Sollers Track

On Saturday, there was a great article in the Baltimore Sun about Dundalk and the new track being renovated at Sollers Point Technical High School in honor of J. Bruce Turner.

This was a great event to have in Dundalk and fitting tribute to a great man!

Check the whole article out at: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/baltimore_county/bal-te.co.track26jul26,0,633884.story

Taken from the baltimore sun: “When Baltimore County school officials would not let the track team at the all-black Sollers Point High School in Dundalk run time trials at the all-white school up the road, their coach decided to make his own track.

J. Bruce Turner hitched a metal bedspring to the rear fender of his old Plymouth. He piled cinder blocks – and a few students – on top. And he drove his car around the oval pattern that he and the school’s math teacher had plotted until the dirt was flat enough and smooth enough to serve as a makeshift track.

“It was the segregation era,” said Thomas Bagley, 73, who graduated from Sollers Point High in 1952 and helped carve the track. “You had to be creative. If you had nothing, you just had to be creative.”

The effort paid off. The teams that Turner trained there in the early 1950s won gold medals at the Penn Relays in Philadelphia for three consecutive years.

In 2006, Turners Station community activists organized to name the track after him at what is now a specialized magnet school called Sollers Point Technical High. But they couldn’t afford to repair the track, which had crumbled and sprouted weeds.

This year, Honeywell International, a technology and manufacturing company based in Morristown, N.J., and P. Flanigan & Sons, a 123-year-old paving company headquartered in Baltimore, chipped in to restore the track as part of Turners Station’s revitalization efforts.

Brooks, the nurse and lifelong resident of the historically black community who helped spur the track improvements, hopes neighborhood groups and recreation leagues will use it to teach young people to run and exercise. She hopes to start a walking group that will gather weekly at the track.

And she hopes it will serve as an inspiration to people to focus on and improve their health.

“Nostalgically, I would say that that would be a great honor to J. Bruce Turner and a tribute to the man who gave us a track,” she said. “Now, we’re bringing it back and using it to make us more fit and more healthful.”"