The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh

by Sheldon Anderson

  The 1932 Olympics contributed to the emerging culture of sport and leisure in Southern California, epitomized today by such sports as surfing and skateboarding. In a way, the cult of the suntanned, muscular, beach-body beautiful mirrored the Greek ideal of the human form. The region invented the term “laid-back lifestyle.”

  Southern California was the land of eternal summer, blue skies, sandy-white beaches, and unlimited opportunity. Hollywood films served up stunning starlets and suave leading men. Los Angeles had an exuberant, youthful feel, and sports and the “talkies” were a welcome diversion from the hardships of the Depression. With an eye on landing the Olympics, the city built the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1923. The head of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, William May Garland, was also a member of the Community Development Association, which built the stadium. It was the largest sports arena in the world at the time.

  In the 1920s, city planners began a beautification effort by planting tens of thousands of nonnative palm trees along the city’s broad boulevards. Los Angeles promoted itself as a tourist attraction, featuring the “cool Pacific” and “Hollywood nightlife,” in the “atmosphere of old Spain.”31 If, as some historians have argued, that avant-garde Weimar Berlin was the city for urbane sophisticates in the 1920s, a case could be made for Los Angeles as the high artists’ mecca in the 1930s, attracting such famous writers as William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the great German directors Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch.

  In 1927, the New Republic wrote, L.A. was “a civilization that will not need to hang its head when the Athens of Pericles is mentioned.”32 In the 1920s, it was the fastest-growing city in the world. Before the city gained its reputation as the car and freeway capital of the world, Los Angeles had a vast, 200-mile Los Angeles Railway (LARY) streetcar system. The beautiful “Huntington Standard” cars, often seen in Hollywood films, ferried people throughout the burgeoning metropolis. In the 1920s, the LARY carried some 250 million passengers annually. Sadly, in the 1930s, busses and then automobiles began to replace the streetcars, and by the 1950s most of them were no more.33

  The Olympians would not see the dark side of the sunny city. Orson Welles called it a “bright and guilty place.” Three years before the Olympics, the city was rocked by the sensational double murder of Hugh Plunkett and Ned Doheny, the son of oil magnate E. L. Doheny, at Ned’s fabulous Greystone mansion on the east end of Beverly Hills. The case was never solved, although it appeared to be a murder-suicide. After the Great Depression hit, 1,500 desperate Midwesterners were coming to the city each day. Los Angeles became “America’s suicide capital,” registering 750 in 1931.34 Some demonstrators picketed the state capitol in Sacramento, protesting the cost of the Olympics given the hardships that Californians were facing in these tough times.

  The 1932 Los Angeles Games were a turning point in the Olympic movement. For the first time, the Olympics was promoted as a business proposition and a way to showcase the booming metropolis. The oil and film industries were fueling rapid economic growth, and the population of the city more than doubled in the 1920s. By the end of the decade, Hollywood was making 80 percent of the world’s movies. Despite corruption surrounding the Los Angeles water, oil, and film industries the city had a progressive side: Southern California was in the forefront of the movement for the women’s vote and passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

  Olympic organizers marketed the event like never before, enlisting the support of Los Angeles business elites and signing on sponsors the likes of Coca-Cola. Los Angeles ushered in the Americanization of the Olympic Games as mass entertainment. The Germans were overwhelmed and wondered if they could put on such a show four years later in Berlin: “The beautiful coliseum . . . the crystal clear swimming pools, this organization! What contests, what performances, what hospitality! . . . In our opinion the advertising for the Olympic Games was simply unimaginable.”35 The Games were a huge financial success, in no small part because the main Olympic venue, the Los Angeles Coliseum, had already been built. The Los Angeles Olympics set a record for spectators and emerged with a profit of $1.5 million. For the first time, the Olympics were broadcast on radio, and newsreels sent coverage of the Games throughout the world.

  Hollywood went all out for the Olympics. Fox Studios prepared a luncheon for the women athletes; the Marx Brothers threw parties; and Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks hosted a reception for Olympic officials at their famous Beverly Hills mansion, where Charlie Chaplin and Pola Negri had frequently dined. Pickford and Fairbanks were avid Olympic fans; they had even accompanied the U.S. Olympic team to the 1924 Paris Games. Pickford told a radio audience that the women athletes would be an important part of the Los Angeles Olympic spectacle: “While their records have not yet equaled the men’s—notice, I say ‘not yet’—they have accomplished wonders in the short time in which they have been competing . . . our cheers will be their inspiration.”36 Pundits Grantland Rice and Will Rogers posed for photos with the athletes, and famed flyer Amelia Earhart attended several events. The Olympic Games had become a Hollywood commercial spectacle.

  The Olympic Organizing Committee knew it would be a financial hardship for teams to get to Los Angeles. The state of California offered Los Angeles a $1 million loan to put on the Games, and when the Depression hit, the committee offered the Olympic athletes reduced rates on ocean liners and trains coming to Los Angeles. Team members were charged two dollars a day for housing and food. The Olympic Organizing Committee picked up the rest. As U.S. high jumper Jean Shiley put it, in those difficult economic times, “I was just glad there was something on the table. I didn’t care what it was.”37

  Olympic organizers also decided to build the first Olympic Village to reduce the cost of housing. Still, only forty countries sent teams to Los Angeles, with 1,332 total competitors. The U.S. team was the largest, with Japan coming in second. Forty-six countries had sent teams to the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, where 2,883 athletes competed, and of those 277 were women. Stella Walsh was among the 126 female athletes in Los Angeles, but Poland’s team had only nine women, down from eleven at the Amsterdam Games.

  In the immediate postwar period, Poland had few resources to devote to its Olympic teams and had to rely on donations from the well-to-do. The IOC recognized the Polish Olympic Committee (POC) in 1919. Its first president was Prince Stefan Lubomirski, a member of one of the oldest and most venerated Polish aristocratic families. The Lubomirski family served the new Polish state in various capacities. Stefan’s cousin, Kazimierz Lubomirski, took over the presidency of the POC in 1921, and was Poland’s representative on the IOC until 1930. Ignacy Matuszewski, Halina Konopacka’s husband, was an IOC member from 1928 until the outbreak of World War II in 1939. The Olympic Organizing Committee for the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp extended an invitation to the POC, but engulfed in the desperate war with the Bolsheviks in 1920, many of Poland’s top athletes were in the army. Poland did not send a team to the first postwar Olympics.

  American Polonia helped subsidize the Polish Olympic team’s long trip to Los Angeles. On July 2, the contingent left Gdynia on the Polish liner Pułaski. The ship took eleven days to reach New York City, giving the Polish athletes little opportunity to work out. Many got seasick. The German team had the same problems, but their ship, the Bremen, made a faster Atlantic crossing. Stella Walsh and a large group of fellow Polish Americans, with Poland’s flags waving, were waiting for the Polish team in New York City. Still, a long cross-country train ride to Los Angeles awaited them.

  Poland’s top long distance runner, Janusz Kusociński, took a French ship that crossed the Atlantic in only five days, giving him more time in Los Angeles to train. He had already been in Los Angeles for five days when the Polish team arrived on July 19. In a photo of the Polish team’s arrival at Los Angeles’ Union Station, Walsh is front and center in Poland’s colors—in a white skirt and red blazer with the Polish White Eagle on the jacket breast.


  The Olympic Village, in Baldwin Hills, housed the male athletes. Some people thought it was a bad idea to put men from various nations together in one place, where fraternization might undermine their competitive nature. The official 1932 Olympic Report found that there were

  evidences of jealously guarded training secrets, and theories opposing the leveling touch that comes from intermingling. As self-discipline is fundamental in the development of an athlete, so it follows that nationalistic discipline is necessary in preserving the athletic perception of a country.38

  However, Baldwin Hills was an overall success and set a precedent for future Olympic Villages. “I’ll never forget the elation of living at the Olympic Village in ‘Baldwin Hills,’” recalled U.S. sprinter Frank Wycoff. “Being able to visit throughout the village trying to overcome the language differences with representatives of fifty-six nations was a rare delight.”39

  The stodgy old IOC members would have objected to coed dorms, so the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee found other accommodations for the women. The women stayed at the five-story Chapman Park Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, near famous Los Angeles hot spots like the Brown Derby restaurant and the Ambassador Hotel, where Hollywood stars came to be seen. The Ambassador opened in 1921, with the claim that it would turn Los Angeles into the “Paris of the West.” That boast was not far off. Pola Negri used to parade around the hotel grounds with her pet cheetah. Marilyn Monroe signed her first contract with the Blue Book Modeling Agency at the Ambassador, and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev stayed there during his groundbreaking visit to the United States in 1959.

  The Ambassador housed the famous 1,000-seat Cocoanut Grove nightclub, a favorite watering hole of such film stars as Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, Jean Harlow, and Clark Gable. The papier-mâché palm trees in the club had been used in Rudolph Valentino’s famous movie The Sheik. The Cocoanut Grove hosted many Academy Awards ceremonies and was the set for George Cukor’s acclaimed film A Star Is Born (1954). The assassination of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador in the summer of 1968 accelerated the decline of the iconic hotel, and it closed in 1989. It fell to the wrecking ball in 2005.40 The former arts editor of the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin, lamented its passing: “The Ambassador was the last outpost of nightly glamour in Los Angeles. I don’t think anything has come along to take its place.”41

  During the second week of the Olympics, the Ambassador threw a “Ball of All Nations” for the athletes. Olympic organizers also offered them a symphony concert at the Hollywood Bowl and a Los Angeles Angels baseball game at Wrigley Field in South Los Angeles. If the athletes wore their Olympic uniforms they could ride the streetcars for free. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most of them. U.S. hurdler Evelyne Hall recalled that a hairdresser on Western Avenue even gave the women free haircuts: “This was the first time I had ever been in a beauty shop and had my hair cut and my eyebrows tweezed, so it was quite an experience for me.”42 Grace Walker, the women’s chaperone at the Chapman, commented on the atmosphere at the hotel, saying, “It’s great. It’s splendid. It seems to be youth calling to youth over the barriers of language, custom, and rivalry.”43 Evidently Walsh and the other Polish women were on their best behavior. Walker said, “If I had as much trouble with all of the teams as I had with the Poles, I would have had little to do.”44

  The opening ceremonies of the Xth Olympiad began on July 30. Motorcades brought the male athletes from the Olympic Village and the women from the Chapman Park Hotel to the Los Angeles Coliseum. The weather that day was spectacular, and it stayed that way for the entire two weeks. The Polish team, including Stella Walsh, marched into the stadium dressed in dark blazers and white slacks or skirts. Los Angeles was a long way from the little Polish village of Wierzchownia and the congested feel of Cleveland’s Slavic Village. Walsh loved the weather, the city, and the hoopla surrounding the Games. After running at the Coliseum Walsh gushed, “I’ve never run on such a fast track as that at the stadium. And the climate’s been ideal. You take those two things—climate and good track—and they’re hard to beat.”45 Walsh was so enamored of Southern California that twenty years later she would leave her parents behind in Cleveland and move there. For a woman who loved sports, there was no better place.

  4

  Winning Olympic Gold and a Challenge from Missouri

  I have always felt Polish, I have fervently desired, in order that for me and my countrymen who emigrated to America [that] the Mazurek Da˛browski was played and the Polish flag was raised.

  —Stella Walsh, after winning the 100 meters at the Los Angeles Olympics

  Polish newspapers in the interwar period devoted scant space to sports, including the Olympic Games. The country’s sport scene was in its nascent stages. Soccer was by far the most important sport in Poland, but even that game got little coverage in the mainstream press. The Polish media in the summer of 1932 was not focused on the Olympics, but on the frightening news coming out of Germany, where Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party was on the rise. Hitler was a direct threat to the very existence of the Polish state. The Nazi platform explicitly called for revision of the Versailles Treaty and a rollback of Poland’s territorial gains along the German border. On July 31, the Nazis won 230 seats, the largest single bloc in the history of the Reichstag. Soviet leader Josef Stalin was worried too; on July 25, he signed a Nonaggression Pact with Warsaw, a seemingly impossible diplomatic development after Poland’s victory in the Polish-Soviet War twelve years earlier.

  The Polish press barely took notice of the Olympics until Janusz Kusociński’s victory in the 10,000 meters. Kurjer Warszawski [Warsaw Courier] wrote that Kusociński’s gold medal was a huge boost for Poland’s image: “Whoever knows the relationship of America to sports must understand that the victory of our runners in the competition for Olympic laurels is the best propaganda for Poland abroad.” Kusociński’s biggest rival, Finland’s legendary long-distance runner Paavo Nurmi, did not run at Los Angeles. Before the Olympics, the Germans had challenged Nurmi’s amateurism, and the day before the opening ceremonies the IOC determined that he was a professional and banned him. One wag wrote that the Olympics would now be “like Hamlet without the celebrated Dane in the cast.”1 After Kusociński’s win, the Germans and Finns questioned the Pole’s amateur status as well, charging that he had also taken money to run.2 That protest came to nothing.

  On August 1, Kurjer Polski [Polish Courier] listed the Polish medal hopefuls at Los Angeles, but Stanisława Walasiewicz, who was favored in the 100 meters, was curiously not mentioned. The women’s 100-meter preliminaries began that day. Just as Kusociński did not have to run against Nurmi, Walsh’s main rival was also not in Los Angeles. After suffering severe injuries from the plane crash a year earlier, defending 100-meter Olympic champion Betty Robinson was unable to compete. Walsh’s competition was expected to come from Californian Wilhelmina (Billie) von Bremen and Montreal native Hilde Strike, who, at 5-foot-1 and 105 pounds, was nearly a head shorter than Walsh. Strike’s father was a professional hockey player, and she was exposed to sports at an early age. Like Walsh, Strike loved to play softball. Strike was in top form, having tied the Olympic mark in the 100 meters in May.

  Walsh won her first two heats, the second in a world record time of 11.9 seconds. No other sprinter in the qualifiers came within three-tenths of a second of Walsh’s time, which is light-years in a sprint. Strike and von Bremen moved on to the final as well. Walsh was confident that the final on August 2 was just a formality. “I expect I can do even better tomorrow,” she said. “My cold bothered me a little at the first of the races today.”3

  Walsh had a distraction. The discus was scheduled for the same day as the 100-meter final. This was not her best event, but Polish women were dominant in early discus competitions (women’s shot put debuted at the 1948 London Olympics). Walsh was inspired by 1928 Olympic discus champion Halina Konopacka, who was the first P
ole to win a gold medal. Konopacka also finished first in the 1926 and 1930 Women’s World Games. Konopacka was not in Los Angeles, but Walsh’s teammate Jadwiga Wajs was another world-class discus thrower. Wajs was born two years after Walsh in Pabianickie, near Łódź. Her ancestors came from Westphalia. Their German name Weiss was of Jewish heritage. Wajs won the bronze medal at Los Angeles, gold at the 1934 Women’s World Games, and the silver medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. After the war, she took third at the 1946 European Championships in Oslo and fourth at the 1948 London Olympics.

  The favorite in the discus in Los Angeles was American Lillian Copeland, who had finished second to Konopacka at the Amsterdam Games. Ironically, Copeland, like Marie Sklodowska Curie, Pola Negri, Konopacka, and Walsh, had a Russian-Polish background. Copeland’s mother, Minnie Drasnin, was born and raised in the old Jewish-Polish section of Grodno (today Hrodna in Belarus). Lillian was born in New York City in 1904. After Lillian’s father died, Minnie married Abraham Copeland, and the family moved to Los Angeles, where Lillian attended Los Angeles High School and the University of Southern California. The Los Angeles Coliseum, where the Olympic track and field events were held, was in Copeland’s backyard.

  It was yet another warm and sunny day in Los Angeles, as Copeland set an Olympic record and won the event. Walsh finished a disappointing sixth, seven meters behind Copeland’s throw. Discus was not Walsh’s best event, and she might have been thinking about her loss in the 100 to Eleanor Egg a year earlier, when before that race Walsh had accidently plunked a spectator on the head with an errant toss and faced possible criminal charges.