Andy Neidnig’s Ninetieth Birthday
A medal he won when 11 is still on the wall
(07/08/2009) On Friday morning, just as he always does, Andy
 Jack Graves
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Neidnig walked down Sag Harbor’s Main Street to the rear entrance of Tony Venesina’s Conca D’Oro pizzeria.
When he entered the kitchen through the back hallway at around 10:15, just as he always does, this writer stepped forward, grabbed his hand, and wished him a happy 90th birthday.
“Don’t squeeze! Don’t squeeze!” said the two-time New York Road Runners Club’s golden age award winner and Manhattan College Hall of Famer, who has been plagued lately by arthritis. “Everybody’s been saying, ‘Happy birthday,’ but I don’t know.”
“Well, it was nice of you to remember,” he said, after he’d drawn his usual glass of red wine and lowered himself gingerly into one of the chairs in the narrow raised dining area.
“It’s a big effort for me to walk now. I’m very disintegrated. The trouble is,” he said, pointing to his head, “the mind is better than the body.”
“You can kill two birds with one stone — you can write up an article on my birthday and then run it as my obituary,” he said with a laugh.
Aside from a brief period in his mid-40s, before masters (over-40) divisions came into being, Neidnig, who has competed in 30 marathons, beginning with a ninth-place finish at Boston in 1938 and setting an over-70 record with a 2:57 at New York in 1992, has run pretty much his entire life.
“Even in the war,” he said, “when I wasn’t fighting. . . . I’ve always taken running very seriously. . . . People used to think I was crazy when I ran through the streets — we lived in Queens, near Aqueduct — every day after work” as a steamfitter.
“The first medal in running I ever won was when I was 11. I still have it on the wall. It was from home plate straight to second base.”
Upon graduating from college in 1941, he volunteered for the prewar draft, figuring he’d be out in a year, “but after Pearl Harbor everything changed.”
Stateside, Neidnig won numerous Amateur Athletic Union track and cross-country titles, defeating college and high school athletes as he moved up in the ranks from staff sergeant to lieutenant in the Second Armored Division, which was to fight in the Battle of the Bulge.
“At one of those A.A.U. meets, in Arkansas, they made me start 20 feet behind everyone else in the mile because I was an outsider. I won! In the half-mile, they started me even with everybody else. I won that too. Then I read in the papers that there was going to be a six-mile race the next day. I won that too! A week later, I was called out by the generals and they had a parade for me.”
He feared, he said, that he might wind up training troops in the U.S. for the duration, but, as it turned out, he did not miss the war. “I don’t want to tell you any stories about the fighting, except that there were three times I shouldn’t have lived.”
When it was over, “the Army started track teams at the bases in Europe, and in one of these meets I ran the half against a kid from Luxembourg. I stayed behind him in the first lap, which I always did, and then, on the second lap, I zoomed down the back stretch and won in 1:57, which was a pretty good time.”
“He said he was 18, still in high school, and that they were expecting big things from him. That was in 1945. I was 26, an old man, though I wouldn’t have been today. In the 1952 Olympics, he won a gold medal in the 1,500. His name was [Josy] Barthel. He visited me here when he ran in the Millrose Games and he saw me run in the 1949 Boston Marathon.” (Neidnig was ranked 136th among the world’s marathoners that year.)
“I haven’t had a sip of this yet — you got me talking,” the new nonagenarian said, raising a half-full plastic cup.
“Happy birthday, Andy,” said Frank Venesina, who had come in to get ready, along with his father, Seve Martinez, Chris Cadger, and Franco LiGregni, for a busy day.
“When I came out here, Tony had a 10K race,” he continued. “Tony was just opening this place. I was just 60, and I won my age group. I learned later in The Sag Harbor Express that they were also giving out a trophy for the oldest runner, so I came down here to get it. That was the first time we met. In 1979. Tony and I ran all over Long Island together. He’d win his age group and I’d win mine.”
With this, Conca D’Oro’s owner brought out a cake, with a candle, and LiGregni stepped forward to shake Neidnig’s hand only to be implored, “Don’t squeeze! Don’t squeeze!”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve got to go to the post office, and at 3:30 I’ll go to the Blue Skies for two or three beers. I go there to socialize, though maybe this afternoon there’ll be something more.”
At the door, on learning that this writer was still playing tennis, he said, “Good, don’t stop. Nature takes care of that — it will slow you. Meanwhile, don’t think about it.”