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Mt. SAC recognizes trailblazing Judy Shapiro-Ikenberry

April 17, 2026

Judy Shapiro’s dream of running began with a hard climb.

Banned because of her gender from running on the track at Verdugo Hills High School where she was a student, Shapiro would climb the school’s fence in the morning, sometimes with a friend, to sneak onto the track so she could train before school.

Shapiro’s daily plight was all too familiar to women runners in the late 1950s and early 60s. Around the same time Shapiro was hopping the fence in Southern California, Doris Elaine Severtson in Washington state, similarly barred from her high school’s track, was training on the beaches and woods along the Puget Sound.

Chances to compete were just as scarce.

“There were no track meets for women,” Shapiro, now Shapiro-Ikenberry, said. “So if we ran we were sort of unofficially in men’s events.”

On an April afternoon in 1961, the Mt. SAC Relays opened the door for women, if only crack.

There were 113 events on the Mt. SAC schedule that year. Only one of them was for women — the 440-yard dash, the meet’s first-ever race for women.

Sixty-five years later, Shapiro-Ikenberry didn’t recall her winning time that day of 60.9 seconds

“Pretty good,” she said this week after being told her time. “For the days, it was pretty good.”

She remembers that the race went around only one curve and finished on Hilmer Lodge Stadium’s ultra-long home straightaway. Mostly she remembers the uniqueness of the moment.

“It was fun to run against girls,” said Shapiro-Ikenberry, who was just 18 at the time of the race. “Usually when we ran, there were no girls or just a few. So that was fun.”

Shapiro-Ikenberry will be honored at this year’s Mt. SAC Relays Saturday in a ceremony commemorating an afternoon where she led her sport as it took a small step on the long road to equality for women runners that would ultimately lead to the International Olympic Committee adding the women’s marathon to the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

The Mt. SAC 440 was one of several historic races Shapiro-Ikenberry would take part in during her career that spanned three decades.

The IOC added the women’s 800 meters to the competition schedule for the 1928 Olympic Games, then promptly dropped it after the Games, claiming the race was “too strenuous for women.”

The 400 would remain the longest distance women were allowed to run at the Olympic Games until 1960, when the IOC agreed to return the 800 to the Olympic program.

The IOC decision caught the attention of Shapiro-Ikenberry and her strong willed mother Evelyn Kowalsky Shapiro.

“My mother was a revolutionary,” Shapiro-Ikenberry said, laughing.

Kowalsky Shapiro was the daughter of a prominent rabbi whose wedding was delayed so her future husband, Arthur Shapiro, could aid anti-Franco forces during the Spanish Civil War. The family moved to Southern California while Judy was an infant after Arthur was offered an aeronautics engineering post at the California Institute of Technology.

The move came during the McCarthyism era and the Shapiros came under suspicion because they subscribed to socialist publications. Neither Evelyn nor Arthur was a member of the Communist Party and Arthur was eventually cleared but lost his job when the family, out of principle, refused to cancel their subscriptions to the left-leaning publications.

Kowalsky Shapiro was a strong advocate for her daughter’s running and was frustrated by the lack of coaching and competitive opportunities for girls and women. Evelyn found a book written by New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard, who guided Peter Snell (800) and Murray Halberg (5,000) to gold medals at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. Lydiard had also begun working with women runners.

“My mother was frustrated that she couldn’t find someone like Lydiard in the United States,” Shapiro-Ikenberry said.

One of Evelyn’s friends told Kowalsky Shapiro that her son’s roommate at Occidental might be willing to coach Judy. Sure enough, Dennis Ikenberry, an Oxy quartermiler and Verdugo Hills High grad, agreed to coach her on the weekends.”We’d spend an hour and a half on the track, half of it arguing,” Shapiro-Ikenberry said. “I would go, ‘Girls can’t run that far. Girls can’t do that.’ And he would say, ‘No, no, you can do this.’”

“I was his big experiment.”

Shaprio-Ikenberry, then 17, qualified for the 1960 U.S. women’s championships in Corpus Christi and a chance to advance to the U.S. Olympic Trials in Abilene.

The U.S. Olympic Committee held separate but clearly not equal Olympic Trials for the men and women until 1976, until the USOC caved to pressure from athletes and legendary Oregon coach Bill Bowerman and the Oregon Track Club and agreed to a single Trials joining both genders.

So Arthur Shapiro removed the back seat from the family’s station wagon, replaced it with a mattress so Judy and her siblings could sleep and Evelyn and Dennis Ikenberry split the driving on the 1,500 mile journey to Corpus Christi.

Kowalsky Shapiro was appalled by what they found in Texas. The athletes were housed in run-down military barracks that had been used to house troops before being shipped overseas during World War II. Superstar sprinter Wilma Rudolph and her Tennessee State teammates and other Black athletes were banned from eating in the city’s segregated restaurants or using public facilities. The food at the barracks, Shapiro-Ikenberry recalled, “was just terrible.” So Evelyn took it upon herself to prepare meals for the athletes, circulating a petition addressing the poor treatment the women were subjected to while soliciting menu suggestions.

Kowalsky Shapiro forwarded the petition to the Amateur Athletic Union, track and field’s national governing body at the time.

“And the AAU officials were totally in control and totally annoyed,” Shapiro-Ikenberry said.

AAU officials took their revenge at the Olympic Trials, loading up a qualifying heat in the 800 with those who had signed Evelyn’s petition, most of them the top 800 runners, creating a situation where some of the signers who would be eliminated in the heats, while lesser runners who had not signed advanced to the final out of weaker heat.

Shapiro-Ikenberry still managed to make the 800 final, finishing fifth. She was fourth in the 400. Severtson finished third in the 800 but did not meet the Olympic qualifying standard.

As Severtson as Doris Brown and later as Doris Brown Heritage would go to hold every American record from the 400 to the mile before becoming the greatest American distance runner of her generation and the premier female cross-country runner on the planet. She represented the U.S. Brown was fifth in the 1968 Olympic 800 final, but her strength was in longer distances.

Brown won five consecutive International Cross Country Championships (now the World Cross Country Championships), leaving the sport to wonder how many other World and Olympic titles she would have captured had the sport been more progressive during her career. The 10,000 for women wasn’t run until the 1988 Olympic Games, the 5,000 not until 1996.

Like Brown, Shapiro-Ikenberry turned her attention to longer distances in the late 1960s.

Dennis Ikenberry, who married Judy in 1964, received a phone call from a newspaper publisher in the fall of 1967. The publisher was looking to drum up publicity for the Las Vegas Marathon, which the newspaper was sponsoring. Were any of the women Ikenberry was coaching interested in trying the marathon.Ikenberry said his wife might. (Dennis Ikenberry died in 2012 after battling pancreatic cancer.)

The call came six months after a Boston Marathon official, Jock Semple, attacked Katherine Switzer during the race. The photos of Semple confronting Switzer as she tried to break the gender barrier in then the world’s most prestigious marathon became a major international story.

As part of the deal, the publisher put the women up in one of Las Vegas’ top hotels and provided them with a daily $20 per diem.

“We thought we were millionaires,” Shapiro-Ikenberry said.

Well at least for a little while. During their stay, the group sat down for dinner at the hotel’s restaurant.

“There were no prices on the menu,” Shapiro-Ikenberry said. “I remember thinking, ‘That’s a little concerning.’ And then the waiter, who was just the nicest man, came to our table and said, ‘You know what I think you’d like it better in the coffee shop,’ and he led us through the kitchen to the coffee shop, which had prices on the menu.”

Shapiro-Ikenberry that weekend won the women’s division in her marathon debut.

She continued to win marathons on the West Coast in the late 60s and early 70s, including the 1974 U.S. Championship race, the first ever official national title race for women. That victory earned her an invitation to the first Women’s International Marathon Championships in West Germany.

Shapiro-Ikenberry led through most of the first half of the race before fading to seventh.

“I guess I just got too excited,” she said. “But I loved leading.”

A decade later, Shapiro-Ikenberry and Brown Heritage, two veterans of the first Olympic Trials 800, caught up with each other during a race on the Olympia, Washington, course that was the site of the first women’s Olympic Marathon Trials in 1984.

“We hadn’t seen each other in years and we spent the whole race talking,” Shapiro-Ikenberry said. “As we finished, this guy behind us was pretty annoyed with us and said you could have run a lot faster if you had just shut up.”

Later that summer, Shapiro-Ikenberry sat high above the track in the Coliseum, awaiting the finish of the first-ever women’s Olympic marathon.

“Way up in the cheap seats,” she said.

Just as Shapiro-Ikenberry always did, American Joan Benoit Samuelson took an early lead.

“Everybody said, ‘She’s going out too fast, she’s going out too fast,’” Shapiro-Ikenberry said. “I said, ‘I don’t know, she looks pretty good.’”

Indeed Benoit Samuelson never faltered on the way to her historic victory.

“When she came through the tunnel, there was this huge roar and…,” Shapiro-Ikenberry said before the emotion of the moment and the road that led to that day stopping her in mid-sentence. She tried to continue but couldn’t.

Dennis Ikenberry had been right during those weekend work-outs all those years ago.

Yes, they could.

“I just thought,” Shapiro-Ikenberry continued, still struggling, “it was so neat that we had been able to do that.”

Orange County Register

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Mt. SAC recognizes trailblazing Judy Shapiro-Ikenberry

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