Cover of the Sports section. THE COMMUNITY PRESS – Salem City/West Marion Co./ Polk Co./Woodburn. Byline by Max Gano. August 14, 1977. – JDW
This photo was taken for the piece. Outside Boone’s Tavern.
Jack Welch, once a 230-pound lineman on his high school football team, is now the 160-pound publisher of “Running” magazine.
Welch thanks a brief diet of cigarettes and coffee during college (“I was tired of weighing so much”) for his change in weight. For the publishership and the impoverished state of living that comes with it, he hasn’t figured out who to blame.
In the end, it has to be himself. It was he alone who decided during his first semester of law school, after having had four law schools to choose from, all he really wanted to do was run, think about running and write about it.
Jack is now leading the life of Oregon’s only national sports magazine publisher.
And Jack isn’t the only Welch involved. There’s also the assistant publisher, Patricia Welch, Jack’s wife. “She sometimes is so busy she shames me to work,” complains Jack with a smile, because if it weren’t for her, the magazine would never hit the racks.
Well…. actually the mag never does really hit the racks in a very big way. Most of the 600 copies are mailed as far away as Australia and Canada. Some are kept at a health food store in Fred Meyer’s east Salem store, but that’s about it.
Just because the circulation isn’t huge, however, doesn’t mean the magazine itself isn’t worth looking into. Somebody once said ‘you can’t judge a newspaper by its circulation.” That goes for magazines as well.
“Running” is 40 pages big in its latest (volume two, number four) form. Though there aren’t any glossy color shots to be found in it, there is a wide variety of articles on training, the theme of that particular issue.
Stories in that summer issue of “Running” run from such subjects as transcendental running (“into strange and uncharted places”) by Michael Fessier, Jr., to an equation-packed lecture by Ernst van Aaken on The Endurance Theory: In Function and Practice (“LSD is the best guarantee for prevention of heart attack”) to the story of a blind runner in the Boston marathon.
Jack Welch, on the other hand, isn’t running much at all these days due to injuries suffered in earlier days of basketball. He’s concentrating mainly on getting another issue of “Running” underway. This means compiling all of the needed material before going and renting the IBM Selectric again.
The magazine doesn’t pay for itself even, and Patricia has a job that keeps some money at least coming into the family coffers. Jack, all over-six-foot of him, curly dark hair, dark eyes that are always wondering, jeans with holes in them, running shoes with no socks and a beaten up manila satchel under his arm, doesn’t seem bothered by not having any money to speak of. The magazine makes up for any lack of splendor in the Welch lifestyle.
“I knew I had to get out (of law school),” he explains. “Even if it meant I had to be poor for the rest of my life, I’d be sitting in class, listening to the law, and all I could think about was running… who won what, but more importantly, how and why… that sort of stuff.” Jack rattles off a few statistics to prove he can, and then goes on with his explanation.
“All of my life I’ve dreamed of being a writer. Even if I had to be a garbage collector, I’d be a writer, too. I’d be a lawyer and a writer. And so on.”
Since the day when the bug finally bit and he walked out of law school during the finals of his first semester, Jack has been doing what he always dreamed. He’s writing.
He started in Arizona with a dry medical journal approach to running. With a friend, Jack also began a running club and an annual running meet.
Then there was a move to Salem and a new home for the Welches and “Running.”
The move has paid off,says Jack. The magazine has, in his words, “improved more than it ever has. This issue is the best.”
Whether or not “Running” magazine ever gets any larger depends largely on whther people begin to notice it as much as they seem to have noticed the namesake sport.
But there is a definite class of runner Jack is aiming for. “A lot of people who run aren’t runners. They may be doing the physical thing, but… this is a magazine for those who think of running in and of itself, it’s not for people who do it because they saw Farrah Fawcett running on television.”
“Running” may not be the largest organization around, and few if any of the staff members get paid, but Jack is proud of his creation nonetheless. “Publishing this magazine is just like running a marathon, you have to prepare for months. It just like having a baby, you look and see all the things that are wrong, but it’s an overwhelming thing all the same.”
In the end, Jack has a hard time explaining his feelings toward the magazine. “It’s like running a marathon, or having a baby, or climbing to the summit of a mountain; you have to have done it to understand the feeling.”
Running means a lot to Jack. He’ll tell you he’s been addicted since a long time ago when he ran his first 100 miles in a “Y” back east to earn a t-shirt.
Since then, Jack has kept running, when his injuries let him. “I used to think running and writing were my second and third favorite activities… but I’ve had to move running up to first place, because it makes me better at my second favorite.”
You’ve seen the bumper sticker that says distance runners make better lovers.
Jack says it’s true.
Epilogue. Yikes. Reads kinda like a skit on SNL. But it is true, it is, all of it.
The guy was late, I remember. By the time he got there, I’d had three dark pints of beer. And I really did weigh 160 pounds, so I didn’t absorb so good.
My eyes were wondering, ’cause the guy was boring.
Soon after. Patricia Welch was irked when some guy said upon meeting her, “I thought you’d be a dog.”