Fast Girls

by Elise Hooper

  “Of course,” Betty said firmly. “You go. I’ll dress and get something to eat. Meet you in the dining hall in an hour or so?”

  “I’ll head there as soon as I’m done,” Helen called as she opened the door and left.

  Alone, Betty crossed her arms over her thin nightgown and surveyed their little room. The smell of fresh paint still clung to the walls, but also there was the earthy scent of damp clothes. Helen’s medal gleamed where it hung from her bedpost. Betty bent over, groaning as her back cracked, but she lifted it and put the medal around her neck. Did she regret selling her own medals? Was all this effort and sacrifice going to be worth it?

  With shaking hands, she removed the medal from her neck and returned it to Helen’s bed before slowly dressing in her white team skirt and navy-blue blazer. She glanced at her wristwatch. Only a couple of minutes had passed. She couldn’t imagine going to the noisy dining hall and making small talk for the next hour. And anyway, she wasn’t hungry.

  After fixing her hair, she laid out a game of solitaire on her bed to keep herself occupied. She’d play a hand or two, collect her thoughts, and then go get something to eat. But after several minutes of staring at her cards, she swept them into a pile and leaned back against the bed’s wooden headboard. She closed her eyes and tried to summon her memory of Amsterdam, the sensation of crossing the finish line in first place. She needed to calm down.

  Instead, she was taken back to Wilson’s plane, the moment when the engine stopped. She had known something terrible had gone wrong, but for a second, she had been overwhelmed by the beauty of her surroundings. The quiet. How the lake had shimmered in the distance, blue and clear. How the world below them—the buildings, cars, streets—had all been miniaturized and the land reduced to its most basic shapes. It had been peaceful and perfect—before terror had set in. Or maybe it had been terror that provided the sharp contrast in perspective, that beautiful tipping point between moving forward and falling, between daringly risky and fatal. She pulled herself off the headboard and sat, her face in her hands. Why was she thinking about this now? How was this supposed to help her?

  She swung her feet off the bed and stood to look outside the window. The sky was growing darker with impending rain.

  “Betty?”

  She turned to see Annette in the doorway, holding a telegram out to her. “I’m on my way back from the mailroom, but I wanted to drop this off for you.”

  “Thank you,” Betty said. She unfolded it.

  * * *

  The Western Union Telegraph Company

  Received at Berlin, Germany 1936 Aug 9 8:09 AM

  GOOD LUCK IN TODAY’S BIG RACE. ALL OF YOUR NORTHWESTERN TRACK TEAMMATES ARE CHEERING YOU ON. I HAVE YOUR 1928 GOLD AND SILVER MEDALS SAFE AND SOUND FOR WHEN YOU RETURN. BEST WISHES, BILL RIEL.

  * * *

  She read the telegram several times, her eyes blurring with tears.

  Bill bought her medals from Jim?

  “Is everything all right?” Annette asked, still standing in the doorway, watching her.

  “Yes, I’ve received surprising news from an old friend.”

  “Good news?”

  “Great news, actually.” Betty couldn’t stop staring at the telegram.

  “I’m so glad. Do you need anything?”

  “No, no, you should go get ready for our race.”

  Annette left, and Betty packed her uniform and shoes into her track bag, double-checking that she had included the correct shoes. She had survived a plane crash and overcome the odds to return to the Olympics. What was she so worried about? Before she left for the dining hall, she tucked the telegram into her bag with a steady hand. She had everything and didn’t need any good luck charms, but she’d bring it anyway.

  57.

  August 9, 1936

  Berlin

  HELEN TOOK HER PLACE AT THE FINAL LEG OF THE RELAY and hopped up and down, shaking out her arms and legs, trying to stay loose. Red flags marred with swastikas filled the air and the cheers of the crowd were deafening.

  When Helen had run the individual 100-meter, she’d felt antsy and preoccupied. She had wanted to absorb the significance of the moment and couldn’t, but this time on the track felt different. Helen tented her hand over her brow, looking toward the other end of the track. There stood Annette, looking serious but calm. Even Harriet, across the track at the start, seemed immune to the crowd. She gave Helen a small wave and then went about the business of checking her starting position.

  Helen glanced across the curve in the track and found Betty smiling at her. It felt right that she’d be the one passing off the baton to Helen. They’d proven to be a good pairing. This time, Helen wouldn’t wait for Betty to collide with her. She knew to start gently, put her hand out, and trust that the baton would be there.

  An unexpected sense of love and of solidarity with these women and all that they had gone through to get there filled Helen.

  No matter what happened next, this was their team.

  At the starting area, the official took his spot and raised his gun to the sky. The women dropped to crouches. The starting commands echoed throughout the stadium. The gun fired.

  The racers moved so quickly. Despite her irresponsible behavior over the last few weeks, Harriet ran effortlessly and passed the baton to Annette, who moved down her straightaway with ease. When the pack clustered around the second hand-off, the Germans took the lead and a sense of urgency buzzed through the stadium. Marie Dollinger surged ahead. Betty’s face strained with effort and concentration as she chased the German, but she wasn’t going to be able to close the distance. Every fiber of Helen’s body came alive with the electricity of the challenge that was becoming more real with every split second. This would be the race of her life!

  Beside her, Helen sensed Ilse Dörffeldt tighten. The German woman pranced in place like an impatient Thoroughbred. Despite the frenetic energy surrounding her, Helen took a deep inhalation and let out a slow exhalation. Though her heart was banging against her rib cage, she felt eerily calm.

  It contradicted her every instinct, but Helen turned away from Betty to focus on the finish line. She couldn’t look back, only forward. She needed to trust Betty. Feeling the air around her hum with the power of the crowd’s anticipation, she waited. Please come, please come now, she thought. Her knees trembled.

  “Up!”

  Betty’s voice rang out above the chaos clearly and there was no time for relief, just action. Helen reached backward, felt the smooth wood of the baton against her palm, and grasped it.

  Behind her, a commotion filled the air, a wail of agony.

  Helen resisted the urge to look behind her, to see what had happened.

  Instead she ran.

  LOUISE HELD HER breath as Tidye’s hand clamped around her forearm. On her other side, Mack let out a low whistle of amazement.

  They all watched as Helen ran along the final straightaway as if the baton in her hand were a lit stick of dynamite.

  She crossed the finish in first place. First place!

  But instead of cheering, the stadium fell silent, all attention affixed to the spectacle unfolding in the spot where Marie had handed the baton to Ilse and she had dropped it.

  Ilse Dörffeldt had fallen to the track and was now crawling after the baton, still rolling along the cinder. It reached the rim of the outmost lane and stopped. Ilse grasped it, but it was too late. The race was over. The British, Canadians, Italians, and Dutch had all followed Helen over the finish line.

  In a stadium filled with tens of thousands of people, it felt like everyone was holding their breath.

  But then, like a conductor, Helen raised her hands in victory, and it was as if everyone let out a collective exhalation. Yelling and screaming resumed.

  Betty, Annette, and Harriet arrived from their different corners of the track and collapsed upon Helen.

  Mack nudged Louise and she glanced over to Hitler’s special viewing box. The man had leapt to his feet and stared
at the track, his expression aghast. Ilse raised her gaze to look at him and he shook his head, irritated, and smacked his black gloves against his thigh before turning to disappear from his box.

  The next few minutes of arranging the top three teams on the medals podium happened quickly. Against a stormy sky, the American flag rose while the opening notes of the national anthem soared over the stands, drowning out the feverish conversations surrounding Louise. Even after all that had happened, the anthem still made her vision swim with tears. Though this country had betrayed her in so many ways, she couldn’t bring herself to reject it. Its promise still had the power to stir something powerful in her.

  Betty raised her gold medal to the crowd, her eyes shining with joy and relief. Annette sang and Harriet smiled widely for a photographer crouched in front of them. But out of everyone, it was Helen who mesmerized Louise. For once, Helen was oblivious to the raucous cheering and the cameras and appeared satisfied to simply be surrounded by her teammates, as if that was all she had ever needed.

  Over the loudspeaker, the announcer reeled off the standings and final times for each team. The crowd boomed with excitement, but the numbers meant nothing to Louise. It wasn’t the finish line that interested her.

  She looked toward the sky where the Olympic flag flapped in the brisk wind. Mack, Jesse, and the men had been setting records and winning medals, and though she was proud of them, a flash of impatience filled her. Beyond the stadium was a whole world filled with girls who had no idea how fast they could run if given the chance. Louise nudged Tidye and bent toward her friend’s ear, yelling to be heard over the din. “Someday they won’t be able to stop us girls.”

  Tidye nodded, giving a rueful smile, and wrapped her arm around Louise’s waist.

  Afterword

  BECAUSE OF WORLD WAR II AND ITS AFTERMATH, ANOTHER Olympics would not be held until 1948.

  What became of these fast girls . . .

  Betty Robinson

  Settling back into a regular life after the excitement of the Olympics proved to be a little bumpy for Betty. She returned from Chicago and found herself in a whirlwind romance that resulted in a brief marriage, but it was annulled. Soon after, she married a man who had first spotted her in 1931, when she had arrived at a Northwestern football game in a wheelchair while convalescing from her plane crash. From a distance, he had fallen in love with Betty, and he sought her out when she returned home in 1936. Eventually she became a mother of two. She kept her Olympic medals in a Russell Stover candy box, only to break them out to give motivational lectures throughout the Chicago area. Occasionally she would meet for lunch with Jesse Owens and his family.

  Betty and her husband moved around the country several times before settling in Colorado. At the age of eighty-four, approximately three years before her death, Betty celebrated the upcoming 1996 Atlanta Olympics by running in the official torch relay through Denver with her family.

  She remained close friends with Helen for the rest of her life.

  There are historical events that I moved or compressed for the sake of a smooth narrative, and the most significant change that I made was to set Betty’s plane crash in 1932, though it actually occurred a year earlier, in June 1931. Betty’s fiancé, Bill Riel, is a fictional character based on her college boyfriend who was a university football, basketball, and tennis star. Though Betty sold many of her Olympic prizes to pay her way to Berlin, she held on to her medals.

  Helen Stephens

  Helen’s 1936 Olympic record in the 100-meter sprint remained in place until Wilma Rudolph beat it in the 1960 Olympics in Rome.

  Despite Helen’s undeniable athletic success, there was no clear path for her to follow when she returned from the Berlin Olympics and tried to make a living as an athlete. Severe AAU rules regulated retaining amateur athlete status and limited the options for many young Olympians to capitalize on their skills and experience, and for a woman, the possibilities for turning professional and snagging endorsement deals were practically nonexistent. Although it made for a rocky existence, Helen forged her own way working odd jobs, playing basketball and softball, and bowling. She even owned and managed a semiprofessional basketball team, making her the first woman to do so.

  During the last few months of World War II, Helen enlisted in the Women’s Reserve of the U.S. Marine Corps, but was never deployed, and later worked as a reference librarian for many years. She also fell in love and spent her life with a long-term partner, but fearing discrimination, she never made her homosexuality public.

  Helen dedicated herself to promoting women’s athletics. Over the decades, she remained in touch with many of her friends from the Olympics, including Betty, Harriet, Stella, and Dee, and she ran in exhibition and masters races. An early member of the National Track and Field Hall of Fame, she worked tirelessly to have many of her teammates inducted as well, and served as an activist and coach working on behalf of women athletes until her death in 1994.

  In Helen’s obituary, The New York Times described her as “one of the great female athletes of her day,” a feat made that much more remarkable for the challenges she had to overcome. Frank Stephens did little to support Helen’s educational and athletic successes; while not as blatantly cruel as I portrayed him, he was distant and made his dissatisfaction with his lot in life plain for all to see. It’s true that she was assaulted by a sixteen-year-old cousin when she was in fourth grade and later experienced a sexual encounter with a visiting teacher.

  Louise Stokes

  Upon her return from Berlin, Malden honored Louise with a parade. Soon after, she married a professional cricket player and had a son. Though she stopped running, she continued to pursue her love of athletics and took up bowling. She founded the Colored Women’s Bowling League, thereby creating an opportunity for more black women to compete, and over the next several decades, she won many awards. After Louise died in 1978, a statue was erected in the courtyard of Malden High School to commemorate her athletic accomplishments.

  Of all the main characters in this novel, I knew the least about the real-life Louise Stokes. Aside from a few newspaper articles and mentions in books, there was very little historical data about her, so I filled in the gaps of the lives of Louise, her mother, and her sisters through researching the lives of black women in Massachusetts during this period. Uncle Freddie is a character of my own creation.

  Tidye Pickett

  Tidye returned home to Chicago and worked her way through college and graduate school. She married and raised three children. She became an educator and then served as a principal at an elementary school for over twenty years. Upon her retirement, the school honored the former Olympian by naming itself after her. She passed away in 1986.

  Louise and Tidye have gone largely unrecognized for many decades, but their perseverance in the face of racial and gender discrimination in the 1932 and 1936 Olympics paved the way for Audrey Patterson, a black woman from Louisiana, to win an Olympic medal when she finished third in the 200-meter sprint in London in 1948. A day later, Alice Coachman, a high jumper, became the first black American woman to win an Olympic gold medal.

  Stella Walsh

  Despite Stella’s adoption of Polish citizenship, she never settled into European society and she spent the rest of her life living in Ohio, though the American press consistently belittled her athletic accomplishments despite the fact that she went on to set records and win races for many more years.

  On the eve of the Melbourne Olympics, at the age of forty-five, she married in Las Vegas, but with her American citizenship finally complete through marriage, she fell short of qualifying at the Olympic trials and announced her retirement.

  In 1980, seventy-nine-year-old Stella was shot in the chest during a random mugging in the parking lot of a convenience store in Cleveland. She died immediately. Later, her autopsy revealed that she was intersex. This finding confirmed what her closest friends had long suspected, but it was a bombshell to the rest of the world. The discovery
led some officials and athletes to demand that her medals and records be rescinded, but there was never a decisive ruling on the case.

  Caroline Hale Woodson

  This character is based on several Olympians from this era: Evelyne Hall, Evelyn Furtsch, Kay Maguire, Simone Schaller, Jean Shiley, Anne Vrana O’Brien, and Maybelle Reichardt.

  Dee Boeckmann

  For Dee, the Berlin Olympics marked the beginning of a long trailblazing career in coaching, teaching, and athletic administration that took her all over the world. During World War II, she worked in China with the American Red Cross. She became coach to Japan’s national women’s track and field team and served as a director for the 1964 Olympics. She was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1976. When she passed away in 1989, she was spending her final days in Creve Coeur, Missouri.

  Olive Hasenfus

  Though Olive traveled to the Olympics in 1928 and 1936 but never raced, she returned home with a medal she won during an exhibition race in Germany after the Berlin Games. Her talent and persistence also inspired her two brothers to be her teammates and compete in canoeing at the Berlin Olympics.

  After 1936, she married, started a family, and continued to support women’s athletics by serving as an official and referee of sporting events. Whenever anyone argued that athletics could harm a woman’s fertility, Olive would refute the point by cheerfully listing all of her titles and records from over the years and then pointing to her three healthy children.

  Babe Didrikson

  Babe led a long, storied career as both an amateur and professional athlete and competed in everything from billiards to tennis to basketball to swimming. Her competitive spirit wasn’t limited to only athletics. She gave exhibitions in needlepoint and often boasted that she could type eighty-six words a minute. In 1934, she even pitched several innings in three different Major League Baseball professional exhibition games, but golf became her passion. After only three years of playing it, Babe competed against a field of all men in the 1938 Los Angeles Open, a PGA event. She went on to dominate the world of golf, setting many records that still stand, both as an amateur and a professional, and became a founding member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA).