The success of the New York Athletic Club started other clubs patterned on similar lines all about the metropolis. Staten Island, with its fresh air and open country and quiet water, only a ferry-boat's journey from the heart of the city—seemingly a sort of paradise for the office slave— was naturally one of the first to follow suit. The Staten Island Athletic Club was or ganized in 1876. The boating clubs, which up to that time had represented the athletic activity of the island, were soon, to a considerable extent, drawn into it, and another band of recruits had been added to the now rapidly growing track athletic army. The Manhattan Athletic Club, subsequently to become the ill-starred Knicker bocker, started up as a strong and active rival of the New York Athletic Club in 1877. The place which the Manhattan Club soon held in city-bred athletics is suggested vividly enough by the mere mention of the fact that Lawrence E. Meyers was one of its runners. There were plenty other men in the club in those days to make it famous W. Byrd Page, the high jumper, Westing, Cope land, and later Conneff, the mile champion and its colors were soon being carried to victory against the strongest fields in the country, and not infrequently abroad. It is through one of those ironies of fate that the club-house at Madison Avenue and Forty-fifth Street, which was looked upon as the best in the country when the Knicker bocker Club went into it, is now the home of a twentieth-century woman's club.
The rest of the metropolitan district soon fell into line. The Jersey suburbs organized their clubs, of which the Orange Athletic Club was to become the most notable, and in Brooklyn and in many of the less sophisticated corners of Man hattan small organizations sprang into being, of which those devoted to cross-country running, such as the Suburban Harriers, Prospect Harriers, and Westchester Harriers, were founded perhaps on the solidest and healthiest basis — the desire of vigorous young men to take vigorous exercise in the open air, untrammelled by clothes, gymnasium air, or the toy freedom of a twenty-lap track.
While this was going on in the East a similar activity was making itself felt all the way west ward to the Pacific. California, which in many ways has always been less Western than the West, began to take an interest in track athletics at almost the same time that they came into favor in the extreme East. Mr. William Greer Harrison, for many years the president of the Olympic Club of San Francisco, is my authority for the state ment that amateur track athletics really began on the Pacific coast in 1877. " In that year," says Mr. Harrison, " the Olympic Club began to foster the sport on an amateur basis. Athletic events had occurred before that, but they had been of a semi professional character, and did not receive the support of amateurs. There were no spacious outdoor grounds at that time, nor handsome dressing-rooms, with all the appurtenances of an up-to-date training quarters, with attendants, trainer, and rubbers to take athletes in hand after or before exercising. It was not an unusual thing, however, to see a dozen athletes undress on the shady side of a rail fence at the old Bay District horse track preparatory to taking their morning or evening exercise, after which they dressed without a shower-bath or rub-down."
The Merion Cricket Club soon became a com petitor of the Olympic Club, and in 1884 a team from the former organization entered the coast championship and won out. The Merion men repeated the beating in 1885 and 1886, and finally the old Olympic Club, recognizing that discretion was the better part of valor, absorbed the new organization and elected Mr. Harrison, who was at the head of it, president of the combined or ganization. With the coalition of these two clubs and the appearance in the following year of Victor H. Schifferstein, the sprinter and jumper, and quite the most unusual athlete that the far West had yet produced, a new and lively interest in track athletics spread along the coast. Small clubs began to spring up, and although they were destined to give way eventually to the growing interest in college athletics, Berkeley was still an infant and Stanford yet unborn, and the time far distant when a team of undergraduates from the coast should contest with the college teams of the East, and when California collegians should be winners at Mott Haven. Oregon and Wash ington followed California, and there were pres ently cinder paths at Seattle and Portland, and plenty of good men to run on them. Of the clubs of the far Northwest the Multonomah of Portland was and is the best-known and strong est. Owing, doubtless, to the fact that social lines are less rigidly determined in that part of the country, the coast athletic clubs have pre served this prestige more successfully than those of the East, and several of them still have a potency, for their own neighborhoods, social as well as athletic.
At the same time that the Pacific Slope was thus getting into the game, the Middle West, led by Detroit, began to enter the running. The Detroit Athletic Club, which was the centre of Middle Western athletic activity for a number of years, was organized in 1886. It was a success from the start. " Jack " McMasters, the club's trainer, laid out its cinder path and also the foun dations of that knowledge and skill which years afterwards were to decorate his watch-chain with little gold footballs. Many capable performers were developed by the Detroit Club, but the most famous of them was John Owen, Jr., and although the prestige of the organization has long since waned, the initials " D. A. C." are fixed in the record books after the name of John Owen, Jr., the first amateur in the country to win the hundred in better than even time. It was at Detroit that the first national meeting of the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States was held, in 1888. There were one hundred and twenty athletes entered for this event from all parts of the country. The East sent its best men. Condon, of the New York Athletic Club, threw the fifty-six-pound weight farther than it had ever been thrown before, and all in all the meet was a complete success. Two years later, at the annual meeting of the Amateur Athletic Union in Washington, on October io, a reorganization of the union was voted ; the various branches which now cover the whole country were organized in February, 189r, and on March 18, 1891, the re organized Amateur Athletic Union held its first meeting. It was at this time, the beginning of the nineties, that club athletics had reached the height of their success.