Ed Froehlich and Dan Hayes pictured with former Davenport Mayor Thom Hart.
If you stream episodes of “The West Wing” as often as I do, you know that post hoc ergo propter hoc is a Latin phrase meaning "after this, therefore because of this.”
Buying fully into that theory would mean Jimmy Carter is responsible for the bigness of the Quad City Times Bix 7 road race that, after the first rain delay in race history, launched a second half-century on the streets of Davenport Saturday.
Not Ed Froehlich. Not Dan Hayes, and the 44 years of the community-minded Quad City Times race sponsorship he shepherded. Not the tens of thousands of runners, walkers, and committed volunteers from the Quad Cities running community and beyond
Yet, even Josiah Edward Bartlett, that fictional resident of the West Wing, recognized the fallacy in that Latin phrase. And he therefore might argue against crediting his real-life Oval Office predecessor for the transformation of what started as a minor seven-mile race up, down, and across the challenging twists and turns of our river city into one of the most highly regarded running events in all of America.
Which is not to say Froehlich, the erstwhile insurance salesman largely credited with making the Bix big, doesn’t wonder to this day if the Bix would have found its running legs had President Carter not imposed a U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Russia, thereby setting in motion all of the magnificent because of this that came after that.
The hoc immediately post Carter’s geo-political decree was that long-distance running legend Bill Rodgers — who had won his third straight Boston Marathon in the spring of 1980 after winning four successive New York City Marathons from 1976 through 1979 — found himself looking for a summer race to run, with his previously scheduled run for gold in Moscow off the table.
Out of a sense of communal duty, Froehlich, then 32 and three years into his work of selling State Farm Insurance, had committed to what he figured would be a year in the role of co-race director alongside a 20-something banker named Jim Schrader.
It was Schrader’s keen idea to contact the man who hereafter shall be referred to as Bix Billy to see if Rodgers might be interested in challenging the rugged seven-mile course in the company of 1,000 or more passionate members of the local running community.
He was, and on July 26, 1980, Rodgers finished ahead of a field of 1,500 entries, 700 more than had run the race the previous year. Bix Billy ran the race in a then-record 33 minutes, 58 seconds, and has returned every July since, and in the company of increasingly large numbers of world-class long-distance runners from across the globe, well over 100 of whom could call themselves Olympians.
The field of participants, meanwhile, would steadily swell from 84 runners in 1975 to 2500 in 1981, 5620 in 1983, 16,521 a decade after Rodgers’ debut, and an all-time high of 23,182 in 1999. Soon after Billy’s first Bix, the race would win annual inclusion in Runner’s World magazine’s annual list of the Elite 25 Best Races. In 1992, that same magazine celebrated the Bix 7 as the Most Community Spirited Race in the United States.
On a recent afternoon in a quiet corner of the Blackhawk Hotel located just an easy jog from the foot of Davenport’s Brady Street hill, where more than 17,000 runners last year toed the starting line for the 50th Anniversary Quad City Times Bix 7, Ed Froehlich pondered the post hoc ergo propter hoc of it all.
Does the Bix get this big if Jimmy Carter doesn’t boycott the 1980 Moscow Summer Games?
“Probably not,” he said once. “Probably not,” he said again.
Which, of course, is post hoc poppycock.
Froehlich spent another hour of that recent meeting at the Blackhawk justifiably heaping credit for the race’s growth to Hayes, the Times, and the many other corporate sponsors who helped the event grow and prosper as it looks to its 51st running on Saturday.
He rightly deferred credit to the thousands of volunteers from the Cornbelt Running Club and beyond who return annually to ensure the Bix is among the most well-organized races around. And to the runners who come from across the Midwest to run the grueling 7-mile race, and are encouraged across every stride by the estimated 75,000 onlookers who annually line the 3/12-miles of out-and-back race course with award-winning community spirit.
Hayes also said he knows where the credit begins, and it’s not with Jimmy Carter.
“I can think of a hundred people who have been key players in making the Bix successful,” he said. “And we have thousands of volunteers every year. So there are so, so, so, so, so many people who have contributed so much to the race. But, mainly, it has been Ed.
“It's Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed, and Ed. He is the reason that the Bix became what it is.”
After all, Hayes said, it was Froehlich’s creative genius that time and again helped the Bix get bigger and then bigger and then bigger still through the addition of a series of participation-growing events. These include the Alcoa Jr. Bix 7, a Thursday pre-race event introduced in 1998 to give children 12-and-under an opportunity to Bix; the Quick Bix, a 2-mile race/walk across a flatter section of Davenport’s downtown introduced in 1999; and the Brady Street Sprints, a series of Thursday evening 400-yard dashes up that brutal hill.
“It goes on and on, the enhancements he brought to the overall event,” Hayes said of his friend.
Indeed, in the aftermath of the 1980 event that he had intended to be his lone race as Bix chair, Froehlich returned for 39 more years as the leader and creative influence behind the Bix 7.
But ask him to cite a quieter, behind-the-scenes contributor to making the Bix big, and Froehlich will turn the focus back to Hayes.
“Dan Hayes is the most valuable player of the Bix 7, without a doubt,” he said.
It was Hayes, in his role as editor of the Quad City Times, who pitched the Times as the race’s primary sponsor in the critical post hoc year of 1981. The Times’ sponsorship provided the financial means to add running icons such as Frank Shorter, Joan Benoit Samuelson, and Meb Keflezighi. With countless others from around the world, those credentialed competitors gave legs to the race’s long-standing invitation to Run with the Best, and drew competitive and non-competitive runners of all kinds in increasingly large numbers.
As importantly, the newspaper supplied countless column inches of pre-race publicity and race-day reporting, helping grow the profile of the Quad City Times Bix 7 as one of the biggest events in the community.
For Hayes, the latter fulfilled a larger mission of restoring pride in a community reeling from the agricultural manufacturing recession of the 1980s, when big employers like International Harvester, Farmall, and J.I. Case shuttered factories and took as many as 20,000 jobs from a region that had long staked its claim to being the Farm Implement Capitol of the World.
“We did market studies at the time that showed a drastic drop in Quad Citians’ general attitudes about living here,” Hayes said. “We doubled down on promoting the Bix 7 because we wanted to change that funk. It was a dour time in the Quad Cities with losing all those jobs. We began building up the attitude that this really is a good place, and people would come from around the country, from all 50 states, to join in this weekend celebration.”
In 1988, the Times was awarded the Inland Daily Press Association’s Community Service Award for “recognizing the need for, and playing an active part in, its community’s adaptation to a changing economic environment,” an honor based in no small part on its role in making the Bix big.
Looking back nearly two decades, Hayes sees the Quad City Times Bix 7 as a legacy to the impact newspapers once had in, and especially on, their communities.
“It’s a genuine community celebration,” Hayes said. “So it just fit with what our goals were. And that was to promote the Quad City Times, but also to help lift the spirit of the community. And it worked. It actually worked.”
Within a decade, dozens of local companies and businesses had joined the Times as Bix sponsors.
“We have over 400,000 dollars worth of cash sponsorship,” Froehlich said. “Over the years, they fell in love with it. I think there's 40 sponsors now, and the main sponsors have all been there 30 years or more.”
Hayes retired from Lee Enterprises in 2014, and Froehlich formally ceded his role as race director to Michelle Juehring in 2019. Both men’s pivotal roles in making the Bix big are celebrated in bronze in Bix Plaza outside the newspaper’s headquarters. They stand alongside statues of Bix Billy, Samuelson, legendary jazz artist and race namesake Bix Beiderbecke, and equally legendary Times columnist Bill Wundram.
There’s no statue of Jimmy Carter, but he’s with them in spirit.