible subculture. Races like the Great Cow Harbor 10k have drawn 5,000 runners to Northport Village. First held in 1977, the race is still going strong, with this year’s release on September 17th). Launched as an Earth Day marathon in the early 1970s, the Long Island Marathon has also grown, adding a hugely popular (13.1-mile) half-marathon in 1984 as the population continues to grow.

current credit

Dean has been around this whole time - and he became one of the fastest “pro” (over 40) runners on Long Island. And in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s - the “glory days” that Dean recounts - it was all about going fast. And he was fast, right up to middle age: for example, in 1996, when he was 53, he completed the 10km and 6.2 miles race in 36 minutes 45 seconds. That’s an average of 5 minutes and 54 seconds per mile. (He also ran a marathon in under three hours—no easy feat at any age.)

Running remains one of the largest participatory sports in the country: About 50 million Americans participate in some form of running or jogging, according to a 2020 report from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. Today’s participants (more than half of them female) run for fitness, raise money for good causes, and for fun - and in the age of social media, to post selfies at the finish line and photos of their awesome race medals.

In the “glory days” full of testosterone, the focus was on strength, which was road-tested every weekend in countless races of distances from 3.1 miles (5 kilometers) to the 26.2-mile marathon that spread across Long Island and Capital District.

“It was a different kind of hostility at the time,” he said. Mike Polanski From Plainview, who led what would become Long Island’s top running club from a group of ten men running around the track at Plainview High School in 1978 to an organization that today has 3,000 members. “Guys like Morey were competitive, they were driven, they were focused. There was a lot of focus on performance.”

“The atmosphere at the time was very competitive,” agrees Mike Bard of Merrick, who has had several great racing times during that time. “There were a lot of talented runners on Long Island, and that generated seriousness, which is pretty funny considering that’s something no one was paying for.”

Race stats by Ed Melnick

Glory Days captures those days in sometimes minute detail: The book’s main feature is 200 pages of racing stats, compiled for Dean by Ed Melnik, Greater Long Island club coach and longtime competitor himself.

So, if you’re curious to find out, say, who ran 10,000 times faster on Long Island, male and female, in different age groups, from 1981 to 2013, you can find them in the book.

Dean’s narrative, illustrated with photographs and copies of the covers of regional magazines and newsletters, chronicles the island’s sporting history with almost unwavering excitement that reflects his love and enthusiasm for the sport.

Dean is still skinny and fit, but as the subtitle of his book suggests, he’s not as fast as he used to be.

In the book, he wrote, “I am not addicted to running again nor am I a man running in the street.” “Maybe I am a recovering road warrior, realizing how the rigorous reality of Demon Time is making me slower and slower, faster and faster.”

However, the completion of his brilliant work was as satisfying as PR (personal record in the parlance of operation). Dean said, “I hate using the term ‘proud’, although I think I’m proud to have been able to get it done, writing about all these great people and places.”

Readers who have been a part of it appreciate running down memory lane.

“I think that’s kind of cool,” Barnes Corley said, turning the pages. “Maybe it’s not a book you’ll read cover to cover, but you can turn the page and say ‘Oh, I remember that! “”

“It’s a great project,” Polanski agrees. “Whatever page I open, I am sure I will find something interesting.

“Someone who has never run, someone whose hobby is bowling or gardening, would have no interest in the book,” Polanski added with a laugh. “But I love him. My life is in these pages.”