The Waco biplane had mechanical problems and went down in a marshy field in Harvey, about ten miles south of downtown Chicago. Ironically, Harvey is where Robinson had gone to high school. A passerby pulled her from the wreckage and put her mangled body into his trunk. Robinson remembered that he drove her to an “old people’s home because he had a friend who was there who was an undertaker, and he thought I was dying.” The mortician realized that she was still breathing and took her to a local infirmary. Robinson had suffered a severe concussion and a broken arm and leg. Robinson’s nephew Jim Rochfort said that a doctor and nurse there saved her life: “At first they said she wouldn’t live, then they said she wouldn’t walk, and then they said she’d never run again.”8 Robinson speculated that “if I had not been in such good physical condition, I would not have lived through it.” A pin was inserted in her left leg, making it a little shorter than her right leg. She was out for the Los Angeles Olympics, and it looked like her running career was finished.9
Several years later, Robinson began to run again for exercise and decided to try out for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Her injuries still prevented her from a crouching start, so running a leg in a relay was her only chance. The 24-year-old made the Olympic team in the 4 × 100-meter relay, and she ran the third leg on the team that took gold, beating the favored Germans. Another ticker-tape parade awaited Robinson in New York City.
Eleanor Egg, Walsh’s other main competition in the sprints, was born two years before Walsh. Egg had sports in her genes. She came from a family of vaudeville acrobats known as the “Three Spauldings.” At an early age, her father engaged her in such stunts as balancing a ten-foot pole on his chin with little Eleanor sitting in a chair on top. Egg said, “I was billed all over the country as the smallest acrobat in the world.”10
Dr. L. Raymond, head of the Paterson, New Jersey, Recreation Department, formed the Paterson Girls’ Recreation Association (PGRA) in 1923, which helped launch Egg’s track and field career. She attended Paterson Eastside High School, where Larry Doby went to school. Doby was the first African American to play baseball in the American League, only a few months after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Although Doby endured the same cruel treatment and racist slurs as Robinson, he, like Walsh, has remained in relative obscurity.
Egg soon became one of the most recognized women athletes on the East Coast, running sprints, high jumping, and throwing the discus and shot put. In 1924, in Pittsburgh, Egg competed in her first of seven consecutive AAU outdoor championships, finishing second in the high jump. The Paterson Evening News raved that she was “one of the finest specimens of womanhood that any city in this meet can boast of.” The PGRA and the city galvanized support for the Paterson women to make the long trip to the 1925 AAU Championships in Pasadena, where Egg finished third in the 50-yard sprint and the high jump. The 4 × 100 relay team came in second. In 1926, she ran on a 4 × 100-yard relay team that set a world record and a year later established another world record with a Paterson relay team.11
Egg was the pride of Paterson. The city anticipated that she would qualify for the 1928 U.S. Olympic team, but in early 1928, Egg tore ankle ligaments and failed to qualify in the high jump or the 100 meters. Elta Cartwright lobbied to put Egg on the team, arguing that she would be a valuable member of the 4 × 100 relay team: “If I can do anything or say anything, Miss Egg will be a member of the team for I know she can help us win points if she gets to Amsterdam.” Egg was grateful but said that the injury was too serious for her to run in the Olympics.12
Egg was to Paterson what Walsh was to Cleveland: a much-needed morale booster for a city that was devastated by the Depression. Paterson was the center of the silk industry in the 1920s, but with the substitution of rayon for silk, manufacturing was already in decline. When the Depression hit, two-thirds of Paterson’s silk factories were shuttered.
Egg met Walsh for the first time at the 1930 AAU Championships in Dallas. Walsh beat Egg handily in the 100-yard dash and the broad jump. A year later, Egg was fully recovered from her ankle injury, and in September she registered the biggest win of her career, when, at the AAU Championships in Jersey City, she upset the heavily favored Walsh in the 100-yard dash. Egg downplayed the victory because she had run 0.2 seconds slower than Walsh’s world record. “Had I broken the record when I beat her,” Egg said years later, “I would have gotten excited about the race.”13 Furthermore, Walsh was shaken by a bizarre prerace incident in the discus competition. Walsh was in the outfield retrieving throws from the other competitors. On one toss back to the throwing circle, she hit a 28-year-old New Jersey man in the head, knocking him unconscious. He had to be taken to the hospital. Egg said that Walsh was not herself when the race began:
I don’t count that race like everybody else does. They all get mad at me, and they say I shouldn’t tell anybody. Well, I’m sorry, it’s the way it is. She had been in the discus throw just before our race. The discus slid out of her hand and she fractured a man’s skull, and for a while there was talk of her being brought up on charges.14
Walsh was arrested but later released. The man lived.15
The city of Paterson celebrated their young star. One of Egg’s trainers compared her importance to the city to what famous football coach Knute Rockne meant to Notre Dame and Babe Ruth to Major League Baseball. The city leaders held a dinner in her honor and commissioned local sculptor Gaetano Federici to forge a bronze plaque of Egg to be hung in the city’s new 10,000-seat stadium. Mayor John V. Hinchliffe said that the bas relief was “not merely an honor to Paterson’s outstanding daughter . . . [but she] exemplifies for Paterson in the highest and most ennobling degree the dynamic spirit of American youth.”16
The 1931 AAU Championships was the last time Egg ran against Walsh. The ankle injury flared up again before the 1932 U.S. Olympic Trials, and once again she failed to qualify. It is a cruel reality that the Olympic Games come only every four years, and many great athletes, for one reason or another, miss their small window to compete. Later in 1932, the same injury caused Egg to bow out of the first-ever meet at Paterson’s new Hinchliffe Stadium, but she was there for the dedication of her plaque. Dr. Thomas E. Manly, head of the Paterson Civic Pride Commemorative Committee, declared it was “fitting that such a marvelous victory [over Walsh], which has gained nationwide praise not only for Miss Egg, but for Paterson as well, should be honored.”17
Egg’s injury made Walsh a shoo-in to qualify for the U.S. Olympic team, along with the brash young Didrikson. Didrikson entered eight of the ten events at the Olympic Trials, winning five, although the Olympics had only five events on the women’s program. Before the Olympics began, Didrikson boasted, “I’m going to win the high jump Sunday and set a world’s record. I don’t know who my chief opponents are and anyway, it wouldn’t make any difference.” Evelyne Hall, who was Didrikson’s main competition in the 80-meter hurdles, called her “selfish, loud, and annoying.”18 With Walsh running the sprints and throwing the discus, and Didrikson running the hurdles, high jumping, and throwing the javelin, the U.S. women were the favorites to dominate the track and field events.
The Olympic bid that went to Los Angeles in 1923 was a controversial choice. Most Olympic teams came from Europe, and the Atlantic crossing and 3,000-mile train ride to California would be long and costly. On the way to the Los Angeles Games, one member of the German Olympic team was astounded to find out that when their train stopped in Kansas City, they were only halfway across the country. The last Olympic Games in the United States had taken place in St. Louis in 1904, and few foreign athletes came. Of the 687 competitors, 525 were American and 41 Canadian. With Los Angeles in the throes of the Great Depression in 1932, many of those in Southern California also thought that the Olympics were an unaffordable luxury. President Herbert Hoover had done little to revive the economy, and by the end of his term, one in four American workers was unemployed. He did not show up for the O
lympics, sending the vice president, Charles Curtis, instead.
The Los Angeles Olympic organizers argued that the Games would be an economic and psychological boost to the depressed region. The city’s power brokers saw the Olympics as an opportunity to put people to work and showcase a modern American metropolis and its leisurely, sun-drenched Southern California lifestyle. Businessmen, corporate lawyers, and bankers, among other private interests, enthusiastically backed the Games. Olympic organizers consciously put an American stamp of commercialism on the Games. The head of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, William May Garland, promised that the region would get $10 million in free publicity. Hollywood movie stars were enlisted to promote the Games, and newspapers, radio, and movie newsreels brought the spectacle to more people than ever before.
Clevelanders eagerly awaited Walsh’s appearance at the Olympics, but the dire economic situation in the country in 1932 had a direct impact on her decision not to run for the United States. The stock market crash of October 1929 foreshadowed the most serious economic crisis in the nation’s history. By mid-November, the Dow had lost more than a third of its value, and by the spring of 1930, 4 million Americans were out of work. The Depression gutted industrial output throughout the Great Lakes region; in 1933, half of Cleveland’s industrial workforce was sidelined. A third of American families depended solely on income from women.
Demand for the NYCRR’s freight trains collapsed, and the railroad was forced to downsize. Walsh’s life took an unexpected turn in early July, when the NYCRR furloughed her indefinitely from her clerk’s job at the passenger agent’s office. The entire department was let go. Any job was a blessing in those days, especially for women; the 1933 Federal Economy Act even prohibited a husband and wife from both holding civil service jobs. Many state and local governments followed suit, as did many private businesses.
Walsh’s dismissal was a devastating blow to the Walasiewicz family, which was dependent on her wages. Nonetheless, on July 8, the Plain Dealer reported that Walsh would receive her citizenship papers the next day, even though she had lost her job: “Miss Walsh stated definitely last night that she would go through with her naturalization.”19
Polish sports authorities pounced on the opportunity to enlist their favorite daughter to run for Poland. After all, she was a citizen of Poland after the collapse of the Russian Empire at the end of World War I. On July 8, Walsh was leaving her house for the U.S. Federal Building to take her oath of citizenship when a telegram arrived from the Polish Consulate in New York, offering her a job and an education scholarship to study in Warsaw if she would join the Polish Olympic team in Los Angeles.
Clevelanders knew the importance of employment in those tough times and were reluctant to fault Walsh if she decided to run for Poland. The press was more critical of the fact that American authorities did not come up with a means to keep her on the U.S. squad. “Poland, like most other European nations,” wrote the Plain Dealer on July 9, “‘does something’ for its athletes who need financial help. America does not. . . . No one can criticize her if she elects to run for her native land.” The newspaper even pointed to gender discrimination as the reason for Walsh’s lack of support:
Any young man one-quarter as capable in athletics would have no difficulty at all financing a college career with attendance at the Olympics provided as an essential part of his academic advancement. But such opportunities are not for the girls. At women’s colleges athletics are “kept in their place” in practice, as well as theory.20
In defining the “amateur athlete,” Coubertin and his cronies overlooked the way these college scholarships compromised the idea. During the Cold War, Western countries ignored these stipends, while complaining about the subsidies that Soviet-bloc governments gave their athletes.
Coubertin had envisioned an Olympics of individual athletes competing without any national designation or national teams, and in the first few Olympic Games athletes did not have an official affiliation. The identification of athletes with their country was just too strong, and by 1908, athletes participating in the London Olympics were part of a national team and countries kept track of their ranking on the medals table. French author Charles Maurras was sitting with Coubertin at the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, when Greek fans went wild about their kinsman’s win in the marathon. Maurras commented sarcastically, “I see your internationalism does not kill national spirit—it strengthens it.”21
Walsh now had to choose between putting on the uniform of the Stars and Stripes or the Polish Eagle. Immigrant communities in the United States have always had divided loyalties between their country of origin and their adopted homeland. Walsh was torn: “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?”22
Coach Griffin tried to convince Walsh to sign the citizenship papers, but she said that finding work would be the deciding factor and that she was “ready to run for the country which presents the most attractive opportunity.”23 Walsh had taken night classes in physical education administration, so Cleveland mayor Ray T. Miller offered her a job in the Cleveland Recreation Department if she became a naturalized U.S. citizen. But that was a job Walsh could not take; the IOC prohibited athletes from making money in any career related to sports. The chairman of the women’s AAU, Fred L. Steers, telegraphed Walsh that she would be ineligible for the Olympics if she took the position. Given the circumstances, the NYCRR would have given her job back, but seniority rules prevented the company from doing so.
Walsh’s decision hung on finances more than her loyalty to Cleveland, the United States, or Poland. One way or the other, she would run at the Olympics. On July 12, Walsh took the offer from the Polish Consulate. Calling it the “most important decision in my life,” she joined the Polish Olympic team.24 The Washington Post wrote the next day that “Uncle Sam’s talented adopted niece, Stella Walsh, of the cinder track, went back to the home folks today and henceforth will do any Olympic record-breaking for the glory of her native Poland.” The newspaper exaggerated Walsh’s prospects, predicting that there was “virtual certainty of victory in the discus, 100-meter dash, and 400-meter relay.”25
“I am going to run for Poland,” Walsh told the Plain Dealer. “But I will always have a warm spot in my heart for Cleveland. I sure do hate to leave this place.” She expressed gratitude for the support she had received from the Polish Falcons to become an international star: “I am running for Poland because I am a Pole. Polish people, both in this country and in my native land, were the first to give me help to go to big meets, and for them I will compete again.”26 Walsh pointed out that her amateur status circumscribed her work prospects: “The way it looks to me I can’t have any kind of job because I’m in athletics.”27 Walsh also mentioned that she had been disappointed to be left off the U.S. Olympic team in 1928, although she had only been an alternate in the 4 × 100 relay and at the time was too young to be naturalized.28
The press called for the U.S. government to match Poland’s offer. On July 12, 1932, the Plain Dealer’s James Doyle appealed to Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt to give Walsh her own New Deal: “Hey there, Mr. Roosevelt! . . . Forget about the Forgotten Man for a few minutes, will you, and give a thought to the Forgotten Woman. . . . Dig up a job, I mean, for Stella Walsh so she can put on the steam for your country and mine in these Olympics.” In an article titled “Any Pork in the Barrel for Olympic Fund, Mr. Garner?” conservative Chicago Tribune journalist Westbrook Pegler appealed to Texas congressman John Nance Garner—who Pegler charged was “very liberal with the public money” anyway—to subsidize the U.S. Olympic team. Pegler wrote that the unemployed Walsh had gone “shopping for a country”: “Miss Walsh, who is Polish and robust, was on the point of becoming a bread-and-butter American, which is something on the order of the Chinese rice Christian.” He suggested that “
but for some jowl and greens,” Walsh would be running for the United States. “The United States was outbid,” he lamented, “and by a new or newly reorganized and struggling nation.” He pointed out that high school football players were sometimes lured by monetary incentives to attend college and that the old English amateur tradition had been repeatedly subverted anyway.29
The Los Angeles Times, in its July 13, 1932, edition, called for Walsh to be barred from the Games for taking payment from the Polish government to run for Poland: “If the International Athletic Federation does not take some drastic action against Miss Walsh or her advisers for the act of brazen professionalism it means the death of the Olympic Games in years to come.” The issue of what constituted an amateur athlete confounded the IOC for decades until professionals were allowed to compete at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.
The IOC’s byzantine rules prevented Stella Walsh from taking a job in Cleveland related to sports, so Walsh joined the Polish Olympic team in Los Angeles. That momentous decision changed her life. Now Walsh was committed to not only competing for Poland, but also studying in Warsaw. What Walsh knew of her place of birth came from her parents, the Polish community in Cleveland, and a short trip to Europe. Poland was, for her, a strange and foreign place. Griffin was hurt by the loss of his once-in-a-lifetime athlete but graciously wished her the best. “I believe Stella is making a very serious mistake in not representing the United States in the Olympics,” he told the Plain Dealer, “but I trust for her sake that everything will work out ok.”30
For a young woman from an old industrial city, and one who loved the movies and sports, Walsh was enthralled with the ethos of Los Angeles. On the surface, the City of Angels seemed the perfect place to host a sporting event that had been inspired, in part, by the ancient Greeks’ cult of the body. Coubertin was a big enthusiast of the warm place. After devastating floods in Paris in 1923, which put the 1924 Olympics in jeopardy, he had even asked Los Angeles if the city would host the Games if Paris could not. Los Angeles was the only city to bid for the 1932 Olympic Games, and Coubertin wholeheartedly endorsed it.
The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Page 7
