Cheesy Grits: Granddad Ralston's Amateur Years: The Beginning

I first thought I would use "Granddad Ralston in Harlem" as a running title for this series, but alert readers, which of course includes all of you, will have already noted that his first documented residence wasn't in Harlem at all: it was on W. 59th Street, a section of Manhattan known as "San Juan Hill." (Harlem itself was still largely white.)

Why "San Juan Hill" was so named remains unclear; what is clear is that it was sort of "Harlem-before-Harlem" insofar as it was a dense cluster of African Americans that also included a great number of recently-arrived-and-arriving Caribbean immigrants. Social conditions were terrible and jobs were few; everybody was scrabbling to make ends meet. And it was here that Granddad Ralston began his career, first as an amateur athlete and then as a professional in the field of physical education.

Because our family possesses very few original documentary remnants of Granddad's career, I've had to rely on public sources to document it as best I can. Fortunately for us, he was a man of sufficient accomplishment that there are some public good records for him.

So far as I can tell, Granddad Ralston made his first appearance in the New York City press in an 27 April 1911 Brooklyn Eagle report of a joint track meet at Brooklyn's 14th Regiment Armory hosted by the Smart Set Athletic Club for nearly twenty African American track clubs, most of them hailing from the East Coast.

G. R. Ralston is listed as representing the host Smart Set A.C. and coming in third in the 220 yard dash, with the winner being H. B. Dismond from Washington, D.C.'s Howard University. (Or is it "Diamond"? The image is fuzzy in all the wrong places. Click to enlarge anyway.)

There's much here to unpack, starting with the story of the Smart Set Athletic Club, but I'll save it for the next post.