Konopacka won Poland’s first Olympic gold medal. At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, she took the discus, breaking her own world record by two and a half meters in beating American Lillian Copeland. “Halina of Gold” became a hero in Poland, which was desperate for international recognition and prestige. Polish president Ignacy Mościcki sent Konopacka a congratulatory telegram, and Piłsudski gave her a reception at the Belvedere Palace in Warsaw. She won two consecutive “Great Sport Award of Honor” trophies, the top sport prize in interwar Poland. Stella Walsh won the award in 1930, 1932, 1933, and 1934.
Konopacka became one of Poland’s best tennis players in the 1930s. She also gained fame as a poet, publishing in such prestigious Polish literary journals as Wiadomości Literackie [Literary News]. In December 1928, she married Poland’s minister of finance, Ignacy Matuszewski. Matuszewski served on the Polish General Staff and, after Germany overran Poland in September 1939, organized a daring operation to move gold from the Bank of Poland through Romania, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, and eventually to France. The gold finally ended up in the hands of the exiled Polish government in London. By some accounts, Halina was involved in the operation, but that seems to be a fabrication. Early in the war, Matuszewski and his wife escaped Europe to the United States.
Halina Konopacka was Poland’s first great female athlete, winning a gold medal in the discus at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. Kurier Codzienny, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe [National Digital Archive].
When the Soviets imposed a Communist regime on Poland after the war, Konopacka Matuszewski, like most Polish exiles, did not return to Poland, but lived out her life in the United States. She died in Florida in 1989, and her remains were interred in Brodnowski Cemetary in Warsaw. She outlived Stella Walsh by nine years. In 2013, Macek Petruczenko, writing in the main Polish sports journal, Przegląd Sportowy [Sports Review], called her the “most interesting figure in our interwar sport, and taking into wider consideration her participation in Warsaw salons and in the cultural field, she was surely one of the most interesting Polish women.”17
While Halina Konopacka Matuszewski was celebrated in Poland for her Olympic victory, Walsh was still an unknown there. She had lived almost her entire life in Cleveland and was just beginning to compete in meets in other parts of the country. The Walasiewicz family did not have the wherewithal to finance her running career, especially after the Great Depression hit in 1929. Like many other Poles in the Slavic Village, Julian’s hours and wages at the Newburgh steel mill shrank. The economic crisis was especially hard on African Americans who had come to northern cities to work. Writer Langston Hughes, Walsh’s fellow Clevelander, noted, “The Depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negro had but a few pegs to fall.”
Walsh turned to the Polish Falcons to subsidize her track and field career. Through her connections to the Falcons in the United States and abroad, she became an international star. She felt deeply indebted to the club, which strengthened her bond with the Polish community in Cleveland and her native Poland. Nonetheless, Walsh fully expected to get U.S. citizenship when she turned twenty-one in 1932, and to compete for the United States at the Los Angeles Olympics.
In the spring of 1928, Walsh boarded a New York Central Railroad (NYCRR) train at Cleveland’s Union Terminal on her way to Syracuse, New York, to compete in the Polish Falcon’s quadrennial Zlot, a track and field meet of athletes from sokółs throughout the country. Running outside of Cleveland for the first time, the seventeen-year-old surprised everyone by winning the all-around track and field championship.
Clevelanders thought that Walsh was a serious contender for a spot on the 1928 U.S. Olympic team. Funds to travel to these meets were always in short supply in those days, and the Plain Dealer called for contributions to send Walsh to Newark for the Olympic trials. Running under the name Walsh and speaking English, few people outside of her neighborhood knew that she was not a U.S. citizen. On July 4, she tied for first in her 100-meter quarterfinal heat but came in third in the semifinal heat. Only the top two finishers advanced to the finals. Walsh was chosen as an alternate for the 4 × 100 U.S. relay team, but it was soon discovered that she was not eligible to run for the United States. “They started measuring me for a uniform, and I had to fill out some cards,” Walsh later recalled. “They had a blank for my birthplace, and I was honest. I didn’t know up to then that it made any difference.” At age seventeen, Walsh was too young to apply for naturalization anyway.18 Years later, she claimed that her disappointment at not making the 1928 U.S. Olympic team influenced her decision to run for Poland at the 1932 Los Angeles Games.19
The Syracuse Zlot and the Olympic trials established Walsh as a world-class athlete, and in March 1929, she anchored the NYCRR Athletic Association’s (NYCRR AA) “famous girls’ 440-yard relay team” to a victory in the Cleveland Athletic Club’s annual track meet.20 Her next stop was the 1929 world Zlot in Poznań, Poland. The Polish Falcons again raised funds to send their star sprinter abroad. Walsh arrived in Poznań in late June, nearly seventeen years after she had left Russian Poland as a one-year-old. It was a remarkable journey back to Poland for Walsh, competing in a city only about 160 miles from her birthplace. Few in Poland had heard of Stanisława Walasiewicz, as she was known there.
This trip to Europe was the first of many for Walsh. Globalization is a phenomenon that many people associate with such recent technologies as the cell phone and the Internet, but the rapid movement of people, capital, goods, services, and ideas throughout the world really began in earnest in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with the advent of the railroad, the steam engine, steamships, electricity, the internal combustion engine, the telegraph, and the telephone. Walsh had immigrated to the United States on one of those oceangoing vessels, and she would traverse the Atlantic many more times in her lengthy running career.
The Poznań Zlot was set to begin on June 28, exactly ten years to the day after the signing of the Versailles Treaty. Surely the Germans noted the timing of the event. Polish notables like politician Roman Dmowski, World War I general Józef Haller, and pianist and diplomat Ignacy Paderewski were on hand for the meet. Before World War I, Poznań (Posen in German) was an agricultural trading and financial center in the German Empire. The population of the city was about 60 percent Polish, and on this basis the Versailles Treaty awarded the entire Poznań province to the new Polish state.
Germans could stomach the loss of Alsace-Lorraine to France in the west, but the loss of this Prussian land to Poland was a bitter blow. The so-called Polish Corridor to the north of Poznań separated East Prussia from Germany proper and left 1 million Germans in Poland. Poles called the acquisition of this predominantly German area the “Vistula [River’s] wedding to the Baltic Sea.” German right-wing nationalists, Hitler’s Nazis among them, made the return of the Corridor and the German-populated port of Danzig a centerpiece of their revanchist foreign policy. With a hostile Soviet Union to the east, interwar Poland was in an impossible geopolitical position.
Walsh’s complete dominance of the Poznań Zlot instantly made her a name in Polish sports circles. She won five events: the 60, 100, 200, and 400 meters, and the broad jump. She also took the all-around championship. Polish track and field officials were so impressed that they invited Walsh to join the Warsaw sports club Sokół Grażyna. In a meet that July, in Chorzów, a predominantly German city in Upper Silesia that had been awarded to Poland in a disputed plebiscite, Walsh competed with the Polish national team against Australia, winning gold medals in the 60, 100, and 200 meters, as well as the broad jump. She won those events again in a meet against Czechoslovakia. Walsh became an overnight sensation in Poland, and she basked in the accolades. She took home a box full of medals and a photo of Piłsudski, which her parents displayed prominently in their house.
Walsh was now famous in Cleveland, and sports fans eagerly awaited her Olympic debut for the United States. One Ohio newspaper wrote
, “Miss Walsh’s big thrill came last summer, when she returned to Poland, where she was born, and there ran the native girls breathless. . . . Her one ambition is to run for America in the 1932 Olympics at Los Angeles (she will have become an American citizen by that time).”21
Walsh was clearly one of the best sprinters in the world. That fall in Newark, Walsh led an 880-yard relay team to an AAU record. The association then invited her to the 1930 Millrose Games, the signature indoor track meet in the country. Rodman Wanamaker, heir to New York’s Wanamaker department store company, had organized the first Millrose Games in 1908 (Millrose was the name of Wanamaker’s estate). He was also instrumental in creating the Professional Golfers Association (PGA) in 1916, and the PGA championship trophy bears his name to this day. Held every February at New York City’s famed Madison Square Garden, the Millrose Games was the most prestigious indoor track and field meet in the country. Ireland’s Eamonn Coghlan, who won the “Wanamaker Mile” seven times from 1977 to 1987, commented that “it was regarded as the Olympics of track and field. The stars were household names, attracting fans who may not have even had a close interest in athletics.”22
Walsh qualified for the final in the 50-yard sprint. The other finalists were Canadians, with Canada boasting a reputation for producing world-class women athletes. One historian called the 1920s the “Golden Age of Women’s Sport” in Canada, when women began to play basketball, ice hockey, and baseball, and curled, bowled, speed skated, rowed, and ran track. The University of Toronto and McGill University in Montreal spearheaded the women’s athletic movement; by 1908, both schools had a physical education degree for women. There was pushback to these women playing sports. Dr. A. S. Lamb, the Canadian representative on the IAAF, tried unsuccessfully to keep women’s track and field off the Olympic program. Even after the Amsterdam Olympics, where women competed in these events for the first time, Lamb again voted to drop them.
The Canadian women’s 1928 Olympic team, nicknamed the “Matchless Six,” surprised everyone at the Amsterdam Games. Canada had some of the best sprinters in the world; three of the six finalists in the 100 meters wore Maple Leafs on their uniforms. Canadians won four out of the eighteen medals awarded at Amsterdam and two of the five gold medals. Jane Bell, who anchored the gold medal 4 × 100-meter relay team, remembered the huge crowd that greeted them on their return to Toronto: “We were the toast of the town. . . . We were on everybody’s tongue.”23
Although Walsh was not yet a U.S. citizen, her coach, Dr. Dan Griffin, appealed to her sense of national pride as the only American in the Millrose field: “I don’t know whether you know it or not,” he told Walsh, “but there are four girls in this race and three of them are Canadians. One or the other of them has won this event for the last five years. Suppose you bring the championship back to the United States.”24
Walsh was overwhelmed by the sense that she was running for the entire country:
I didn’t just feel like Stella Walsh then, but as if I was part of every girl in the United States. I can’t describe that feeling. I wanted so much to win, but I can say honestly that this time I didn’t have a thought for the personal glory that would go with it. I was just one American girl against these aliens, and it has never seemed so important that I win a race as it seemed then. There were millions of girls in the United States, and I was the one chosen to run this race. That was the thrill.
Walsh blew away the Canadians in a world record time of 6.0 seconds. The Plain Dealer wrote that “she was bound to win—because she was Stella Walsh, American girl.”25
Walsh was named the Millrose Games’ top athlete, the first woman to win the award. A few days later, she beat one of the Canadians—Dallas Creamer—again, at the Meadowbrook Games in Philadelphia. Walsh broke the 220-yard dash world record by two seconds. “It wasn’t so bad that she beat us,” remarked Creamer. “But did you see her turn halfway down the track to see where we were?”26 Walsh’s winning streak ended in Buffalo in March, with a loss in the 75 yards to Kay Griffith, one of the Canadians Walsh had beaten at the Millrose Games. After one false start, a cautious Walsh got out slowly and never caught up to Griffith. That summer, Walsh bounced back to become the first woman to run the 100-yard dash in less than eleven seconds (10.8).
The national news media followed the exploits of the sensational new sprinter as she set world records, but Walsh kept her quiet, reserved demeanor. Coach Griffin told the press that “not one victory, not a single achievement on the track turns her head in the slightest. She goes to bed each night before ten, and she has never had a boyfriend.” Griffin did say that Walsh liked to go to the “talkies”—the new sound movies.27
Walsh claimed that she never drank, but that was against the law as she came of age in the 1920s. The Eighteenth Amendment (1919) prohibited the production and consumption of alcohol, and Ohio was at the center of the crusade to ban the “lawless contraband.” The Women’s Christian Temperance Union was founded in Cleveland in 1874, and the Anti-Saloon League was formed in Oberlin in 1893. Operating out of Cleveland, Wayne Wheeler was a leader of the Anti-Saloon League and the driving force behind the “dry laws” in Ohio and throughout the nation. Upon the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, evangelist Billy Sunday declared that “men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”28
Protestant America was behind Prohibition, and in their view, women doing sport was one way to steer the fairer sex away from the “evil elixirs.” Walsh often said that she did not hoist a beer because she was in training. According to the press, she was not interested in the nightlife anyway: “She plans to keep on running for at least four or five years in the time she can spare from her duties in a railroad office,” one Ohio newspaper reported. “She is in bed by ten, never later, and therefore finds no time for such entertainment as movies, bridge parties, or dancing.”29
Walsh’s Polish community energetically circumvented the law, however. The barkeep was a respected person in Catholic Polish American neighborhoods, and as one historian pointed out, “[I]mbibing was traditional [for Poles]. Peasants drank for recreation and hospitality, and in the new world the tavern continued its old function as a place of repose and sociability. . . . Roman Catholic teaching condemned drunkenness, not drinking per se.”30 After her Olympic career was over, Walsh was known to frequent the many pubs in the Slavic Village and worked at one for a time.
The Cleveland press anticipated that Walsh would lead the U.S. women’s team at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. The Plain Dealer reported that she was going to night school to pass her citizenship test. After her twenty-first birthday on April 3, 1932, it would take three months for Walsh to become officially naturalized, making her eligible for the Los Angeles Games in August.31 On March 6, 1930, the newspaper ran an article and a big cartoon of “Stella Walsh—Cleveland’s Spring Queen” kneeling at the starting line, surrounded by smaller drawings of her favorite things: a leggy pose sitting in an easy chair reading a “Wild West” story, a couple of apples (her favorite fruit), and standing in a dress at a filing cabinet next to the caption, “She is a clerk at the New York Central R.R. offices.” In the right corner of the cartoon is a newsboy hawking papers with the headline, “Stella Walsh Breaks World’s Record!” He remarks, “It’s a good thing that she changed her name—the newsies would have choked on the real one—Stella Walasiewicz.” The paper also published a photo of the “world’s two fastest humans,” Walsh and Ohio State University sprinter George Simpson, who had set a world record in the 100 yards in 1929. That mark was not recognized because he had used starting blocks.
On April 7, 1930, Walsh submitted her “Declaration of Intention” to the Naturalization Service to become an American citizen in 1932. The application read,
I will, before being admitted to citizenship, renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty. . . . I am not an ana
rchist; I am not a polygamist. . . . It is my intention in good faith to become a citizen of the United States of America and to reside permanently therein.
Walsh had no qualms about giving up her Polish citizenship. Although it is not clear whether she had legally changed her name from Stanisława Walasiewicz, she signed the document “Stella Walsh.”32
On April 17, Walsh left Union Station on the New York Central 5204 bound for the AAU National Indoor Championships in Boston. Probably because she was an employee of the NYCRR, the Plain Dealer was able to get a shot of her in a stylish knee-length black dress standing on the locomotive’s cowcatcher. Walsh’s rise to national sprinting prominence had prompted the railroad’s Cleveland office to give her a job in the billing department in 1929, and she began to run in track meets in the jersey of the NYCRR, one of the oldest and biggest railroad companies in the country. Shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt had taken over the railroad in 1867, building a vast rail network from the Northeast to the Midwest.
As Walsh’s fame grew in Cleveland, the railroad’s bosses used her for publicity. One took Walsh to the kitchen of his house to take pictures of her cooking—with flour on her face and all—to show that she not only worked and played sports, but also could carry out domestic activities. A woman who could outrun guys was an oddity, so Walsh became somewhat of a novelty act at company picnics and events. Other male employees were given a head start, but Walsh beat them anyway.
In 1930, the Cleveland press dubbed Walsh the “Twentieth-Century Flyer,” after the railroad’s most famous train—the “Twentieth-Century Limited”—a sleek, steel, gray steam locomotive that ran between New York and Chicago.33 The train was already well known before it was featured in the 1934 hit comedy of the same name starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. The entire movie was shot on the Twentieth Century traveling from Chicago to New York City, with the failing theater producer (Barrymore) trying desperately to seduce his former lover and ingénue-turned-Hollywood star (Lombard). Alas, after World War II, the passenger train and the Twentieth Century succumbed to the American auto industry. The NYCRR merged with Penn Railroad in 1968, and the new Penn Central Railroad went bankrupt two years later, at that time the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.
The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Page 5
