Richard Thomas "Dick" Buerkle

Life was a race and Dick Buerkle had something to prove. A walk-on to Villanova's track team, he had only started running track the year before as a senior in high school at Aquinas Institute in Rochester, NY. The taunts that would come from the stands and land on the field ridiculing his balding head from a diagnosis of alopecia at 12 years old were a catalyst. As he lost his hair, the chip on his shoulder grew. Running was of course physical, but he mostly talked about it as mental fortitude. He did the workouts, but it was what was happening inside that bald head that seemed to push him. When Dick had figured out he could win a race, he usually did. One time in particular, Dick called his family urging them to come to the CYO Invitational at the University of Maryland in 1978. No one came. Even his wife stayed back to save money to wallpaper the dining room. But Dick had already made up his mind and ran the indoor mile at 3:54.93, breaking the world record, despite reportedly eating nine Oreos and two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches a few hours before the race.

But it was the running that fed him in a way that the rest of his life couldn't. He raced between careers. Bringing his family down to Atlanta in 1979 through an Olympic job opportunity program with Coca-Cola. The job ended just as quickly as the 1980 U.S. Olympic Team's dreams with the boycott by President Jimmy Carter. The '76 Olympics in Montreal hadn't been kind to Dick, and he spent four years training for Moscow. '80 was supposed to be his year. Until it wasn't.

Finding his footing after retiring from running in 1981 was difficult. Dick started the Dick Buerkle Running Show in Atlanta, but never got enough stations for syndication. His running career had been sponsored by Nike, when he started the sports-talk radio show, his sponsor was the local wing joint Taco Mac.

Dick became a TV reporter, a newspaper journalist, a copier salesman, and finally and most consistently, he taught. With a love for languages, he had majored in Spanish and minored in Russian at Villanova – he taught Spanish, and coached track, where he soon realized for all the hours he put into it, he was making less than a dollar for each one. But he loved it. He loved coaching and he was good at it. Getting his kids to state meets and teaching them the love for running, spending most of his career at Grady and Dunwoody High Schools. The same large poster hung on the wall in all of his classrooms – the image of Tommie Smith and John Carlos with fists in the air on the podium during the '68 Olympics.

The restlessness never ended. Dick was always ready for an adventure. He did ridiculous things that most people would never consider. He took a 40-hour bus ride from Atlanta's immigrant heavy section of Buford Highway to Mexico City, just to see how local Latinos traveled back to Mexico. When he had flying benefits from his son's job at Delta, he'd wake up on the weekend and fly to Buenos Aires for the day. He once flew to Mexico City on the Day of the Dead and had a cab driver take him through a cemetery so he could see the families gathering. He had been to every state except one, which had always bugged him. The first day he retired from teaching he drove to Arkansas, spent the day in Little Rock and drove right back to Atlanta.

Maybe it was the bald head that made him feel like he never really belonged anywhere in particular. The endless ridicule forced him into other people's shoes and gave him a sense for justice. Dick trained with a local blind Paralympian for years, being a guide.

His children remember their first funeral. Dick took them out of school to pay their respects to Martin Luther King Senior who had long outlived both his legendary son and wife, both murdered years earlier. Dick's belief in the civil rights movement was lifelong; taking his young son to the Selma-to-Atlanta Relay organized by the Sub-40 Running Club in 1985. It was a 315 mile race starting at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the brutal site of the Bloody Sunday beatings in 1965, stopping in Montgomery before passing through Birmingham to lay a wreath at the 16th Street Baptist Church that was bombed in 1963. The group kept the baton going the whole time only resting when it was placed at the gravesite of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior in Atlanta.

The New York Athletic Club got a taste of Dick's sense for right and wrong too. They were ticked to see Dick wearing a German jersey on the February '78 cover of Sports Illustrated winning the Wannamaker Mile at the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden. Runners commonly swapped singlets on the road and he had an affinity for a German one he'd gotten because of his German surname. He had been tormented by the NYAC's decision not to allow black runners into the club. He had a good feeling about that race, and so instead of wearing the NYAC jersey, he opted for the German one in protest.

He ruffled feathers everywhere he went. In the early days of U.S. - China relations, Dick was on the U.S. Track and Field team competing in what were then called Canton, Peking, and Shanghai. He was personally responsible for the "white short ban" established after the May 1975 race at the Peking Workers' Stadium. Dick wore white shorts in the rain with his whole jockstrap on display.

His parenting was as unpredictable as every other part of his life. Bedtime stories were never routine, once opting to read the entire book Alive to his kids about the Uruguayan rugby team who crashed into the Andes resorting to cannibalism to stay alive.

His need for self-improvement was never ending. Dick was an integral part of the 12-step community in Atlanta.

To his family, the most coveted running moments were always off the track. There was the time he came home from work in the middle of the day to find a burglar in the house. Dick, still in a suit, chased him through the woods for miles where he thought they'd run into construction workers building highway GA400 that could help apprehend him. But it was lunchtime and no one was there and Dick decided to let him go not wanting to risk confronting him alone. The man made off with Dick's Olympic ring in his pocket. There was the time Dick chased down a purse-snatcher in Seattle during a family wedding. Again in a suit, this time he caught the man and got the lady's purse back. His oldest daughter once begged him to go to a spot on I-85 where the hubcap for her prized '73 Cadillac lay on the inside shoulder across all 6 lanes of highway back when the highways were not lit at night. Dick sprinted across both ways in the dark, gave her the hubcap, and decided it had been a terrible idea. Dick said, "You never know how wide a highway is until you're running across one." But he was always willing to insert himself into a bad situation. He once pulled a guy off the Marta train tracks at Lindbergh just in time.

Dick Buerkle, who had once beaten running legend Steve Prefontaine - breaking his four-year winning streak, was always kept grounded at home by his wife, Jean, of nearly 49 years. With all his accomplishments, Jean wonders about the more mundane stats. Like how many times has he locked his keys in his car or lost his wedding ring? How many times has he run out of gas?

Dick never stopped pushing. There was no such thing as a relaxed family run around the block. Every run ended in a sprint. Dick's elbow would always find a way to edge out the person next to him, even if it was his young daughter. Birthdays were never a day of rest, Dick was known for running his age up to his 50th, going 50 miles.

Dick's restlessness, his running, and his constant racing to the next thing would be only stopped by a rare form of Parkinson's called Multiple System Atrophy.

Dick Buerkle, two-time Olympian, carrier of the Olympic torch in Barcelona in ’92 and again through Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward in ’96, has finally passed the baton. Dick, forever thankful to Michael Jordan for shaving his head and ultimately making bald cool, was shrouded in an old Jordan tracksuit, surrounded by family, finally at rest, the wild race over.

Dick is survived by his wife, Jean; his children, Gabe (Hope), Lily (Eric Geshekter), and Tera Buerkle; grandchildren, Rose and Mae Geshekter, August and Emmett Buerkle; 7 siblings, and many nieces and nephews.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Respite Care Atlanta, 2715 Peachtree Rd. Atlanta, GA 30305, and the Cathedral of Christ the King – Hispanic Ministry, 2699 Peachtree Rd. Atlanta, GA 30305.