German heavyweight boxer Max Schmeling was the only male athlete to rival Walsh’s number of transatlantic voyages. He became the darling of the Nazis after beating Joe Louis in 1936, but Schmeling made most of his money fighting in the United States with a Jewish trainer and Jewish promoter. Schmeling did not care who was handling him as long as he cashed in on his fights. The cover of the March 1929 German boxing magazine Boxwoche had a drawing of Schmeling standing on top of a U.S. silver dollar.
Walsh was excited about the opportunity to study in Poland. A Los Angeles Times reporter detected a newfound confidence in Walsh from the time she had arrived at the Olympics:
Then, she resembled a big, scared, harassed, bewildered jackrabbit, scurrying for cover. She was afraid to open her mouth, mistrustful of everyone. Yesterday, she was beaming. . . . “Going to be a reporter, Stella?” “Ya—ah,” she replied. “I’ve had to meet so many of ’em that I kind of took an interest in their work. Maybe my experience in being interviewed will help me to interview.”35
In October 1932, Stella Walsh and the Polish Olympic team arrived in the Polish port of Gdynia, not far from the contested city of Danzig (Gdańsk in Polish). Danzig was the port at the northern end of the “Polish Corridor,” a swath of German territory the Versailles Treaty awarded to Poland for “free and secure access to the sea,” as Woodrow Wilson put it in the thirteenth of his Fourteen Points. The Versailles Treaty did not give Danzig—a predominantly German city—to the new Polish state. It was administered by the League of Nations, and Warsaw feared that the league would eventually return the city to Germany. Poland decided to build an alternative port of its own twenty miles north of Danzig, at Gdynia, with Poland maintaining complete control. Gdynia and neighboring Oksywie had a population of 200 in 1914, but this number had grown to 120,000 by 1939. By that time, Gdynia handled more tonnage than any other Baltic port, with some fifty oceangoing companies sailing out of the harbor. The biggest was the Gdynia-Ameryka Line, which had ten liners by 1939. Walsh sailed on all four flagships, named for Poland’s greatest heroes: the Kościuszko, the Pułaski, the Batory, and the Piłsudski. Germany’s naval bombardment of Westerplatte, near Gdynia and Danzig, and the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, marked the beginning of World War II. By that time, Walsh was safely back in Cleveland.
Walsh anticipated that she would be a major celebrity in Poland. After all, she and 1928 Olympic discus gold medalist Halina Konopacka were the most famous female athletes in Poland. Walsh was soon disappointed at the lack of attention. Soccer and other men’s sports dominated the media, and Walsh went unrecognized in public. She had already been to Poland several times, but as an athlete traveling with a visiting team she had received first-class treatment. Now she was just a poor student living in Warsaw. She was surprised at the poverty of the Polish people. The Depression was hard on the country, especially given the monumental task of building the new Polish state after World War I. The real value of the economy fell by 25 percent from 1929 to 1933 (in contrast, Britain’s economy contracted by 5 percent). By the mid-1930s, 450,000 Poles were out of work. Ethnic divisions exacerbated the dire economic situation. The population was one-third Jewish, Ukrainian, German, and Lithuanian. Poland’s politics were hopelessly divided. Poland’s treatment of these minorities in the interwar period was hardly exemplary, especially after Piłsudski died in 1935.
Poland’s economic problems were complicated by its precarious diplomatic situation. The country had potential enemies on all sides. The Soviet Union, Lithuania, and Germany lost territory to Poland after World War I, and the countries remained estranged from Poland throughout the interwar period. After the surprise victory over the Red Army in 1920, Poland annexed the former Russian territories of Belarus and part of Ukraine in the Treaty of Riga (1921). Lithuania would not accept Poland’s incorporation of Vilnius, a Polish city surrounded by a Lithuanian-populated countryside. Germans bitterly resented the cession of former German territories to Poland, cutting off East Prussia from Germany proper. Czechoslovakia had nabbed a portion of the predominantly Polish city of Czieszyn (Tešín in Czech) in 1920, souring relations between those two countries as well. The Piłsudski regime brought a semblance of political and economic stability to Poland in the late 1920s, but the Depression brought renewed domestic and international troubles. The modest gains the economy had made in the 1920s were rolled back.
Shortly after Walsh arrived in Poland, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Five years earlier, a Nazi chancellorship had seemed impossible. In the 1928 Reichstag elections, Hitler’s Nazi Party received a paltry 2.6 percent of the vote. The Depression sent voters to the Nazis in droves. By the fall of 1930, Hitler’s share of the vote had increased to 18.3 percent, reaching a high of 37.4 percent in July 1932. German conservatives handed Hitler the chancellorship in January 1933, hoping to co-opt him in a right-wing assault on the German left. Hitler had other ideas and destroyed the Weimar Republic altogether. In October, he signaled a new direction in foreign policy by leaving the League of Nations.
Interwar Poland. Map by Gracia Lindberg.
Hitler’s denunciation of the Versailles Treaty was a direct threat to Poland. His demand for the “unification of all Germans” was an unmistakable reference to the 1 million Germans in Poland. Nothing united Germans more than Hitler’s call for the return of Danzig and the Polish Corridor. “So long as this treaty stands there can be no resurrection of the German people,” Hitler railed. “The treaty was made in order to bring 20 million Germans to their deaths and to ruin the German nation.”36 Piłsudski was so alarmed by Hitler’s chancellorship that he approached France for a preventive war against Germany. With the carnage of World War I still fresh in French minds, and without support from London, Paris was in no mood to join Warsaw in a war against Germany. Germany was in no shape to fight either, and in a defensive move of his own, Hitler signed a nonaggression pact with Poland in 1934. He could tear up that piece of paper later.
Walsh had more trouble adjusting to the economic hardships of life in Poland than any culture shock. “It’s hard to get along in Europe once one has been brought up in the American standard of living,” she said.37 The Walasiewicz family was struggling to make ends meet in the early 1930s, but Walsh was surprised by the meager living standards for a student in Poland. She missed the comforts of home. She had to tell the cooks at Warsaw University how to make the American food and drink she loved, for instance, toast and orange juice for breakfast. Although she knew spoken Polish, she found taking classes in the language the “worst part” of her studies.38
The cinder track had always been a place for Walsh to forget about any personal troubles. Shortly after her arrival in Warsaw, she set the Polish record in the 800 meters, a new distance for her and one that was no longer on the Olympic program for women. The Plain Dealer kept track of her exploits in Poland: “And here’s Stella Walsh of Cleveland setting a new fast-foot record at Warsaw. It’s useless,” the paper quipped, “for her to try to hide her identity by calling herself Walasiewicz,” which is, of course, how she was known in Poland.39
The refuge of the track was denied to Walsh in early 1933, when she suffered a severely sprained ankle. Various reports had her tripping over a railroad track in Lwów or turning an ankle walking to the post office while on vacation in Zakopane, a ski resort in the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland. The Associated Press sent out a release that her career was over, citing a Warsaw doctor’s prognosis that “it was doubtful if she would be able to run again.”40 The New York Times reported that her career was “imperiled” and that she “might be permanently disabled.”41 The reports were erroneous. A month later the newspaper wrote that she had fully recovered.
Walsh was completely disillusioned with the Poles’ lack of concern for her well-being after the injury. “I’d hate to say what I think about this incident,” she griped to the Plain Dealer. “I don’t intend to run in Poland while
I’m finishing my course at the Institute of Athletics. I’m going to the United States when I’m through.” Walsh was particularly angry with the “lack of consideration” by the Polish doctors. She said that her spirits had been injured as much as her ankle. The newspaper reported that she was “disillusioned and embittered by her life in her native Poland.”42
Some solace came in February, when the Polish government gave her its highest annual honor for an athlete, the Grand National Sports Prize. Stefan Lenartowicz, director of the Polish Rada Organizacyjna Polaków z Zagranica [Council of the Organization of Poles Abroad], sent Walsh a letter of congratulations: “The award attests to the fact that through your fame Poland’s reputation abroad has been enhanced. . . . Polish sport generally, and Polish sport abroad in particular, has you to thank for one of the most glorious chapters in its history.”43
Walsh on a Warsaw street, 1934. Kurier Codzienny, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe [National Digital Archive].
James Doyle of the Plain Dealer announced that it came with a $1,100 award and commented on the lack of U.S. financial support for Walsh before the Los Angeles Olympics, which had resulted in her running for Poland: “Over in Poland,” he wrote, “amateur athletes are apparently paid off under the lights rather than in the alley, as is the United States custom.”44 It turns out that Doyle’s Associated Press source was wrong; the sports prize did not come with cash.45 Walsh would have been ineligible for the next Olympics if it had.
Homesick for family and friends in Cleveland, Walsh took any break in her studies to return to the United States, even if only to run in a few races. That summer, she was on a ship back to the States, and in July, she won four gold medals at the National Polish Falcons Track and Field Championships. Still upset by her decision not to run for the United States at the Los Angeles Olympics, the Plain Dealer put her Polish name first and Stella Walsh in parentheses, and wrote that she was “formerly of Cleveland.”
In August, Walsh returned to Europe for a meet in Brussels. The ankle was still bothering her, and she lost the 100 and 200 meters to Tollien Schuurman of the Netherlands.46 By the fall Walsh had fully recovered. Running for the sports club Polonia Warszawa, Walsh set two world records in the 60 and 100 meters at a meet in Poznań. At the end of September in Lwów she broke her own world record in the 60 meters, and two weeks later she set world records in the 80 and 100 meters in a meet in Katowice. After the ankle scare, Walsh was again at the top of the world of track—the unquestioned “Queen of the Sprints.” In 1934 Walsh won Poland’s Grand National Sports Prize for the second year in a row. It seemed that no one stood in the way of her winning gold again at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
Walsh was a familiar customer for the Gdynia-Ameryka line. Studying in Europe allowed Walsh to leave Warsaw for lengthy periods of time. Most courses of study in European universities consist of preparing for and passing exams, which the student can schedule. Attending lectures is often not mandatory. It is not clear, however, if Walsh ever finished a degree in Poland. In October 1933 she set sail again for New York. President Ignacy Mościcki gave Walasiewicz an official send off. In its coverage of the event, the Los Angeles Times joked about the difficulty in pronouncing their names, ignoring the fact that they were in Poland: “Just pity the guy who had to introduce them.”
The Plain Dealer, which now called her Stella Walsh again, reported that she was returning to Cleveland to begin a two-year college prep course at Notre Dame High School, although she had yet to finish her studies in Warsaw. Walsh went back to her old familiar routines, starring for Cleveland’s Vivian Beauty Shoppes’ basketball team and for Kroger Stores’ softball team. In April 1934 she took the 50 and 200 meters at the AAU Indoor National Championships in Brooklyn. Betty Robinson was there, running in her first big meet since her horrific airplane crash in 1931. She was relegated to the 4 × 100 relay because she could not bend her injured knee at the starting line. Robinson’s team did not win a medal.
In May 1934 Walsh went back to Poland to prepare for the World Women’s Games in London. This would be the last of Alice Milliat’s all-women track and field events. The IOC had finally admitted women’s athletics into the Olympic Games on a permanent basis, and the “Women’s Olympics” was no longer needed. Few spectators showed up in London. Nonetheless, debate would continue for decades about which track and field events were “suitable” for women. The 200 meters, which was probably Walsh’s best race, did not get on the Olympic program for women until the 1948 London Olympics. The 800 meters, which had been run at the 1928 Amsterdam Games, was taken off because some of the runners fell to the ground in exhaustion after the race. Canadian Jane Bell said that the “people who ran the 800 didn’t think it was difficult. I’m sure no one thought it was hard. It was just those officials who thought so.” Teammate Myrtle Cook claimed that the story about the women collapsing at the finish was “grossly exaggerated.”47 Women did not run the 800 meters in the Olympics again for 32 years.
Walsh’s winning streak in the Women’s World Games came to an abrupt end in London. Germany’s Käthe Krauss was a music teacher at the Dresden Conservatory, but she also had a strong physique and the gift of speed. Walsh won the 60 meters, but Krauss whipped Walsh in her two specialties, the 100 and 200 meters. Walsh did not take the defeats too seriously because she had injured her leg training for the broad jump. In 1935, she set a recognized world record in the 200 meters, which was not broken for seventeen years, when Australia’s Marjorie Jackson won the event at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
In December, Walsh was on another ship bound for the United States. That winter she played basketball for the Cleveland sporting goods company Blepp-Coombs but ran into trouble with a new AAU rule against an amateur team playing a game on the same program with a pro basketball team. The AAU suspended her for thirty days, and there was some question as to whether she would lose her amateur status permanently. “If I wanted to turn professional I could have done it long ago,” Walsh huffed, “and made plenty of money in the process.”48
A new sprinting phenom hit the sports scene in 1935. Helen Stephens, standing at six feet tall, was an unknown seventeen-year-old farm girl from the small town of Fulton, Missouri. Stephens’s victories on the track brought a modicum of fame to the town in the mid-1930s, but Fulton would gain greater notoriety after World War II, when former British prime minister Winston Churchill made a visit to Westminster College in March 1946, to give a speech on the state of affairs in Europe. Churchill warned that the Soviet Union was building an “Iron Curtain” to divide Europe. He put a city in Walsh’s Poland at the northern end of a line of Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe: “From Stettin [Szczecin] in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill declared, “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”49 Churchill’s memorable observation contributed to President Harry Truman’s hard-line containment policy and the emerging Cold War. “Behind the Iron Curtain” became synonymous with the Soviet bloc.
Stephens and Walsh had their own hot war on the track and cold war off it, the latter spurred on by the Missouri press. Although both women had grown up in the United States, they took vastly divergent paths to the cinders. Stephens had little formal training, running on the farm: “From the time I was a small child I was in training, only I didn’t know it,” she recalled. “I was walking, running, doing chores, building up my body, my lung capacity, my wind, my endurance, everything that people have to train for today.”50 She told one reporter that she just chased rabbits all over the farm. Stephens was aware that women had run for the first time at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. At one point she promised her mother, “I’m going to run in the Olympics someday.”51
Stephens’s high school track coach, Bert Moore, recalled the first day he saw her as a neophyte sophomore with pig tails:
She came out where the boys were practicing one day and said she wanted to run. Well, that was all right with me. . . . One time I
casually took out my stopwatch and timed her on a dash. I could hardly believe my eyes. . . . Do that dash again, I suggested. Again she came close to a record in the women’s time in that sprint.
Moore turned out to be an excellent coach, honing Stephens’s starting and running techniques. But he was also concerned that the young girl would be physically harmed by pushing her too hard: “I never let her run a race in competition until the following year. She was still growing like a weed. I let her tag along and run some exhibition races with the boys. No girl should be allowed to do any hard running until she is past sixteen.”52 Although Moore’s opinion reflected the conventional wisdom of the time about overtaxing female athletes because of their supposedly fragile bodies, he was probably right about the damage of overtraining of any young athlete, male or female, which is rampant in the sporting world today.
Walsh spent all but the first year of her life in the big city and had formal training with coaches from the Polish Falcons, South High School, the Polish Olympic team, and Polish athletic clubs. She had traveled the world and now considered herself a sophisticated cosmopolitan urbanite. The confident twenty-four-year-old was an Olympic champion and seasoned veteran of many big international meets in North America, Europe, and Asia. Walsh liked to dress the part. Getting off the train from New York after one trip, one Plain Dealer reporter noted that she sported a “raccoon coat, a blue tam, a blue georgette dress, blue socks with white stripes, white kid slippers with blue trim, and several beautiful dinner rings.”53 Aside from the track, in public Walsh was always nattily dressed.
The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Page 10
