And if you think gaining induction into it means any less to former Kansas University distance-running great Wes Santee than being enshrined in Cooperstown ever has meant to a ballplayer, well, then you must not be familiar with all Santee had to run from to get there.

Santee is in Jacksonville, Fla., for tonight’s induction ceremonies to a Hall of Fame located in New York, a world apart from the farm in Ashland where he ran his days away.

During a recent visit to Lawrence, Santee, 73, sat down and talked about his successful track career and his difficult upbringing on a farm in Ashland with a father he described in one word: “mean.”

“He carried a rawhide buggy whip in the pickup and didn’t care how he used it,” Santee said. “I got a few hefty swats with that thing, and I learned how to stay away from him. Unfortunately, I grew to dislike him.”

Nick Krug

His tone is matter-of-fact.

“He throws a blacksmith hammer at me one day and hit me in the right arm, and it hurt,” Santee said.

Inside and out, no doubt. The treatment gave Santee all the more experience running, but it’s not as if he should stand up and thank his father for creating an environment that kept him on the run.

“We’d be working out in the field and it would be time to go back to the house,” Santee said. “Instead of riding in the truck with him, I’d run back in because I didn’t want to be with him. That’s just the way it developed.”

Strong path

Nick Krug

Santee’s story is not a woe-is-me tale. On the contrary, he only answers the questions when asked, and he is not defined by the mistreatment he received from his father. The natural reaction of the boy of an abusive parent is to blame himself for everything.

Santee has taken another path. He learned as much as he could about his father’s background, and that helped him understand why he was so mean.

“My dad was born in Ohio, and his mother died when he was 1-and-a-half or 2,” Santee started. “He was raised helter-skelter. If you go back to the 1800s, you’ll find a couple got married, and they had one or two children, and usually the wife died giving birth.

“My grandfather had two boys with his first wife. He remarried, had two boys, and she died. His third wife was my grandmother. She had two boys and died, my dad being the second one. His upbringing was terrible. He got as far as second or third grade in school, and that was it. He was a strong, robust kid in Ohio, and they had to find something to do with him.”

A cousin owned a farm in Ashland, 52 miles south of Dodge City, so Santee’s father was sent there to become a farmhand. He didn’t see the need for education, Santee said, and figured if he survived without one, so, too, could his son.

“Luckily, in the fifth grade, we had a new coach come to town,” Santee said. “There were two people in town my dad wouldn’t challenge. One was the superintendent of schools, and in small-town Kansas the superintendent is dominant. And the coach was a very likable guy, and he would go talk to my dad about letting me run. My dad wouldn’t say yes and wouldn’t say no.

“About anybody else my dad would have pulled a rifle on him and told him to get off the property. Certain times of year, he wanted me home at noon to work. I’d go in, get my assignment and after everybody went to bed, I’d pump up a kerosene lamp, do my work and turn it in to get full credit.”

Santee made the best of it.

“Why sit around and fret and carry on if you can’t do something about it?” Santee said. “I couldn’t do anything but get myself out of there. It conditioned me to be tough as nails and very aggressive. I wanted to get out of that place, big-time. That’s part of the reason I went to college.”

Into the spotlight

Once he got out, Santee never went back, and he ran all the way into the global spotlight. Santee brashly predicted he would become the first man to break the four-minute barrier and as he, Australia’s John Landy and England’s Roger Bannister chased the magical mark, the world tuned in. Fifty years later, books and documentaries brought the chase back into the spotlight, where it has stayed for the past year.

Bannister was first, then Landy. Santee’s three best mile times: 4:00.5, 4:00.6, 4:00.7. He repeatedly has explained that Bannister had countrymen helping him get there by setting the pace for him, whereas Santee didn’t have that luxury. “Can you imagine someone from Missouri helping someone from Kansas by being a rabbit for him? But you have to give the credit to Bannister. He was first.”

Plus, Santee raced in multiple events to help Kansas win meets, a different goal than customizing training to beat the clock in one event. For example, in one meet for KU against California, he won the 880 yards in 1:51.5, the mile in 4:05.5 and ran a 48.0 440-yard relay leg. And he ran the 5,000 meters in the 1952 Olympics, an indication of his versatility.

Great career

Roger Kingdom, Mike Powell, John McDonnell, Earlene Brown, Jim Fuchs and Fred Wolcott join Santee in the class of 2005. Though Santee has spent so much of his life explaining why he didn’t do something, namely break the four-minute barrier, his induction is about what he did do.

Santee set the world indoor record in the mile twice and the 1,500 meters once and set the outdoor 1,500-meter record at the 1956 Compton Invitational. He was an NCAA champion in cross country, the 1,500 meters, the mile, and 5,000 meters in various years.

Confidence has been his constant companion. Cockiness, even, his old fraternity brothers would say. Once, after returning from an unusually poor performance, his fraternity brothers showed up at the Lawrence airport to rib him about his 36th-place finish. It so angered Santee that he challenged them to a race wherein he would run 14 miles alongside a busy road while each of 28 Acacia fraternity brothers would run a half mile apiece, passing the baton to the next man.

Santee won the race run on a frigid day by more than a quarter mile, as his Kansas coach Bill Easton shouted instructions to him from out the window of a car that drove alongside him.

As for the cocky charge, Santee always has disagreed.

“To me, saying I can beat you in the mile is being confident,” Santee said. “To me being cocky is me thinking I’m a better person than you. I never thought I was a better person than anyone else. I just could outrun people.”

Not to mention his less-than-idyllic upbringing. Though he doesn’t claim to be perfect, he outran that quite well, too.