One of the most embarrassing episodes in Walsh’s life took place in the fall of 1942, when she, Harry Jakubiak, and Lois Mattheson were arrested for pilfering six fur coats worth $275 from stores in Logansport, Indiana, about 250 miles southwest of Cleveland. Walsh had met Jakubiak—alias Harry Stron—at a basketball game in Cleveland. Jakubiak allegedly bragged that “he was the smoothest shoplifter in the country.” Walsh acknowledged, “I knew he was in some kind of racket, but I didn’t know what it was.” According to Walsh, she had nothing to do with the thefts: “When we arrived in Logansport in my car, Jakubiak went away with Mrs. Mattheson, and he said he was going to buy her a present. I walked around town window shopping.” When Walsh returned to her car, she saw the police surrounding her car, so she hitchhiked to the nearby town of Ober. “I was afraid it might hurt my athletic career if I was seen there [in Logansport].” In Ober, Indiana, she went to the police and reported that her car had been stolen.12
Walsh pled innocent to the grand larceny charges, although the coats found in her car were damning evidence. After a few days in jail, Walsh said, “The truth has not much to do with the case. I came to Logansport to do some hunting, and I’m getting all I want. I have killed sixty-six cockroaches in this jail.”13 The Pittsburgh Press reported that Walsh had thought she was going to Chicago on a shopping trip. She was released on $3,000 bail, and Mattheson was released without charges. Jakubiak pled guilty and was sentenced to one to ten years. He maintained that the two women were not guilty, but because the stolen goods were found in Walsh’s car, she still faced a trial.14
In May 1943, Walsh’s lawyer requested a postponement. In September, the judge in the case gave Walsh permission to leave the country to play in a softball tournament in Canada, and the trial was again set back to June 1944. On October 11, 1944, the New York Times reported that the prosecutor in the case, Kenesaw M. Landis II, the nephew of the famous baseball commissioner, had dropped the charges of grand larceny against Walsh because Mattheson was by that time in the Women’s Army Corps, and the Logansport municipal authorities refused to pay her way back to testify in the trial. The incident went virtually unnoticed throughout the rest of the country and did not hurt Walsh’s reputation in the long run.
While Walsh was awaiting trial in the fur coat caper, she went back to the track. The larceny charge did not seem to affect her at the 1943 AAU Championships, which were held at Lakewood High School, about seven miles east of Cleveland. Walsh competed in the 100 meters, 200 meters, and broad jump, and won them all.
Stephens was paying close attention to Walsh’s career. When she heard that Walsh had tied her Olympic record of 11.6 seconds in the 100 meters at the 1943 AAU Championships, Stephens contemplated a comeback, although as a professional basketball player she was not eligible to run in AAU meets. “[I] just want to show Stella Walsh I can beat her,” she said.15
Another pioneering woman athlete won the 50 meters and the high jump at the 1943 AAU Championships. At an early age, Alice Coachman was outracing and outjumping boys in her hometown of Albany, Georgia. “The girls were no fun to play with,” she scoffed, “because they were always trying to act cute.” She came to the attention of the Tuskegee Institute track and field coach, and began competing for that famous club, winning her first national high-jump championship in 1939, at the age of sixteen. In 1948, Coachman qualified for the U.S. Olympic team for the London Games, but she had a potentially debilitating condition. “I didn’t really want to go to England,” Coachman remembered. “I started crying like a baby. But I couldn’t let my country down. . . . I had an ailment that was corrected by the doctor placing a plastic tube in me to turn my ovary around. It was twisted. That was dangerous in high-jumping.” The U.S. Olympic team doctor took out the tube the day before the high-jump competition at London, and Coachman won, making her the first African American woman to take home an Olympic gold medal. “I was happy to get my medal awarded to me by King George,” Coachman said, “because I had heard so much about the king and queen of England.”16
In August 1944, Walsh ran a record 24.2 in the 220-yard dash. For the first three years after the war, she won every U.S. National Outdoor 200-meter title. Walsh recognized that as she aged, she was losing some of her explosiveness out of the starting blocks in shorter sprints, so she also began running the 800 meters. Accomplished in both track and field, she also trained for the pentathlon, an event in which sheer speed was secondary to conditioning and athletic skills. At the Northeast Ohio District AAU Championships in June 1945, she set a world mark in the triathlon, which consisted of the high jump, javelin, and 1,000 meters. The Plain Dealer also reported that Walsh had run an 11.2 in the 100 meters, supposedly lopping a huge 0.3 seconds off of Stephens’s world record.17 Although this record was never officially recognized, Stephens again repeated her challenge: “I beat her before, and I can do it again.”18 At the 1945 U.S. National Championships in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Coachman beat Walsh in the 100 meters, but Walsh won the 200 meters and the broad jump.
Walsh kept up a busy schedule that winter, running indoor track meets and playing basketball for the Polish Olympics. Her team put together a thirty-game winning streak, and in February 1946 they won a fifth straight Northeast Ohio AAU Championship. As usual, Walsh led the team in scoring. At a Polish Olympic Club meet in Cleveland in June 1946, Walsh beat her own record in the 60 meters, which she had set thirteen years earlier in Lwów, and a week later she bested her 50-meter record, set in Katowice in 1933. At the Northeast Ohio AAU Championships, Walsh topped that with an 11.5 time in the 100 meters, tying Stephens’s world record. Once again, these records were unofficial.
Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, and Japan capitulated on August 15, ending World War II. Walsh desperately wanted to compete in the Olympics again, although given the devastation in Europe, it was not clear which city could host it. In August 1945, the IOC decided to hold the first postwar games in 1948. British sporting authorities pushed hard for London, wanting to show the world that Britain was still a world power, recovering from the war and remaining open for business. After the Nazi exploitation of the 1936 Berlin Games, the British argued that their amateur tradition best exemplified the separation of the Olympic movement from political agendas. Cognizant that Britain’s economy was foundering, the United States offered to feed the Olympic athletes. In February 1946, the IOC decided on London.
Many members of British prime minister Clement Atlee’s Labour Party argued that reconstruction should take precedence over spending on a sporting event. A New York Times reporter argued that the psychological lift for Britain was well worth the cost:
For the British people, weary from two World Wars in thirty years and separated by only twenty-one miles of channel from a Europe split and tense with international strife, the sight of young men and women from the Balkans, from Scandinavia, from Western Europe, and from the Middle East, from the Moslem world, from the British Empire, and from the Western Hemisphere . . . generally competing side by side, will have a tonic effect.19
The Soviet Union did not send a team to the 1948 Olympics, but its satellite states in Eastern Europe did, including Poland. Walsh was eligible to run for Poland, but by that time a Communist government was firmly established in Warsaw. Soviet leader Josef Stalin was not about to allow Poland to hold free elections after the war because a democratically elected government would have been antagonistic to Moscow. Poles knew very well that Stalin had divided their country with Hitler when the war began in 1939, and that Stalin had ordered the killing of thousands of Polish Army officers in 1940. The Soviet leader barely trusted the Polish Communists, let alone Polish democrats and bourgeois intellectuals. Stalin had murdered hundreds of exiled Polish Communists before and during the war. After the Red Army began to push the Germans out of Poland in 1944, he immediately installed a Soviet-friendly government made up of Polish Stalinists.
There is an old joke about the chronic divisions w
ithin Polish politics that when ten Poles gather together they form eleven political parties; however, after World War II, Polish Americans were united in their hatred of Soviet Russia and outraged that the United States did not prevent the Soviet subjugation of Poland. Roosevelt was unjustifiably blamed for giving free rein to Stalin in Eastern Europe, when, in fact, Roosevelt had no way to prevent Stalin from doing what he wanted there. Poland became the crucible of the Cold War in Eastern Europe.
In the early postwar period, the Western powers held out hope that Stalin would allow free elections in Poland, and Walsh continued to run in Poland and for the Polish national team. Hers was still the most recognizable name on the European track circuit. In 1946, Walsh won her last five titles at the Polish National Track and Field Championships. In August, she competed for Poland for the final time at the European Championships in Oslo, but at thirty-five she was beginning to show her age. She did not place in the 100 and 200 meters, the high jump, the broad jump, or javelin. Walsh finished fourth in the shot put.
The Polish Communists held phony elections in January 1947, solidifying their hold on power. Given the Polish American community’s virulent hatred of Stalin and the Polish regime, there was no way that Walsh could run for the People’s Republic of Poland at the London Olympics. Despite her failure at Oslo, she was still one of the best female athletes in the United States. At the AAU Championships in Buffalo in late August 1946, Walsh captured her twenty-ninth and thirtieth national titles, winning the 200 meters and the broad jump. She came in second in the 100 meters. At the AAU Championships in San Antonio in June 1947, she again won the 200 and came in fourth in the broad jump, while complaining of a pulled muscle. Tuskegee Institute won its tenth women’s AAU team title in eleven years. The only year they lost during that string was to Walsh’s Polish Olympics team in 1943.
In December 1947, at the age of thirty-six, Walsh finally received her U.S. citizenship papers. By that time, the Soviet-backed Polish United Workers Party was firmly in control of the Polish government. Walsh was fixated on competing again in the Olympics. Now that Poland was no longer free, it was a remote possibility. Walsh was well aware of the IOC rule that an athlete could not switch countries to compete in the Olympics. According to the Plain Dealer, she was “looking forward to the possibility of competing in the 1948 Olympic Games in London,” but the newspaper cited the Olympic rule that would rule her out: “An athlete having once competed for one country cannot compete for another country, except in the case of conquest or the formation of a new state.” If she had remained a Polish citizen, she could have continued to live in Cleveland and still run for the Polish Olympic team. She was resigned to the political reality of the Cold War:
Naturally I would like to run for the United States this year, but I realize that is impossible. Since I am now a citizen here, it probably wouldn’t be considered patriotic to compete for Poland, but I would like one more opportunity to run in the Olympics. This absolutely will be my last season of competition, and that would be a great way to finish my career. Maybe fate will decide for me.20
Surely Walsh would have made the 1948 U.S. Olympic team. Helen Stephens had retired from running to play basketball, and at the 1948 U.S. Track and Field Championships in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Walsh placed first in the 100 and 200 meters, and the broad jump. Frances Sobczak Kaszubski, Walsh’s Polish American pal from Cleveland, emerged as a star in Grand Rapids, winning the discus and shot put. The Plain Dealer headline on July 14 read, “Cleveland Housewife Snares Two Track Titles.” Walsh was proud and yet envious of her friend, who qualified for the U.S. Olympic team in both events. Kaszubski said that she had been inspired by the great Stella Walsh:
My mother tried to discourage me. She and dad both wanted me to be lady-like. But I persisted. We lived next-door to Sokół, the Polish Falcons Hall, on Broadway at 72nd, and I finally talked them into letting me become a member. They even let my younger sister join also. Because we were so close, my mother believed no harm could come to us, and she could keep her eye on us.21
Kaszubski did not finish in the top ten in either Olympic event at the 1948 London Games, but she won the U.S. championship in the shot put in 1945, 1948, and 1950, and the discus in 1945, and from 1947 to 1951. She went on to become an official with the AAU. Her most controversial decision came at the 1958 U.S. Track and Field Championships, when she called a foul on Lillian Greene for allegedly getting paced by a teammate on the infield in the last lap of the 880 yards. Although the teammate was simply cheering on Greene, she was disqualified. Walsh, running for the Southern Pacific Athletic Club, finished fifth in that race but was selected for the U.S. team to go to Moscow for a duel meet against the Soviets that summer.
Helen Stephens wanted to go to the London Olympics as well, but she had lost her amateur status by playing basketball with the semiprofessional All-American Red Heads. Stephens and Walsh probably would have challenged for the medals’ stand in both the 100 and 200 meters. The Netherlands’ Fanny Blankers-Koen’s winning time in the 100 meters at London was two-tenths of a second slower than Walsh’s second-place finish at Berlin twelve years earlier. Walsh told the Chicago Herald-American, “I’ve beaten Koen every time I have run against her—about four times.”22 Walsh did not mention that she had lost every race to Stephens.
Walsh was thirty-seven years old in 1948. Even if she could somehow find a way to compete in the 1952 Olympics, whether for Poland or the United States, she would be out of her prime. Walsh began to run in longer races, which took more training and endurance. The 400 and 800 meters were still not on the Olympic program for women, however. The pentathlon, which Walsh dominated in the United States in the early 1950s, was not an Olympic event either. The 800 meters for women finally returned at the 1960 Rome Olympics, women ran the 400 meters for the first time at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the heptathlon and marathon for women debuted at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
In 1949, Grace Butcher was a sophomore at Chardon High School, about forty miles east of Cleveland. The sixteen-year-old wanted to run track but found no outlet to do it. Butcher tried to start a girls’ track team at Chardon, but the boys’ coach told her that she could not do it because there were no other girls’ teams to run against: “You know, Grace, we can’t really have girls’ track here. To have a team here, you’d have to have one at other schools, too. Nobody has girls’ track,” he said.23 Butcher’s mother Mary then contacted Walsh, who was coaching girls at the Polish Falcon club in Cleveland. Butcher’s diary entries recall her excitement to work out with the Olympic champion:
MOM CALLED STELLA WALSH, AND THIS FRIDAY I AM GOING TO CUYAHOGA HEIGHTS TO WORK OUT WITH HER TRACK TEAM! [sic]. My break! It’s unbelievable. . . . Boy, talk about being nervous—I’m scared. Will I make good tomorrow? If praying my heart out helps any, I should because I’ve been praying my heart out this past year. . . . Will I be able to think about school tomorrow? I doubt it. Just thinking about going makes my heart beat faster and my stomach thrill.24
On the first day of practice, Walsh asked Butcher what event she wanted to do. Butcher said that she wanted to run the mile, but of course there was no mile run for women in those days, so Walsh told her, “You have good, long legs, you can try the hurdles. The 220. Maybe high jump.” Butcher was ecstatic about her first workouts at Cuyahoga and thrilled to get a pair of Walsh’s track shoes: “I put them under my pillow the way Stella says she used to.”25
Grace Butcher trained with Walsh in 1949, and is still running today. Photo by Darlene Fritz.
That summer Butcher ran with Walsh on a 4 × 110 relay team. Butcher recalled,
At my first-ever meet on June 11, 1949, wearing the bright satin uniform of the Poland Falcons (I guess that was really wasn’t kosher, seeing as how I’m not Polish), I ran on the winning 440-relay team with Stella at anchor, but we were disqualified to second because one of our runners ran out of her zone. I was third in the 220 behind Ste
lla and a teammate.
Butcher said that it was a thrill of a lifetime: “To run in the same race as Stella! To see her take off her warm-up suit struck me as rather like seeing a statue unveiled. I was almost glad I was so far behind in the race so I could watch her run. She almost never ran like that in training. Her acceleration seemed out of this world.”26 For months, Grace’s mother drove her to Cleveland to train with Walsh. Mary and Stella became good friends, often sharing a few drinks after practice.
Disappointed at not being able to run in the London Olympics, Walsh once again said she would call it a career. In 1948, the Plain Dealer ran a photo of Walsh sitting in her room at home, surrounded by a clutter of plaques, medals, and trophies. That is all she had to show for her many victories on the field of play. In August 15, 1949, the newspaper announced, “Stella Quits Track, Will Write Memoirs.” One of the reasons Walsh thought about retiring was to find work in physical education, which Olympic rules prohibited if she wanted to remain an amateur. “In recalling the highlights of her career,” the newspaper wrote, “Miss Walsh regards her victories in the 1930 and 1934 women’s Olympics and her sweep of the 60-, 100- and 200-meter dashes and broad jump at the 1932 Olympics at Los Angeles as her greatest triumphs.” The newspaper probably misquoted Walsh and conflated her women’s Olympic victories with the Los Angeles Games, because she only won the 100 meters in the latter.
The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Page 15
