After a Tragic Beginning, an Olympic Ending
On Park Avenue, in an empty lot between East 134th and 135th Streets, a 29-year-old hammer thrower was practicing one autumn day in 1904.
His name was Simon P. Gillis. He had walked to the lot from his apartment six blocks away, on East 127th Street, as he did regularly, carrying his 16-pound weight. The ball was attached to a steel cable with a handle on the end.
After making sure no one was in harm’s way, and holding on to the handle with both hands, Gillis swung the weight in a wide loop, using all 6 feet 4 inches of his body to gather momentum and send the hammer flying. And fly it did. He launched several practice throws, according to newspaper articles written about that day.
It must have been quite a sight. A mountain of a man whirling what looked like a cannonball above his head as effortlessly as a yo-yo. He was a veritable beacon of strength, a real live strongman.
As Gillis was practicing, boys nearby were tossing a ball. An errant throw sent their ball into the empty lot. Christian Koehler, 14, ran to fetch it. As Christian reached the center of the lot, Gillis, who was already in his windup motion, sent his hammer soaring.
Cries of warning were shouted, but it was too late. The weight struck Christian on the side of his head, smashing his skull. Gillis ran to him and held him in his arms. The boy was taken to Harlem Hospital and pronounced dead. Gillis was taken to the local police station.
Details about the immediate aftermath of the incident have seemingly been lost to history. Court records could not be found, relatives of the boy’s family could not be located, and no one with firsthand knowledge of how the child’s death affected Gillis is still alive.
Gillis’s granddaughters, who live in Washington State, said in a recent interview that he never talked about the incident, though their mother told them he felt awful about it. “Back then, people didn’t dwell,” said Maureen Shriver, 66, the third of four of his grandchildren. “They just moved on.”
What is known about Gillis, however, is that he became an Olympian, competing at the Summer Games the first time they were held in London, in 1908 — four years after Gillis’s hammer struck Christian Koehler.
Shriver is the keeper of a large leather-bound scrapbook that her grandfather assembled. Inside, his life unfolds in crumbling newspaper articles, letters from the International Olympic Committee, photos from his time in the silent movies, and portraits taken of him dressed in his New York Athletic Club uniform, the winged foot logo, still used today, displayed prominently on his shirt, the hammer at his side.
An Athlete and a Dancer
Gillis, the fifth of 13 children, had been in New York for several years working as a carpenter, having left his rural home on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia as a teenager to join his brother in the United States.
He wrote home to his sister Sarah about his athletic endeavors, something of a hobby in his family. Although they were farmers, they were also step dancers, an activity passed down from their Scottish great-grandfather who was a dance master.
Perhaps that was the fountain from which his love of sports sprung. In New York, Gillis, like many athletes at that time, joined the New York Athletic Club and was growing his reputation as a sports star. He appeared on the sports page of The Evening World in a cartoon about a competition at Travers Island in 1906.
The cartoon showed Gillis and another athlete, John Flanagan, warming up with their hammers while chatting with each other.
“I wish you’d throw 180 feet today, Gillis,” Flanagan said, taunting his rival. “I want a little competition.” To which Gillis replied, “Sure, John, I’d hate to see you strain yourself.”
It was a good year for him. Gillis won the national junior championship, and set a record for throwing, 161 feet 8 inches, which held for almost three decades. That same year he won the championship in hammer throwing in Canada, as well.
He began competing internationally, heading to Brazil, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland, and at the same time working as a contractor overseas. But it was on the boat to the Olympic Games in London in 1908 that he earned his reputation as a man who could eat.
The story goes that he and his teammates would order so much food at each mealtime, the poor waiter who served them eventually lost his temper, having become overburdened hauling trays and trays of food to their dining table. “They’re not men,” he told a reporter on the boat. “They’re whales.”
For breakfast he would order a dozen eggs — not scrambled, or fried, or boiled. Rather, they were still in the shell. Then he would decorate the top of each egg with a dab of mustard, popping the whole ovoid into his mouth, consuming it raw, shell and all, or as he liked to call it, “Eggs with the fur on.”
He was clearly well nourished because he placed seventh at the London Games with a throw of 149 feet 6½ inches.
At another competition that year in Baltimore, he and two other Whales — the nickname from the waiter stuck — had placed an order ahead of time at a restaurant nearby. They ordered 27 dozen oysters and six T-bone steaks to be ready at 5 o’clock. When the athletes arrived at the appointed hour they discovered the table had been set for 33. The waiter turned pale, Gillis said, when he learned no one else was coming. Needless to say, the Whales ate it all.
Back in New York, while still continuing to throw the hammer in contests in and around the city, he switched careers and joined the police force. He conducted traffic at the corner of Broadway and Duane, where a horsecar line ran. There his athleticism took a new turn.
A runaway horse, without a bridle, was on the loose, putting the lives of schoolchildren at risk, Gillis recalled in a letter. Somehow he managed to stop the horse, but not before both he and the charging beast were sent through a plate-glass window in a corner shoe store.
Several seeds of caution were planted that day. In another incident, he took a horsecar driver to court for speeding. According to an article in The New York Times, the magistrate presiding over the affair fined the offending driver a dollar and told him his offense was “a heinous one.”
On the force, Gillis worked alongside other track stars. As they prepared for the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, they became known as the Knights of the Nightstick. The New York Herald wrote a feature on them a month before they left for Sweden with the tag line: “How six members of New York’s police force are training to represent the United States in the struggle for the athletic supremacy of the world next June.”
His fellow Knight Matthew McGrath went on to win the gold in the hammer throw. Gillis had to sit out the competition with a strained leg. It was his last appearance at the Olympics.
Career Changes
Back home again in New York, Gillis found the life of a traffic cop was becoming unsustainable. In another article in The Evening World, he spoke to a reporter about why he was quitting the force to take a contracting job in Spain. “I can’t live in these times on $3.10 a day and be honest,” he said. He questioned how he was “going to keep honest if the opportunity comes for him to get graft.”
He went on to mention how he owed $350 — the cost of six uniforms — to the force, a bill he had accrued over three years of working. He itemized each piece. Among them were a winter uniform, the most expensive garment at $38, and his belt, the cheapest, at $1.50; his revolver was $14.
During his time in Spain he honed his engineering skills. He applied this knowledge to designing a hammer, a metal shell filled with mercury, which he used at a competition in England. After a throw, the weight hit a rock and shattered — a bit like an egg — with mercury spilling everywhere. The silver liquid mystified the boys who fetched the balls out in the field as they could not pick up the liquid.
After spending a couple of years working in Europe, Gillis returned to New York for yet another new career. He worked for Thomas Edison creating screen titles for silent movies, and even appeared in one or two — as a policeman.
Soon he left New York for good, heading west, where he met his wife, Bridget, in Montana, and thereafter settled in Phoenix. In 1919 his daughter, Effie, was born.
He and his wife ran a rooming house during the Depression before he settled into an engineering career, specializing in building smokestacks for smelting metal. He laid out his philosophy on career paths in a cover letter he wrote. “I never was a subscriber to the proverb ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss,’ ” he said. “All through my career, my theory was that a man who sticks to one job gets buried in it, so that my rule was to accept any offer that came along. Just so it carried a promotion and I liked the place and work, which means I traveled and was engaged in many branches of work.”
It must have come as a surprise to Gillis when his wife received letters of condolence regarding his death in 1954. Arthur Daley, the sports columnist for The New York Times, indirectly pronounced him dead in a column on the passing of Pat McDonald, who won the gold medal in shot put at the 1912 Olympics and took home another gold in the 56-pound weight throw at the 1920 Games in Antwerp, Belgium. Daley referred to McDonald as the last of the legendary Whales, that infamous group of champion athletes who ate so well.
Gillis wrote to Daley a good-humored letter that began, “I am still living!” He went on to thank him for saying he was dead, explaining: “It pays to be announced as dead once in a while to find out what people think of you. I am the oldest living hammer thrower of the American Olympic teams.”
It was another 10 years before Gillis died, at age 88, nearly 60 years after his fateful practice throw in an empty lot on Park Avenue.
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