The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh

by Sheldon Anderson

  In Boston, Walsh added to her growing national reputation by winning the 220 yards and narrowly beating Babe Didrikson in the broad jump. Walsh confirmed her bona fide status as an international track star at the Women’s World Games in Prague in September 1930. This was the third of Alice Milliat’s international women’s athletic track and field meets. The last one was held in London in 1934. In spite of Milliat’s efforts to legitimize women’s track and field, in 1929, the IOC voted to take women’s athletics off the program of the 1932 Los Angeles Games. Pressure from the AAU and the American representative from the IAAF forced the IOC to rescind the edict. Nonetheless, the IOC told the AAU not to send a team to the Prague Games, but the AAU allowed Walsh to accept an invitation to run for Poland. Her departure was delayed for a time because there was some question that if she ran for Poland in Prague she would be ineligible to compete for the U.S. team at the 1932 Olympics. The Women’s World Games was not an IOC-sanctioned meet, however, so Walsh got the go-ahead to run for Poland. Walsh completely dominated the Prague Games, winning gold medals in the 60, 100, and 200 meters, and a bronze in the 4 × 100 relay. She was named the “World’s Greatest Woman Athlete.”

  That fall Walsh helped the Polish national women’s track and field team soundly beat Japan in a dual meet in Warsaw. The featured matchup was Walsh against Japan’s star Hitomi Kinue. Kinue was a graduate of Tokyo’s Women’s College of Physical Education, and like Walsh, she was an outstanding all-around athlete. She dominated the 1926 Japanese National Track and Field Championships and was sent to the 1926 Women’s Olympics in Gothenberg, Sweden, as Japan’s only entrant. The nineteen-year-old was the first woman to represent her country in an international meet.

  Kinue took the Trans-Siberian Railroad on her way to St. Petersburg, where she got on a ship to Sweden. Despite the long and arduous two-week trip, she was a sensation in Gothenburg, winning the running broad jump, the standing broad jump, a silver medal in the discus, and a bronze in the 100 meters. Halina Konopacka won the discus and came in third in the two-handed shot put, but Kinue won more medals than any other competitor and was named the Women’s Olympics’ “outstanding athlete.”

  Stella Walsh at the 1930 Women’s World Games in Prague, wearing the uniform of the New York Central Railroad, although she ran for the Polish team. Kurier Codzienny, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe [National Digital Archive].

  Kinue led the Japanese women to the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. After finishing a disappointing fourth in the semifinals of the 100 meters, she decided to try the 800 meters, a distance she had never run. Japanese spectators in the stadium cried for joy when their countrywoman took home the silver medal, the first ever for a Japanese woman.

  Walsh met Kinue for the first time at the Women’s World Games in Prague in 1930. Kinue finished third in the 60 meters at Prague. After the meet, the Japanese women toured Poland, Germany, France, and Belgium. Running for Poland against the Japanese team in Warsaw, Walsh broke her own world record in the 100 meters, again beating Kinue with ease in that race and in the 200 meters. The Plain Dealer tagline put Walsh’s victories in typical indelicate fashion: “Stella Wins Two Races from Japs.”

  After the tour, Kinue fell seriously ill on the ship from France to Japan. Her family was shocked at her wan appearance as she disembarked in Kobe. Hitue Kinue, Japan’s first great female athlete, died of respiratory failure on August 2, 1931. She was only twenty-four years old. Years later, Walsh reflected on her friend and rival:

  I’ll never forget her. At the awards dinner [in Prague] she made a speech, predicted I would be the new Olympic champion two years later, and that I would break the world’s record in the games. Then she presented me with enough spikes for a pair of track shoes. I had a special pair of shoes made with those spikes and used them for the first time at Los Angeles when I won the 100-meter dash.34

  That fall Walsh established another world record in the 60-meter dash. By that time she was a national hero in Poland. Przegląd Sportowy named Walsh Poland’s most popular sportsperson. The Polish government was so proud of its native daughter that it awarded her the prestigious Silver Cross of Merit, an unprecedented honor for a Polish athlete. The Plain Dealer wrote that “[the medal] came all the way across the Atlantic to repose yesterday on the running jersey of Stella Walsh, Cleveland’s world champion sprinter.”

  Walsh beats Japanese sprinter Hitomi Kinue in the 100 meters in Warsaw, 1930. Kurier Codzienny, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe [National Digital Archive].

  Walsh left Europe in early October. The NYCRR AA gave her a resounding reception when she arrived in New York. A big crowd of fans greeted her at Union Terminal in Cleveland, and Mayor Edward A. Weigand organized a banquet and dance in her honor. Another throng cheered Walsh at City Hall, although many were there queuing up to register for park improvement jobs, highly sought-after positions in the economically strapped city.

  In 1930, the IOC put women’s track and field on the Olympic program for good, just as Walsh was emerging as the world’s top woman sprinter. She was a shoo-in to win a place on the 1932 U.S. Olympic team.

  3

  Stanisława Walasiewicz Runs for Poland

  I’m not trying to duck the United States, but I’ve got myself to look out for. If a big company like the NYCRR can’t give me a job, where can I get one?

  —Stella Walsh, on her decision to run for Poland at the Los Angeles Olympics

  Workers worldwide were in desperate straits after the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. The economic crisis hit the northern U.S. industrial cities particularly hard. By 1933, nearly a third of Cleveland’s labor force and half of the city’s industrial workers were out of work. The Newburgh steel mill was in trouble, and with Julian Walasiewicz relegated to part-time work, he could not support his wife and three daughters.

  Walsh was fortunate to have a clerking job with the NYCRR, and her paycheck was a crucial source of income for the Walasiewicz family. Walsh could not capitalize on her greatest talent, however. She could not play sports for money and remain eligible for the Olympics. Coubertin not only wanted to keep women out of the Olympic Games, but also he was determined to keep professional athletes out of it too. Coubertin was heavily influenced by the amateur tradition of English sports, which favored those who had the wherewithal to play just for fun, and to finance their own training and travel to competitions. Amateur sport was the purview of the rich.

  Britain’s Harold Abrahams won the 100 meters at the Paris Games in 1924. Although the movie Chariots of Fire (1981) plays up Abrahams’s confrontation with anti-Semitism among England’s Oxbridge elites, Abrahams’s hiring of a “professional” running coach was, in fact, a bigger issue. In 1930, the AAU briefly barred Babe Didrikson from competition because a photo appeared of her running the hurdles in a car advertisement. Didrikson denied knowing anything about it and was exonerated.

  The most famous case of a breach in the Olympic amateur code involved Native American Jim Thorpe. In June 1912, Thorpe and the U.S. Olympic team boarded the SS Finland in New York, bound for the Stockholm Olympics, at the same time one-year-old Stanisława Walasiewicz and her young mother Weronica were on a ship in the Atlantic headed in the other direction. Like Walsh, Thorpe was not a U.S. citizen. He was a ward of the federal government (Native Americans became citizens in 1924).

  Thorpe had few ways to make a living except through sports. Pop Warner, Thorpe’s famous football coach at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, observed that “unfortunately, amateur athletics is not for the poor and the friendless.”1 Thorpe scrounged enough money to compete in Stockholm, where he won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon. He was the most famous Olympic athlete in the United States.

  Soon after the Stockholm Games, the IOC discovered Thorpe had taken money for playing baseball in the Carolina League and promptly stripped the athlete’s medals and struck his name from the Olympic record book,
the first time that had ever happened. In 1982, twenty-nine years after Thorpe’s death, the IOC overturned the decision and recognized his victories. A year later, IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch presented facsimiles of the gold medals to two of Thorpe’s children.

  Walsh had to turn down any monies she might have been offered to run track meets or play basketball and softball, although one of her softball coaches admitted to the Plain Dealer in 1981, that she “would try to slip them something whenever possible.” There were no AAU or Olympic rules, however, barring athletes from working for a company and playing on its sports teams. Funds from the NYCRR AA and the Polish Falcons enabled Walsh to compete in meets throughout North America and Europe. Without her job at the NYCRR, Walsh’s opportunities to run would have been limited, and her family would have struggled to make ends meet.

  Walsh also formed her own basketball team, dubbed the “Stella Walsh Flyers.” Walsh was the team’s leading scorer, although three to four points was often her total in low-scoring games that barely made it into double figures. She even had to be careful not to take any money for playing in one game of a doubleheader if the other game on the bill included a professional team.

  Walsh’s popularity in Cleveland was at its zenith in the early 1930s. With the Cleveland Indians mired in the middle of the American League baseball standings, Walsh was a source of pride for the depressed city. Clevelanders could follow her sports career in the Plain Dealer, but reporters did not have much to write about her life off the track. There was no romantic connection in her life. She was a frequent subject of sports columnist James Doyle, who wrote that Stella Walsh “stays at home nights, is a good time gal only when she’s stepping out against the clocker’s watch.”2 After work, Walsh spent much of her time on the track, going to the movies, and driving around in her car. She enjoyed the few luxuries that her job afforded her and had no qualms about flaunting them. In the winter, she wore huge, ostentatious fur coats that were in vogue.

  Walsh loved the celebrity of being a star athlete, but she did not seem happy. According to the March 12, 1930, installment of Chicago’s Daily Times, she “smiled rarely and spoke only when spoken to, but in her complete self-possession there was no hint of the sullen.” Aside from her own personal issues, in those days women athletes were targets of societal scorn; Walsh’s success on the track did not inoculate her against ridicule of her muscular looks. Some people in her Polish community called her “Bull Montana,” a cruel comparison to a swarthy professional wrestler and bit-part actor. Montana (Luigi Montagna) played such characters as the Ape Man in The Lost World (1925) and Bullfrog Kraus in the Buster Keaton short The Palooka from Paducah (1935). “Stella the fella” was another insult tossed about in the neighborhood.

  Barred from taking money for track, basketball, or softball, Walsh decided to capitalize on her notoriety by entering a local popularity contest. In the summer of 1931, the city ran a “Queen of Cleveland” competition as part of the festivities commemorating the 135th anniversary of the founding of the city and the completion of the new 80,000-seat Municipal Stadium on Lake Erie. Walsh seemed an unlikely candidate for this beauty contest. One Plain Dealer reporter commented that “girls with lots of dimples and personality usually become queens in this sort of thing.” But Walsh was after the prizes that went with the title, including a new car: “After all of the running I’ve done,” she told the Plain Dealer, “I haven’t anything to show for it. Just some cups and medals lying around the house. They don’t get me anything. I want that car.” Walsh hit the pavement and worked tirelessly to garner votes. She admitted that she “had never broke training so badly before.”3 With overwhelming support from the Polish community, she polled 327,400 votes, 126,500 more than second-place finisher Anna Griffith. Walsh got her car. Now she set her sights on competing at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1932.

  Walsh decided not to run on the indoor circuit that winter. Instead, she began training for the U.S. Women’s Olympic Trials, scheduled for July in Evanston, Illinois. She worked on four events: the 100 meters, the 80-meter hurdles, the discus, and the broad jump. In a practice throw, she set the U.S. discus record, making her a favorite to qualify for that event and the 100 meters. On June 5, Walsh ran in the Northeast Ohio Association Track and Field Meet in Cleveland, winning the discus and the 50 and 100 meters. She was in top form for the trials. Fifteen-year-old Cleveland sprinter Jesse Owens was going to the Olympic tryouts too, but he would not qualify.

  Walsh’s main competition in the sprints at the trials was expected to come from Betty Robinson of Riverdale, Illinois, Eleanor Egg from Paterson, New Jersey, and Babe Didrikson from Port Arthur, Texas. Robinson was four months younger than Walsh, and like Walsh she played all sports. Legend has it that a track coach from her Harvey, Illinois, high school saw her dashing to catch an Illinois Central train, and her running career began. “I had no idea that women even ran then,” she recalled later. “I grew up a hick. That is when I found out that they actually had track meets for women.”4

  Three days a week, Robinson made the long train and bus ride from Harvey to work out at the Illinois Women’s Athletic Club on Chicago’s North Side. In 1928, competing in only her second track meet, she broke the world record in the 100 meters at Soldier Field in Chicago, although it was wind-aided and went unrecognized. Many of these reports of records set were premature, because the meets were not always officially sanctioned, and the AAU and the IOC did not recognize the records. The club paid Robinson’s way to the U.S. Olympic Trials in Newark in July, to try to qualify for the 100 meters at the Amsterdam Olympics. Walsh was there too but did not make it out of her semifinal. Robinson won her semifinal heat, but twenty-year-old Eureka, California, native Elta Cartwright beat her in the final. Both Robinson and Cartwright qualified for the team.

  “Cinder-Elta,” as the press nicknamed Cartwright, was a known entity in track circles. She won her first AAU Championship in Pasadena, California, in 1925, beating Egg in the 50-yard dash. Cartwright won three straight AAU titles in the 50 yards and added the 100-yard championship in 1927, so her win at the Olympic Trials in Newark came as no surprise. What happened in Amsterdam was. Cartwright got seasick on the ship to Amsterdam, never found her form, and did not make it to the 100-meter final. She was left off the relay team as well. Later she hinted that the coach had favored the athletes from the East Coast. The U.S. relay team finished second to the Canadians. Nonetheless, when Cartwright returned home, Eureka greeted her with a big parade. That was it for Cartwright on the cinders; she retired from running, became a schoolteacher, and got married in 1932. She and her husband honeymooned in Los Angeles, where they watched Stella Walsh run in the Olympics.

  The Amsterdam Olympics was Robinson’s fourth track meet. She was only sixteen. Canadian world record holder Myrtle Cook was the favorite in the final of the 100 meters, but she had two false starts. Cook was devastated and fell sobbing onto the infield grass. Robinson nipped Cook’s teammate Bobbie Rosenfeld to win the first U.S. women’s gold medal in Olympic history. Chicago Tribune journalist William L. Shirer, soon to be famous for his reporting from Nazi Germany, wrote that an “unheralded pretty, blue-eyed, blond young woman from Chicago, Elizabeth Robinson, became the darling of the spectators when she flew down the cinder path, her golden locks flying, to win . . . in world record time.” The president of the American Olympic Committee, Major General Douglas MacArthur, gushed that her “sparkling combination of speed and grace . . . might have rivaled even Artemis herself.”5 MacArthur was taken with Robinson and asked her to join him at various functions for the rest of the Games. Years later, Robinson recalled the moments after her victory: “I started crying like a baby. . . . Just talking about the awards ceremony gives me duck bumps when I think of my standing in the middle of the stadium with all these people there and the Star-Spangled Banner playing because I had just won the hundred meters.”6 Robinson and the other gold medal Olympians received a ticker-tape parade do
wn Broadway in New York City.

  For several years after the Amsterdam Olympics, Robinson was one of the top sprinters in the United States. She won both the 50- and 100-yard dashes at the 1929 AAU Championships in Chicago. In a much-anticipated final in the 100 yards at the 1930 AAU Championships in Dallas, Walsh beat Robinson by a nose, and then Walsh won the 220 handily. Robinson’s Illinois Women’s Athletic Club wanted a rematch and finally got one on February 23, 1931. The press called it a “match race”—like two horses—although there was a third starter. Robinson won that race, setting up a dual with Walsh for a berth on the 1932 U.S. Olympic team.

  That summer Robinson trained at Northwestern University to prepare for the AAU Championships in Jersey City. July 28, 1931, was a steamy, hot Sunday, but Robinson worked out anyway. Afterward Robinson’s coaches would not let her cool down in the swimming pool for fear that she would exercise the wrong muscles, which could affect her speed on the track. That absurd notion almost cost Robinson her life, as she recalled later:

  The day of the accident . . . I was training. It was so hot, and we weren’t allowed to swim as runners. I decided to ask my cousin, who was part-owner of a plane, to take me up. That’s why I went up, to cool off. I was hoping to make the 1932 Olympic team. But I made the mistake of flying. I was destined to go to Los Angeles and would be expected to win.7