Pious Miler

For eight seasons, short, bespectacled Gil Dodds has been something of a track oddity. He usually knelt and prayed before each race. On trips, he often carried bread and honey sandwiches in a paper bag. His awkward running style -- arms thrashing like windmills -- outraged the copybook but set a world's indoor mile record of 4:06.4. Last week, just after his coach predicted that he would soon smash that record by as much as two seconds, Dodds said he was through with track forever -- he had received the Call to begin full-time gospel work.

The news knocked the breath out of indoor track. Pole-vaulters, shot-putters and sprinters come and go, but the mile goes on forever as the backbone of the sport. With Dodds out of the running, all present thought of the dream (4:04) mile vanished, and with it the "marvelous mile'' that might have been, between Dodds and Sweden's great Gunder Haegg.

Plotted Energy. Before he donned the cloth, Boston fans got one final look at the Flying Parson in motion. He gave his schoolboy rivals handicaps up to 90 yds. in the Boston Y.M.C.A. twomile, then won going away in slow time (9 min. 58.4 sec.).

Dodds' unorthodox style had changed little since he ran his first (and involuntary) race. As a boy in Falls City, Neb., he threw a stone at Lloyd Hahn's passing automobile. When the then great runner stopped to give chase, he could not catch the chunky culprit. But Hahn recognized a future champion when he saw one, made young Dodds his protege.

In Chicago last year, Hahn and Dodds -- with the Lord's help -- ran the world's fastest indoor mile. Hahn plotted the race lap by lap, eleven of them, scribbled the fractional times on paper. Dodds studied them religiously. Then Hahn stood at the starting line in Chicago's Stadium, stop watch in hand, yelled out the minutes and seconds, each time his runner pounded past. At the start of the final lap : "Three-forty-four. You're behind, Gil!" The collaborating pair missed their plotted 4:06 mile by four-tenths of a second; but so doing, they lowered the world's record by nine-tenths of a second.

After the great race, Dodds hardly heard the barrage of congratulations. "I must catch a train," he said, "I'm really excited -- I'm to preach a sermon tomorrow at Goshen, Ind." Now, the man who prefers gospel teaching to mile records joins Torrey Johnson's Evangelistic group in Los Angeles -- the town where another dashing character won lasting fame as an evangelist: the late, white-robed Aimee Semple McPherson.

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