The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh

by Sheldon Anderson

  In the fall of 1938, Polish sport authorities offered Stella Walsh a job as a national physical education trainer, but Walsh declined the position, explaining that she did not want to jeopardize her amateur status. Walsh wanted to leave Poland anyway. Life was hard enough in her depressed Cleveland, but the standard of living in Poland was markedly lower. Every chance she got she left Poland to compete in meets in North America and visit her parents back home. In the mid-1930s, she sailed back and forth across the Atlantic at least ten times.

  Walsh was happy that her studies in Warsaw were over. She had never adapted to life in the country of her birth. She was a relative unknown on the streets of Warsaw—a university student like any other. It was no time to be caught in Eastern Europe anyway. With little opposition from Britain and France to his unilateral breaches of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler was becoming increasingly bold. In a November 1937 meeting with his financial advisors and top generals, Hitler laid out his plans (in the so-called Hossbach Memorandum of the meeting) to revise Germany’s eastern borders by force in the early 1940s. Western appeasement encouraged him to move up the timetable.

  Walsh went back to live with her parents on Clement Avenue. She did not hold down a regular job during this period but was in the prime of her athletic career. She relied on local clubs to subsidize her travel to track and field meets. Walsh joined the Polish Girls’ Olympic Club of Ohio, which won the first Polish American Olympic Games in 1937, in Pittsburgh. Walsh was the club’s one-woman show, winning all but one of the ten events she entered.

  The Plain Dealer followed Walsh’s exploits closely, and her name repeatedly popped up in the news, even when it had nothing to do with her career on the track. In 1938, Shaker Heights police set up a sting operation to nab muggers who were active in the area. One cop dressed as a woman and chased down a would-be mugger. Sportswriter James Doyle joked that the robber “must have thought for a few seconds that he’d made the mistake of holding up Stella Walsh.”1 On July 7, 1939, the newspaper reported that Walsh had thrown the fastest ball recorded by the “speedometer” at a Cleveland Indians baseball game.

  Polish ambassador Jerzy Potocki honors Walsh in Pittsburgh, 1938. Kurier Codzienny, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe [National Digital Archive].

  Few athletes of her time, let alone a Polish woman from Cleveland, were such international stars. In September 1937, Walsh represented the American Falcons in the Falcon World Games in Katowice, Poland. Afterward, she went on a tour of Europe, running in meets in Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest. In the Polish city of Drohobycz in August, Walsh unofficially shattered three world records, in the 80 meters, 100 yards, and broad jump.2 Back in Cleveland the next summer, she supposedly clipped a whopping .4 seconds off her 100-yard world record, but it was wind-aided (it must have been a big gust). At the second Polish American Olympic Games in Pittsburgh in June 1938, Walsh won nine of ten women’s events, losing only to her neighborhood friend Frances Sobchak in the high jump. On July 5, Walsh left again for Europe, to compete in the European Athletic Championships, her biggest meet since the Olympics. Several weeks before the championships, she competed in a meet in Warsaw, where she set an unofficial world record in the broad jump.

  The European Championships took place on September 17 and 18, in Austria, which by then was part of the Third Reich. Six months earlier, the German Army had marched into Hitler’s homeland. The Anschluss of Austria was Hitler’s first aggressive move outside of Germany’s borders, and the Western powers did not react. The West was divided about the nature of the German threat, in part because of the success of the Berlin Olympics. The Nazis had shown the world that the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936 did not threaten France and that Hitler had nothing but peaceful intentions. Many visitors came away from Berlin believing that anti-Nazi propaganda was unwarranted. Showcasing Germany through the Olympics provided fodder for those in France and Great Britain who had favorable views of Nazism, credited Hitler with bringing the German economy back to life, and wanted to avoid another European war at any cost. Even the Poles were hopeful. Polish artist Jan Parandowski won a gold medal in the art competition at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and wrote these optimistic words about the meaning of the quadrennial event:

  There is an ideal—we can even call it commandment—to which twentieth-century mankind aspires and which it expects; the commandment of peace. In Antiquity the voice announcing the Olympic Games disarmed fighters, put an end to animosity and discord, and, although this divine truce only lasted a few months, sometimes it lasted whole years.3

  The Berlin Olympics served apologists for Hitler’s repression of Jews and political opponents, and justified acceptance of Hitler’s disregard for the Versailles Treaty. Even the release of Leni Riefenstahl’s seemingly apolitical documentary Olympia in 1938, contributed to the Reich’s propaganda campaign. In September, Hitler promised British prime minster Neville Chamberlain at Munich that the Czech Sudetenland was his last territorial objective. The brutal Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jews that November belied Hitler’s assurances that the Nazi regime was no threat to Europe. Riefenstahl expected a big welcome in Hollywood that fall, but the movie industry shunned her.

  Hitler’s interest in Austria and Czechoslovakia was strategic rather than a sincere desire to bring the Germans in the former Austrian Empire into the Third Reich. Consolidating control of Germany’s southern flank would pave the way for revision of the most hated provision of the Versailles Treaty, the loss of German territory to Poland. Most interwar German leaders agreed that the border with Poland was untenable. Hitler was no different in wanting to revise Germany’s eastern border with Poland, but he knew that a war on Poland might again bring the World War I alliance against Germany. He was not ready for that yet, so he moved cautiously to prepare for war.

  His first objective was to control Austria, either through a puppet government or annexation. As the crisis unfolded in the spring of 1938, Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg proposed a plebiscite, asking Austrians if they wanted to stay independent or go into the Reich. Worried that Austrians would oppose the Anschluss, Hitler hurriedly ordered the German Army to invade Austria. Cheering crowds along the way to Vienna prompted Hitler to incorporate the country into the Reich. The British and French had no stomach for fighting Germany on behalf of the independence of the Austrians, who were, after all, ethnic Germans.

  There is historical controversy about the depth of Austrians’ support for the Anschluss. Many Austrians were opposed to the Third Reich, as evidenced by numerous manifestations of Austrian patriotism at sporting events with Germany. In early April, the German national soccer team played Austria in the so-called Anschluss match at Vienna’s famous Praterstadion (today the Ernst-Happel-Stadion). Austria won the game, 2–0, and fans put on a display of anti-Germanism that shocked attending Nazi officials. Austrians jeered and whistled during the playing of the German national anthem, chided German fans, and taunted the German players. In games between Austrian and German teams during the war, the German secret police reported many incidents of Austrian fans heckling and committing acts of vandalism against German players and other representatives of the Third Reich.

  Despite Hitler’s saber rattling, there was no significant opposition in Europe to holding the European Championships in Austria. Walsh was still one of the most well-known figures on the women’s European track and field circuit, and at age twenty-seven she had already won four “best athlete” awards from the Polish journal Przeglad Sportowy, a mark that still stands. The European championships at the Praterstadion promised a rematch between Walsh and Käthe Krauss, the veteran German sprinter who had finished third to Walsh’s second in the 100 meters at the Berlin Olympics. Running for Poland, Walsh bested Krauss in both the 100 and 200 meters, and took second in the broad jump. Walsh also anchored Poland’s silver medalist 4 × 100 relay team. She was the star of the meet and looked forward to competing for Poland again at the 1
940 Olympics in Tokyo. World War II scuttled the Games.

  The European Championships took place in the midst of the Sudetenland crisis, which put Europe on the precipice of war. After the Anschluss of Austria, Hitler set his sights on Czechoslovakia, which was now surrounded on three sides by Germany. Three million Germans lived in the Sudetenland, and Hitler was intent on a war against Czechoslovakia to incorporate the region into Germany. Czechoslovakia was defenseless without this strategic, mountainous area. If Czechoslovakia went, Poland was exposed too.

  Walsh at the 1938 European Track and Field Championships in Vienna. Kurier Codzienny, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe [National Digital Archive].

  Chamberlain went to Germany three times in September, in a desperate attempt to keep the peace. In complete disregard of the Czechoslovaks, on September 12 Chamberlain offered Hitler the Sudetenland—if Hitler agreed not to invade the rest of rump Czechoslovakia. Hitler agreed, and on September 22, Chamberlain met Hitler again at the Rhine River resort of Bad Godesberg to finalize the deal. Hitler, disgusted with Chamberlain’s diplomacy and bent on a military campaign against Czechoslovakia, rejected it. Chamberlain flew back to Britain and told the nation to prepare for war.

  That same night, Walsh was on a train from Austria back to Poland. Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš had mobilized the army, and the border was swarming with Czechoslovak troops. Interwar Czechoslovak-Polish relations had been strained because Czechoslovakia had grabbed the predominantly Polish town of Cieszyn in 1919, and Poland had an eye on retaking the town if the Germans were awarded the Sudetenland. Walsh thought that the Czechoslovaks suspected her of being a Polish spy:

  I was returning to Warsaw, Poland, from the international championships at Vienna, when I was detained for several hours while passing through the Sudetenland. . . . Passports were being examined in routine manner, but when my Polish service passport was seen I was picked up and held for several hours. When I asked what the confusion was, I learned that the border had been closed, and I was told that “if I knew what was good for me I would not even look through the windows.” I was not even allowed to leave the train for a cup of coffee. I began to worry that war had been declared and was too frightened to ask questions.

  The Plain Dealer wrote, “Walsh must have known how the celebrated Mata Hari felt during some of her harrowing escapades.”4

  Walsh was fortunate that war was narrowly averted. Facing an alliance of Czechoslovakia, Britain, France, and possibly the Soviet Union, Hitler finally agreed to the Munich Conference on September 30, and the Sudetenland was ceded to Germany. Chamberlain’s critics forget the tense week after Bad Godesberg, when Britain and France stood resolute. If Hitler had not agreed to Mussolini’s offer to broker another compromise at Munich, Europe would have been at war. Hitler reluctantly opted to take the deal for peace, but six months later he broke the Munich Agreement by occupying Bohemia and Moravia. Slovakia became a puppet state, and Czechoslovakia was no more. Poland was next on Hitler’s agenda.

  In late October 1938, Walsh took the Batory back to the United States. She was scheduled to go on a track and field tour of Europe in the fall of 1939, but Hitler attacked her homeland on September 1. Three years after the Berlin Olympics, Europe was again at war. On September 17, the Soviet Union invaded Poland, and the country fell within a month. The German and Soviet occupation of Poland was the most brutal of the war, and when the Wehrmacht attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Germans’ persecution of the Poles worsened. Five and a half million Poles lost their lives in the conflict, of those 3 million Jews in the Holocaust. One British historian of Poland labeled this period “Golgota,” Polish for Golgotha—or Calvary—the place of Christ’s crucifixion.5

  With war raging in Europe, Walsh became a regular on the North American track and field circuit. Three days after Hitler attacked Poland, Walsh leapt 19 feet, four inches at the AAU Championships in Waterbury, Connecticut, to beat her own nine-year-old broad-jump record by almost seven inches. She also took the 200 meters.6 At the 1940 AAU Championships in Ocean City, New Jersey, Walsh took home the individual all-around award by winning the discus and broad jump, and coming in second in the 100 and 200 meters.7 The Washington Post reported that Stella Walsh, the “queen of America’s women dash athletes,” had been dethroned in the 100 and 200 by another Ohioan, Jean Lane, a seventeen-year-old student from Wilberforce University in Xenia, the oldest private, historically black university in the country.8 Walsh had not won the 100 at the AAU Championships since 1930, but her loss in the 200 was a big upset.

  Walsh said that she had pulled a muscle before the AAU meet and promised to beat Lane—the “speedy colored girl,” as the Plain Dealer put it—in future races. Lane won the 100 again in 1941, and Walsh finished second to Lane in the 200. Walsh won the broad jump and discus, however, continuing a remarkable fifteen-year run in the AAU Track and Field Championships. Somehow she regained her explosiveness off the starting line and won the 100-meter title three more times. When she got beat, it was always a headline. Walsh dominated the 200 meters in the 1940s, losing only once from 1939 to 1948 (in 1941, to Lane). She won the broad jump in 1930, then eight straight broad jump titles from 1939 to 1946, again in 1948, and finally in 1951, at the age of forty. She also garnered two championships in the discus (1941 and 1942).

  At the Northeast Ohio AAU Meet in Cleveland in June 1942, Walsh proved that she was still a world-class track and field athlete by setting four unrecognized world records, in the 50-, 100-, and 220-yard sprints, and the broad jump. She also took first in the javelin, placed second in the discus, and led her Polish Olympics team to victory in the 440-yard relay. A month later, at the AAU Championships in Ocean City, Walsh won three titles, in the 200 meters, discus, and broad jump.

  Most athletes in her day quit playing games in their early twenties, sometimes for physical reasons, but more so because games were ultimately considered child’s play. Walsh could not give it up. Sport was her vocation, her love, her soul. In 1941, she played on the Lakewood Bakery Olympics softball team, winning the city championship. Walsh also organized a basketball team called the Polish Olympics and won the Polish American championship in 1942 and 1943. She was the MVP in both tournaments. In 1943, she played for the Waldorf Beer basketball team, winning thirty-one of thirty-two games. As her reputation as a basketball player grew, Walsh was recruited to play for one of the country’s best women’s teams, the Rochester Filarets, which is said to have won more than 200 straight games from 1940 to 1944. Life ran an article on them on April 3, 1944, but by that time Walsh had left the team.

  After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, to bring the United States into World War II, many of baseball’s greatest stars, for example, Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg, and Joe DiMaggio, left the game to serve in the armed forces. Chicago Cubs owner Phillip Wrigley started the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in 1943 (depicted in the 1992 film A League of Their Own). The National Girls Baseball League was founded in 1944, with six teams playing in the Chicago area.

  Playing mainly in Midwestern cities, the AAGPBL eventually had ten teams and drew 1 million fans between 1943 and 1954. The AAGPBL purposely feminized its players to sell a women’s brand of baseball. As the league office put it, they “had only two things to sell the public, baseball and femininity.” At the first few spring trainings, players went to a finishing school run by Chicago Tribune beauty editor Eleanor Mangle and beauticians from Helena Rubenstein’s salon. The players wore skirts and makeup but were carefully portrayed as “nice girls” with a “high moral tone.” No “freaks or Amazons” needed apply, but rather girls who evoked the image of a Hollywood pinup girl. Just to make sure that the girls were chaste, chaperones accompanied the teams.9

  Poster advertising Walsh’s Polish Olympics basketball game at Immaculate Heart of Mary, where she went to elementary school. Notice that the “dynamic” Stan Orzech refereed.
Orzech owned a bar in the Slavic Village frequented by Walsh. Courtesy of Grace Butcher.

  Neither Walsh nor Helen Stephens tried out for the league, but then their mannish features did not fit into the way Wrigley wanted his women to look. One player recalled that the “league stressed femininity. It wasn’t as much about beauty as it was about being not masculine.”10 Walsh was also older by about a decade than the youthful girls Wrigley wanted on his teams. Her Polish citizenship was another hurdle. The league had an expressly patriotic purpose during the war; Wrigley had the players form a “V” for victory before every game. Walsh was not a player the AAGPBL could promote as a model patriot.

  With the war raging in Europe and Asia, it was not clear if the Olympics would ever be held again. Walsh wanted to keep her amateur status, however, and if she played baseball for money, her AAU and Olympic career would be over. Olympic athletes only have a small window of opportunity, and Walsh was at the peak of her physical abilities in the early 1940s; at a Knights of Columbus indoor meet in Cleveland in March 1941, Walsh unofficially broke the world indoor record in the 220-yard dash. The dozen years between the Berlin and London Olympics in 1948 cut short Walsh’s Olympic career. She never ran in another Olympics.

  As long as she could find funding, Walsh tried to compete in any big track and field meet in the Western Hemisphere. Bristling under U.S. hegemonic policies in Latin America, Argentina tried to tap into the region’s resentment by taking the lead in hosting a Pan-American Games. In 1939, as war seemed imminent and the 1940 Olympics were in jeopardy, the Argentine Olympic Committee launched an effort to hold the Pan-Am Games in Buenos Aires. Both Walsh and Helene Mayer, who had fenced for Germany at the Berlin Olympics, wanted to go. In late 1941, however, both were ruled ineligible to join the U.S. team because they had competed for another country in the Olympics. The Plain Dealer wrote that Walsh was the “girl without a country.”11 After Pearl Harbor, the United States decided it could not divert resources from the war effort to send a team to Buenos Aires, and the Pan-American Games were called off. The first Pan-American Games did not take place until 1951, in Buenos Aires.