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country team among her sweetest victories. She had learned from an old boyfriend that the team planned to stage the race by documenting runs on their various hometown tracks. Margie asked for the race to be expanded to women so that, unlike in high school, she could compete. Then, she looked up all the men’s times. She knew she could beat everyone except one classmate who was still running a 7:11 mile. “So, Sarah and I really started practicing hard,” not only in training on the track but by having Margie regularly compete in all-comer one-mile races every weekend. “Then, on July fifteenth, I went to the track. I had my son Andy come and pace me. Sarah was out there yelling what to do. Hans was taking pictures. And I had a couple of friends cheering me on. I did the mile in six:fifty-seven,” she said, laughing heartily. She finished thirty-one seconds ahead of her toughest challenger.

In explaining her passion for running, Margie says she likes everything about running except the necessity to rise early and running when it is cold. She subscribes to the belief that one runs to her own beat, compelled by nothing but herself, responsible to no one but herself, and free to reap all the rewards of running for herself, too. “Running must have some magic,” she said. “It’s not just the occasional and appreciated compliment that makes me feel younger. The running itself makes me feel like a kid again.

HARRY BERNSTEIN

Ruby of a Writer

“These have been the most

productive years of my life.”

Some days Harry Bernstein shakes his head at how long it took him to embrace the first commandment of writing: Write what you know. By the time he did, he was no neophyte. After all, his first short story was published when he was seventeen, in 1928. That was the year Mickey Mouse debuted in movie theaters, the old Boston Garden opened, and Herbert Hoover was elected president, months before the stock market crash ignited the Great Depression. In the 1930s, Harry’s stories appeared in some of the best American “little magazines,” such small literary journals as The Anvil, Story, and Literary America that were devoted to serious if noncommercial writing. His work was published alongside such celebrated writers as William Carlos Williams, Richard Wright, Gertrude Stein, and Nelson Algren. Harry was poised for literary success. One of the nation’s most acclaimed editors of the era even asked him to write a novel. But things did not go Harry’s way. Instead, he suffered seven decades of literary frustration, rejection, and failure.

Yet for fifty-five years—through ten years of low-paid and ungratifying work as a reader for Hollywood studios, fifteen years as the editor of a construction trade magazine, and another thirty years of “retirement”—he kept his fingers moving on the typewriter. Fueled by resistant hope and habit, he wrote about forty unpublished novels. He does not know how many exactly because he lost track. If he thought they were good he showed them to agents or publishers. Usually, he heard nothing back. Or worse. And with each fresh disappointment, he lost a little more faith. “I figured if they didn’t like them then they probably weren’t any good so I threw them in the trash,” he said.

He was ninety-three when he decided to once again devote himself fully to writing, turning this time to the memories of his childhood instead of to his imagination. He submerged himself in writing about life before World War I on a cobblestone street in a poor Lancashire mill town called Stockport in the north of England. He reimagined his life as a working-class kid coming to terms with the grievous mysteries of that small universe, a street divided by an invisible line, with Christians on one side and Jews like himself on the other. To get started, he didn’t do any research. He didn’t have to. He just pushed everything else out of his mind and wrote.

When his debut memoir, The Invisible Wall, was published in 2007, he was weeks away from turning ninety-seven. The book was greeted—first in Britain, then in the United States—as an