Heavyweight - #24 Jimmy and Mark

Episode Date: September 26, 2019

When he was only 10 years old, Jonathan Marshall was sent on a 240 mile bicycle trip. 3 days. Across 2 states. With no adult supervision. 45 years later, Jonathan can’t stop thinking about the trip. Or the little boys he made it with. Credits Heavyweight is hosted and produced by Jonathan Goldstein. This episode was produced by Stevie Lane, along with BA Parker, and Kalila Holt. Editing by Jorge Just. Special thanks to Emily Condon, PJ Vogt, Anna Ladd, Haley Shaw, and Jackie Cohen. The show was mixed by Bobby Lord.  Music by Christine Fellows, John K Samson, Edwin, Blue Dot Sessions, and Bobby Lord. Our theme song is by The Weakerthans courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I have a medical question for you. Do you say the big toe, or do you say the great toe? I say the big toe. In a medical situation, if someone came into the ER and their foot was broken, to bring a smile to their face, would you refer to their pinky toe as the little piggy? If their foot had just gotten run over

by a truck, and you were examining all of their toes, would you say, oh, is the little piggy okay? Would you do that? How are you employed? From Gimlet Media, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, Jimmy and Mark.

There are a couple of days in 1974 that Jonathan Marshall can't stop thinking about. They involve a bicycle and a crazy idea. His dad's crazy idea. Jonathan says there are two important things to know about his dad. The first is that he was a salesman. And according to Jonathan, he could be pretty persuasive. When I was 12, I bought my first car.

What? Because my father thought it was a good idea, so he convinced me with my lawn raking money to buy a car and then work on that car for three years until I could drive it. Wait, is a 12-year-old even allowed to buy a car? Well, you can buy a car, you just can't drive it legally. The second thing to know is that Jonathan's dad was a 70s kind of guy. He had the wide ties, he had the lapels, he had platform shoes, sideburns. He tried to get a perm once. Was he kind of like a kung fu aftershave kind of guy?

That was an Old Spice guy. Old Spice, slap on some Old Spice, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, my dad was a groovy guy. Ah, the 70s. The 1970s. All of us crying out, Dynamite!

When life was good, and I am not a crook. When life was bad, pet rocks, mood rings, and cool, open-collared dads. In the 1970s, there was nothing cooler than a cool dad. And Jonathan Marshall's dad was the coolest.

He was the father that, on a hot summer night, would go, Hey, Johnny, how many of your friends want to go get ice cream? And we had a van. So however many kids could get in a van would go get ice cream with my father. All those unseat belted kids banging around in the back of the van like bingo balls. But even though it was the 1970s, a decade during which my own father once used my shoe as an ashtray at a garden party, Jonathan Marshall's father was about to set a whole new standard.

Jonathan was only 10 years old when his father took him aside to pitch him on his craziest idea yet. My father said, hey, you know, what if you rode your bike to Vermont? That is, why don't you pedal your child-sized bicycle 240 miles all alone over the Adirondack Mountains, over the Green Mountains, across Lake Champlain, to your Uncle Herb's house in Newport? And how long were you anticipating the trip would take? Three days. Three days? So you would be going like 80 odd miles a day? Oh yeah, that was the idea. No adult supervision? None. Coins for pay, phones, because that's how you used to make calls back in those days.

So you were just completely on your own? Yeah. When your dad proposed to you this, you know, 250-mile trip, did you really have a sense of what that meant? None. Absolutely none. As a parent, the entire plan makes me shudder. But as a 10-year-old, it would have felt like a dream come true. When I was out riding, I could pretend that I was an orphan. I could pretend that I was free.

But how free could you really feel when you were expected home for dinner? Jonathan Marshall wouldn't have to pretend he was free. He would be free. Dangerously free. Jonathan's best friend at the time, a seasoned 13-year-old named John, lived down the street. Jonathan asked him to come along.

And John's parents, over what I can only imagine to be a dinner of jello salad shrouded in smoke rings, agreed to let John go. He was a little bit of a badass. You know, we'd go out in the woods and start a fire. You know, we'd go do stupid stuff, right? And so he seemed like a great partner in this,

okay, we're going to ride our bikes. The two best friends spent the next few weeks preparing. They pored over maps and planned their adventure. They gathered the supplies they'd need, ponchos, bike tools, 40 bucks in cash, and the food they'd bring, Slim Jims and Cupso soup. Everything was perfect.

But then, Jimmy and his little brother Mark showed up. About a week before the trip started, these two guys, Jimmy and Mark, their names coming back to me, I barely knew them, and they were sent by their parents to live with us for a month. Jimmy and Mark arrived all alone on a Greyhound bus from Long Island. Jimmy was 12, Mark just 11. Their family had met Jonathan's family

at a resort a couple summers earlier, but Jonathan hadn't thought of the brothers since. Now, here they were, standing at his door, adult-sized luggage clutched in their hands. Jonathan had no idea why they were there. I remember asking my mom, well, what are we going to do with Jimmy and Mark when John and I ride our bikes to Vermont? And my mom's response was, oh, well, they'll go with you.

Initially, I was resentful because it was, what do you mean they're going with us? I've been planning this. We don't even know if they know how to ride bikes. They're from Long Island, wherever that's from. But at 10 years old, I certainly didn't say no to my mother, and so they were going on the trip because Mom said they were going on the trip. And so, one August morning,

before the sun had risen, the two best friends, Jonathan and John, and the two mysterious brothers, Jimmy and Mark, all set off. Day one is really a recollection of hitting the Adirondacks and starting to just have to go uphill a lot. But uphill battles are worth the fight when you're a young boy on a bike,

and the day's destination is a hotel room that your dad booked for you at the happiest, most magical place on Earth. Frontier Town. It was a little fantasy land of the Old West. It had a jail, a saloon, a big square. It was, you know, do you know Frontier Town? Oh, yeah. Frontier Town was a family-owned old western theme park, and as a kid, I'd see commercials for it on TV. Please can we go, I'd beg my parents.

And my father, a decidedly uncool 70s dad, would tell me that he didn't need his son getting trampled by wild donkeys. I remember they had a dunking machine, and that was a thrill for a kid. As Jonathan tells me about stepping foot into the Frontier Town Hotel after a long, hard day of peddling, the 10-year-old in me is jealous. But the adult in me knows that Jonathan's accommodations couldn't have been that great, that at the end of the day, Frontier Town was probably nothing more than a roadside motel with cowboy hats. No, my recollection is the hotel

rooms were as cool as Frontier Town because everything seemed to be made out of logs. My God, I could have slept on a bed with a wagon wheel headboard. Ten-year-old me and adult me are in complete agreement. My God, I could have slept on a bed with a wagon wheel headboard. Ten-year-old me and adult me are in complete agreement. We've wasted our lives. Jonathan and John crawled into one double bed, Jimmy and Mark into the other. Exhausted, they all fell asleep almost immediately. When we woke up, it was raining. It rained all day. It was gray, it was cold, it was nasty.

And we got three flat tires that day. The plan for day two was to catch the ferry across Lake Champlain. But of the many things they packed, no one had thought to bring a watch. When they reached the dock, the very last ferry of the day was about to set sail. We went down the ramp yelling. We were yelling and waving and we're like, no, no, stop, stop, stop. And the guy waited, bless his heart. By the time they got off the ferry, they were soaking wet and hungry. What did you do for dinner? I remember distinctly, we went to A&W.

I remember John took off his shoes, and it was the worst smell I've ever smelled in my life. And to this day, I still remember that horrible, horrible, horrible smell of wet construction boots that had been soaked through an A&W food. What do a bunch of 10-year-olds who have been bicycling in the rain all day order at an A&W? Everything. Everything we could think of. Multiple burgers, multiple shakes, hot dogs, fries. Yeah, it was a feast.

And it was some of the best food I ever had. Was there a point at which, like, it stopped feeling like a kind of fun boys' adventure, you know, and felt like suddenly you were, like, in a World War I film? Day three. War I film. Day three. After the break, day three, and all the days since. We'll be right back. Enjoy the number one feeling, winning, in an exciting live dealer studio, exclusively on FanDuel Casino, where winning is undefeated. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Please play responsibly.

When the boys woke up, they were still a full day's ride from their destination. Without the will to get back on their bikes, they got back on their bikes. We were very sore and very tired, and we've got another 80 miles through the Green Mountains to go. Eventually, they came to a familiar road. It was the same stretch Jonathan's parents drove each year to visit his uncle. And I'm like, guys, we are so close. And so then we keep going and going and going and going, and I recognize nothing. As it happens, a highway looks a lot different from a bicycle than it does from the backseat of your dad's car.

I picture them, four little kids, still young enough to have baby teeth, a lot different from a bicycle than it does from the backseat of your dad's car. I picture them, four little kids, still young enough to have baby teeth, standing at the side of the road, hunched over a large map that they'll never be able to fold back up. Using their little fingers, they trace their route, trying to figure out where in the world they are. In the end, Jonathan asked directions from a farmer who must have wondered why four children were cycling down a highway all alone. They rode the rest of the way in silence

and arrived after dark. When Jonathan's Uncle Herb saw the boys at his doorstep, he was shocked. And I just remember looking at their face and like, your father told us you were going to do it, but we really didn't think you'd make it. We thought you'd call and we'd come and get you somewhere along the way. Because Jonathan's uncle Herb, Great Seventies' uncle name, by the way,

was a grown adult, he was able to see the extraordinariness of the trip in a way that the boys couldn't. My uncle said, you know, I think we should call the paper, and we thought that would be a swell idea. And so the next day, the boys rode their bikes into downtown Newport, where a photographer for the local paper took their picture. It felt like being famous. And we bought a dozen copies so we could hand them out. And that was like the most exciting thing that ever happened to me. Jonathan sends me a scan of the photo.

It's folded up as though it's been carried around in a wallet for decades. In it, from left to right, Jonathan, his best friend John, and his two new friends, Mark and Jimmy, stand astride their bikes with looks of little boy pride. You know, when you ride your bike 240 miles when you're 10, right? Everything that comes up after that, you gauge by a 240-mile bike trip,

and it seems small in comparison. The bike trip is Jonathan's origin story. On the track team, he never considered himself especially talented. But what he lacked in natural athleticism, he says he made up for in effort. After college, even though no one saw it coming, he entered law school and graduated fourth in his class. For Jonathan, the three-day trip with his three little friends wasn't just kid stuff,

crazy 70s stuff. It taught him to keep going. I mean, you know, listen to me now. I am still talking about three days that happened 45 years ago. Jonathan is now middle-aged.

He has white hair and an office job. But the trip is with him all the time, whenever he looks at a map or sees a kid bike by. And as he grows older, Jonathan finds himself telling the story with greater frequency. But when people think that he's exaggerating, or worse, that he made the whole thing up,

more than 200 miles on a three-speed, at age 10? Without parents? He doesn't have anyone to turn to. Anyone who can say, yes, Jonathan, we did do that. And yes, I also think about that trip. All the time.

A year after the bike trip, Jonathan's family moved away, and he lost touch with his best friend John. As for the two brothers, Jimmy and Mark, after they got back on the bus to Long Island, wherever that is, Jonathan never saw them again. It's just so weird to me that we went through this adventure, and I never spoke to them again.

And this is why Jonathan has come to me. It's really quite simple, he says. He feels like the last living Goonie, and so he just wants help finding his old friends. If you could find these guys again, what specific questions would you want to ask? Did the trip have as big of impact on your life as it had in mine? Do you ever think about that?

If you do, what are your recollection? What were your impressions? What do you remember of the feeling of you and Jonathan planning out the bike trip? Not a whole lot. This is Jonathan's best friend, John. 45 years later, and the badass from down the street is now a retired carpenter living in Las Vegas. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. And apparently, what happened on the bike trip

stays anywhere that isn't John's brain. Do you remember the day that it rained? The day that it rained. Or taking off your shoes in the A&W? Or taking off your shoes in the A&W. I don't know. Are there any other details that you remember? Uh-uh. Well, we made it. But despite not remembering many of the details from the trip,

or any details from the trip, John tells me that, like Jonathan, he still has the photo. He keeps it in a dresser drawer, along with other mementos, mostly from just after that summer. I have every concert ticket stub that I've ever been to since probably 1974. Rush, Kiss, Journey, Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd.

In 1974, the year of the bike trip, John was 13, three years older than Jonathan, and his schwinn was starting to take a back seat to going out at night to concerts, to loud music, to other things, teenage things, that must have eclipsed the bike trip that summer with his younger friend.

So for John, the bike trip is a nice but foggy memory, a newspaper photo tucked away in a drawer. But there, on the opposite end of that photo, in T-shirts and scuffed-up sneakers, are the two brothers who'd mysteriously shown up at Jonathan Marshall's doorstep in the summer of 1974, Jimmy and Mark Campbell. Names so common that it's hard to narrow down the search.

We know the brothers are originally from Long Island. But as it turns out, Long Island is a pretty long island, and we don't know what part Jimmy and Mark are from. So Jonathan calls in a favor from a friend who works in local government there and has access to elementary school yearbooks dating back to the 70s. In the end, though, Jimmy and Mark Campbell don't show up in any of them. Next, we reach out to the resort where Jonathan met Jimmy and Mark some 45 years ago, but there's no record of their stay.

The resort had no computer system in the 70s, and the owners have since changed. So over the next few weeks, I make hundreds of phone calls. Hello, you definitely have the wrong number. I think you have the wrong number. I guess you probably have the wrong number. We're sorry, your call cannot be completed. No brothers named Jimmy and Mark, who've lived in the state of New York in the 1970s, are safe.

He hasn't lived here for years. There's no James here. No James Campbell lives here. I was literally talking about that trip a week and a half ago, and this is bizarre. Jimmy Campbell. He now goes by James or Jim. He's a financial advisor living in California. He phones me back from his office. I can remember us walking our bikes and climbing up the hill at like 6 in the morning. That's where Route 9 was and we'd take off.

As we talk, it becomes clear that that summer long ago is just as alive for Jim as it is for Jonathan. I can remember the second day when we were trying to catch the ferry to Burlington. But the more we keep talking, the less Jim dwells on the bike trip itself. I can remember things like Jonathan's dad coming home from work and having some fun fights in the pool or something. And the more he talks about the days bookending the trip. I remember sitting in their family room watching the TV, and then we camped out on there. For Jim, family life with the Marshalls was in stark contrast to his own home life,

or to what it was becoming. My family situation got uglier and more difficult post that trip because my mother was becoming sick. And this is why Jim and Mark were sent to stay with the Marshalls. Their mother was in the early stages of both MS and Parkinson's. Having two little boys to care for made a hard time even harder. So a phone call was placed, arrangements made, and two bus tickets purchased. When I asked Jim what his mother and father thought of their little boys bicycling all the way to Vermont,

he says that they didn't even know. They had so much else to worry about. Jim's mom was spending so much time in the hospital that she had to quit her job, making Jim's dad the sole breadwinner. My father, what I truly believe, could not handle it, right? Could not handle the stresses of the illness,

and they ended up divorcing, and he actually ended up moving out of the state. So he chose to move, and they ended up divorcing and he actually ended up moving out of the state. So he chose to move and he chose to not contact us again. He chose to disappear. So life got difficult. Money wasn't there. You had a single parent who was an ill person

who was fighting for her own life, and you had to learn to start fending for yourself. Probably the next year, I started working, and I grew up fast. So that was probably the last fun summer of my childhood. We'll say that. For Jonathan, whose world was opening up to him that summer, the bike trip was a beginning.

But for Jim and Mark, it was an ending. So yes, the bike trip was fun, Jim says. But when he thinks about the summer of 74, he thinks about playing games with Jonathan and his sister, about sleeping outside in the Marshalls' backyard under the stars, about getting to just be a kid one last time. I knew my family life was changing and getting worse, and his was just what I wanted life to be. And it wasn't going to be, you know, with a nicer home, nicer setting, the two parents, a lot of family time time just getting along.

This is Jim's origin story. Like Jonathan's, it also took place that summer, not along Route 9, but in the Marshalls' home. Jonathan's mom had just had a baby and spent a lot of time with the kids, hanging out in the master bedroom. Which has a sitting area, so not only do you have your bed, but you have an area where you have a couch and you can relax in.

And I can remember hanging out in that room with the mom, and she's nursing the baby, and we're all just talking and just having a good time. For Jim, that bedroom at the Marshalls represented the heart of family life. It was cozy, and it was safe. It made an impression on Jim that carried into adulthood. Years later, when my wife and I bought a home in New Jersey, I wanted to make sure my master bedroom was big enough to have a sitting area

because I remembered their house having that, and I wanted that in my own home. I wanted that for my children, and I was going to do my damnedest to get that. You know, a parent's supposed to sacrifice for their kid. So I try to live up to my expectations of what a parent's supposed to be, which wasn't what my father was. Jim holds resentment, and I don't have that same resentment. This is Jim's little brother Mark, 11 years old the summer of the bike trip. He's now a schoolteacher in Florida.

I accepted my dad for what he was. And, yeah, I didn't hold a grudge. Yeah, I didn't hold a grudge. Our reactions to our lives when our parents broke up was very different and made us very different people. Until that summer, Jim and Mark spent all of their time together. They'd shared a bedroom since they were babies. But after their dad left, they drifted apart, and Jim moved out of the room. The bike trip was the last time they'd ever spend together

like that. Whole uninterrupted days, just being brothers. Jim and Mark now live on opposite ends of the country. They rarely see each other or talk. But when they do, the bike trip often comes up. see each other or talk. But when they do, the bike trip often comes up. And with it, the photo. That picture of all four boys astride their bikes in the Newport News. Unlike John and Jonathan, who've managed to keep their safe for 45 years, Jim and Mark don't have their picture anymore. It's just one more thing lost in the chaos of illness and divorce. Neither Mark nor Jim has seen it since they shared a room. You know, like, I'm picturing right now, I can picture

the newspaper article with a picture of us four with our bikes with this huge smiles up in Newport, Vermont. That picture says it all. Just four smiling faces next to these, you know, half-assed bicycles, but look what we did.

No one believes that this even happened because it sounds so far-fetched to everyone, but I'm like, if we had the evidence, we could prove it to them, but we don't have it. It's very well wrapped. Someone really taped it up big time. After my conversation with the brothers, I prepared two packages,

each containing a framed photograph. One is addressed to Jim in California, and the other to Mark in Florida. Scissors down. Here it is. That's freaking open. Oh, I. Here it is. Sounds freaking open. Oh, I can't believe you got... Holy shit. Look at that.

Now, that is crazy. Where did you find this? Oh, man. Oh, that is the picture. It's funny. I don't have my college degree my MBA none of that's in a frame and up on any wall

my wife hates our wedding pictures she didn't like the photographer so those pictures don't come out so for me this is this is a huge deal for me oh it's gotta go up Jim and Mark no longer ride bikes for Jim, it's hard to find the time

for Mark, hip and back surgeries have made it too difficult but looking back at the photo stirs an old feeling in Mark one that he hasn't felt since that summer since he's a kid complete freedom from everything. Think about most of your life. Someone was telling you what to do. When is it every your time?

Because I feel my life is so, it is contained. During that time, I just felt complete freedom. I can't describe it. I know some people tried to describe it in books, in songs. There is just a feeling that just comes over you. And I want that feeling again. To just get up and just go. And just be free. It's Jim.

Jim, I have Jonathan on the line. Hello, Jim. Jonathan, how are you? Jimmy. God, you know, I swear to God, I haven't heard your voice in 40 years. You sound exactly the same. 45 years, buddy. This is Mark.

Hello? John! What's happening, man? With John out in his hammock drinking a beer, Jim in his office, and Mark at home after school, Jonathan, after 45 years, reminisces with his old friends about prowling around Frontier Town after dark, about the smell of John's shoes, about being kids with nothing but time

and long stretches of open road ahead of them. I know I love telling the story to my kids, and my kids roll their eyes. When my kid won't ride a bicycle a mile and a half to go do something, okay, what am I going to do? Come on. I was 13, I did 110 miles in a day. And wild and pain. now that the furniture's returning to its goodwill home now that the last month's rent is scheming with the damage deposit, take this moment to decide if we meant it, if we tried, or felt around for far too much from things that accidentally touched.

From things that accidentally touch Heavyweight is hosted and produced by me, Jonathan Goldstein, along with Stevie Lane, B.A. Parker, and Kalila Holt. The show is edited by Jorge Just. Special thanks to Emily Condon, PJ Vogt, Anna Ladd, Haley Shaw, and Jackie Cohen. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, Edwin, and Bobby Cohen. Bobby Lord mixed the episode with music by Christine Fellows, John K. Sampson, Edwin, and Bobby Lord. Additional music credits can be found on our website,

gimletmedia.com slash heavyweight. Our theme song is by The Weaker Thans, courtesy of Epitaph Records, and our ad music is by Haley Shaw. Follow us on Twitter at heavyweight or email us at heavyweight at gimletmedia.com. You can listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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