How one woman in disguise changed Bay to Breakers forever

May 17-In a city where people reserve space in their closets for costumes, it's hard to imagine a time when one San Franciscan actually had to wear a disguise just to run in its yearly bay-to-ocean fun run. After all, Bay to Breakers participants are famous for putting on everything from regular running attire to outlandish costumes, and sometimes even nothing at all.

But on March 10, 1940, that's what was done by Barbara J. Burke, who posed as a man to participate.

The year prior, Barbara had met a keen runner named Edward Preston at the World's Fair at Treasure Island. The two fell in love. Edward, already a two-time winner of the race, wanted his girlfriend to join him in the run, which was then called the Cross City Race. But there was one problem.

"At that time women were not allowed to run with men," Edward's son James Preston told SFGATE in an interview.

Running as a sport was also a lot more exclusive in the first half of the 20th century than the plethora of weekend runs all across the nation today would suggest. While participation in the race, which began in 1912, was free, you had to be registered with the Pacific Athletic Association as an amateur athlete to run. This attracted "only serious runners with intentions of racing to win," as St Mary's College of California kinesiology professor Claire M. Williams wrote in her chapter on Bay to Breakers in "San Francisco Bay Area Sports." Professionals were completely banned from participating, as it was "believed they did so with impure motivations" - meaning prize money.

Edward was fast, amateur or not, and had had Olympic hopes (the 1940 games were canceled in late 1939 as World War II raged in Europe). He ran for the Olympic Club, because athletics organizations from across the state like the Young Men's Hebrew Association, Japanese Showa Club and the Catholic Filipino Club sent runners to represent them in the Cross City. But still, no women were on the course. The basic requirements were to be over 18, and male, and to have lived in California for the last three months.

How Edward got his girlfriend through the reported hurdles for admittance to the race - a preregistration by mail for a PAA number and a physical exam at the starting line - is anyone's guess. James told SFGATE that he never heard about these requirements from his father, noting, "I'm inclined to believe they never happened."

In the end, Barbara's disguise was simple. She already went by the nickname "Bobbie," so her registration would have reflected that, James said. She was short - 5 feet, 2 inches to Edward's 6 feet - with short hair. And she was still just a teenager, an 18-year-old finishing her senior year at Lowell High School.

Donning shorts and a T-shirt like the other runners, plus a baseball cap, "She looked like a young boy," James told SFGATE. Though Barbara is also touted occasionally as the race's first costumed runner, "There was no costume," he attested. (According to Williams, the first costumed runner did race in 1940 - as Captain Kidd, the Scottish privateer.)

A note penned with Bobbie Burke's race entry quoted in the March 2, 1940, edition of the San Francisco News read, "I am a very dark horse but you are in for a surprise when I finish up with the leaders," and said her "coach" was a former two-time winner.

Barbara and Edward ultimately married in 1941 and had James and his brother. But "that was the first and last time she raced," James said.

Given that her boyfriend was considerably speedier than she was (Edward won the race again that day, with a time of 42 minutes and 12 seconds), no one knows for sure if Barbara completed the race or, like so many Bay to Breakers runners to follow, peeled off at the park, possibly heading for her parents' home on Ulloa Street in West Portal.

"We have no physical evidence that she finished the race. She claims she did," James said.

When asked if his mom thought she was doing anything revolutionary at the time, he demurred: "No, just her boyfriend asked her to run and so she did."

It surprises Williams that Barbara got through undetected - "The race was so small during that era that women dressed as men would have been noticeable, I would think," she told SFGATE by email. About 35 runners on average finished the Cross City each year between 1937 and 1963.

But it's been reported that other women followed suit over the decades between Barbara's run and the creation of an actual women's division in 1971. That year, a Stanford University hospital brain surgeon, Dr. Frances K. Conley, won with a time of 50 minutes and 45 seconds. Reporters of the era unfortunately referred to her as "a Palo Alto housewife" in articles about the race. By 1997, women had outpaced men in participation, a trend that continued into the 2010s.

To this day, the Preston family loves the "urban legend" of Barbara's race, James said, and has celebrated Edward's three-peat by running in the Bay to Breakers together several times. Edward quit running for a long time after that 1940 Cross City, but took it back up again in his 50s, when James and his sons - one of whom was once seeded in the race - occasionally ran with him.

For his part, James, who is 80, has honored his dad by completing the race virtually from his hometown of Visalia for the last 15 years - Bay to Breakers sends him the T-shirt ahead of time and the medal afterward, once he shows his completed distance on a tracking app. He hangs the medals on one of his dad's Bay to Breakers trophies.

Over email, James wrote that his granddaughter is now the one continuing the "Preston tradition," completing the 4.2-mile Pat Tillman run last month in Phoenix, where she lives. Both Prestons who ran the 1940 Cross City Race would probably be proud.

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