The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh

by Sheldon Anderson

  The Soviet women trounced the Americans, and Walsh did not “run them off their feet,” finishing far behind the 800-meter winner. The American men beat the Soviet men by seventeen points, while the American women lost by nineteen. The overwhelming victory of the Soviet women gave the Soviets bragging rights. Two of the American javelin throwers sent a postcard home: “The Russians had us going,” they wrote, “but wait until next year.”37 The next years brought no better results, as the Soviet women dominated the Americans again. Naturally the Soviets crowed about the superiority of their Communist system because it produced better athletes. The Soviet bloc countries claimed to have emancipated their women and chastised gender discrimination in the West.

  This propaganda and the poor showing of the American women in the Olympics and the dual meets with the Soviet Union accelerated a change in American attitudes toward women doing sport. Opportunities gradually increased for women to play games. In 1972, Congress passed Title IX legislation that mandated the devotion of equal resources to men’s and women’s sports in public schools and universities.

  The emergence in the 1950s of the remarkable Tennessee State athletes keyed the resurgence of the U.S. women on the international track and field scene. Led by coach Edward Stanley Temple, from 1955 to 1969 the Tennessee State Tigerbelles won all but one outdoor AAU Track and Field Championship, a truly incredible run. The lone loss came by one point to the Compton Track Club in 1964. Temple coached the U.S. team that went to Moscow in 1958. He said, “We went over there, but they didn’t even know we were there. All they were talking about was [decathlete] Rafer Johnson and [shot putter] Parry O’Brien. . . . The women were nothing. Russia had the Press sisters. The Press sisters had more whiskers than I did.”38

  Tennessee State women registered the only victories in the 1958 and 1959 dual meets with the Soviets, winning the 100 and 200 meters, and the 4 × 100 relay in both years. Led by Mae Faggs in the early 1950s, and then Wilma Rudolph and Wyomia Tyus in the 1960s, the Tennessee State women dominated Olympic sprinting. At the 1962 National Outdoor Championships, Vivian Brown bested Walsh’s last surviving U.S. record in the 220 yards.

  Rudolph’s story was particularly uplifting. As a child, she was stricken with scarlet fever and pneumonia, leaving her left leg partially paralyzed. Through heroic efforts of doctors and her mother, Rudolph recovered and won three gold medals at the 1960 Rome Olympics.

  Walsh tried to make one last Olympic team in 1960, but she failed to qualify in the 100 meters and javelin. She finally resigned herself to coaching American women up to the level of the Soviet-bloc athletes. Walsh studied their practice routines and copied their training methods, including weight lifting. She loved coaching and training youngsters almost as much as competing. One of her friends in Cleveland remembered later that “no matter what she undertook, she done [sic] a good job with the children. We went to many track and field meets, and they always became winners because she was very good at coaching and instructing.”39 Grace Butcher never forgot what Walsh meant to her, as a mentor and for breaking barriers in women’s sport and master’s competitions. In a 1987 interview Butcher recalled,

  My track career has continued now for over thirty years, just as Stella’s did, and I am extremely grateful. But it began that day in May 1949, on the track at Cuyahoga Heights, as I felt my hand taken in her strong grip, those intense eyes studying me. . . . She wore real track shoes and real warm-up pants, and she was the greatest woman athlete I have ever known.40

  Although Walsh would not contemplate running for Poland after it became a Soviet satellite, she continued to do goodwill tours to run in track meets in Poland. In 1962, she took U.S. discus thrower Melody McCarthy with her on a two-and-a-half-month trip. Sports Illustrated reported that Walsh, a “spry San Fernando, California, track trainer who won Olympic medals in both the 1932 and 1936 Games, proved her theory on staying in condition—never get out of it—as she nimbly outran younger competitors in eleven of twelve races in her native Poland.”41 The caliber of the competition is not known. Columnist James Doyle wrote this ditty about the middle-aged Cleveland celebrity:

  Though Stella Walsh is all of 50

  She’s still a medal-winning swifty

  Our town’s erstwhile Olympic wow

  Is on the whizz in Poland now.42

  In October 1962, the Central Committee of the PZPR awarded Walsh the Champion of Merit Medal for her accomplishments in sports. It was the highest honor that Poland could give an athlete. A street in Górzno—a town about twenty-five miles from Walsh’s birthplace—and a high school stadium in Radom were named after Walasiewicz. In contrast to other Warsaw Pact members, Poland’s Communist regime was more tolerant of non-Communist cultural institutions and contacts with the West. The hard-line Communist regimes in the Soviet Union or East Germany would not have bestowed such honors on an anti-Communist expatriate living in the United States.

  On her way back to Los Angeles from Poland, Walsh detoured to see her aging parents in Cleveland. She also stopped by the offices of the Plain Dealer to see Doyle and other sports reporters. She lamented the state of athletics in the United States, ignoring the feats of the Tennessee State sprinters: “We don’t have very many newcomers coming up, and our replacements for today’s name stars are just not there. I feel we could make rapid strides if more opportunities would be available to school-age boys and girls.” She noted that the Soviets were doing strength training to improve speed.43

  In the summer of 1963, Walsh ran the 75-yard dash in 8.6 seconds, two-thirds of a second slower than the world record. She decided to run in the AAU Championships in July, but any serious competition was over for her. As much as she loved the weather in Southern California and the opportunities to do sport throughout the year, Walsh missed her friends and family in Cleveland.

  By the mid-1960s, life in Los Angeles had lost some of its allure for her anyway; the “land of perpetual spring” had become the “city of eternal smog.” A symbol of the dramatic changes in the city was the demise of the once-extensive electric trolley system. The last car ran in 1963. The megalopolis had grown to 2.5 million by 1960 (third largest in the country), suburban sprawl clogged the freeways, and race relations were strained (the Watts riots erupted in 1965). In 1968, Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian, “I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable, and the most uncivilized major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer.”44 Marilyn Monroe died of an overdose of drugs and alcohol in 1962; the death of Hollywood’s most glittering female star reflected the city’s lost luster. After a dozen years away, Walsh went back home to Cleveland.

  8

  Back to Cleveland and the Murder

  With great sorrow and a heavy heart we say farewell to an outstanding athlete, a legend of Polish sport. She left us as a great sportswoman and patriot. Honor her memory.

  —Walsh obituary in Słowo Powszechne [Universal Word]

  In the summer of 1964, Stella Walsh moved back to her childhood home in Cleveland. She told Plain Dealer sports columnist Dan Coughlin, “I came back to see my parents.” Julian and Weronica were in their mid-seventies, and her father was not in good health. Walsh was not altogether happy to be back on Clement Avenue, letting Coughlin know that she was not sure how long she would stay in the tiny house.1 Eight years later, Julian Walasiewicz died, at the age of eighty-two. His funeral was held at Sacred Heart of Jesus on Kazimier Avenue, about a ten-minute walk from the Walsh house. Stella and Weronica would live on Clement for the rest of their lives.

  Cleveland was no longer the bustling city Walsh had left in the early 1950s. At the beginning of the century, Cleveland was the nation’s fifth largest city, and at the end of the 1940s, the local media boasted that Cleveland was the “best location in the nation.” Two decades later, the city was in precipitous decline. The venerable Cleveland News newspaper closed its doors in January 1960, foreshadowing the fa
te of many of the city’s old businesses. From 1958 to 1977, Cleveland lost some 130,000 jobs. The interstate highway system cut right through downtown, dividing many of Cleveland’s decrepit neighborhoods and prompting white flight to the suburbs. The housing stock of the crumbling industrial town was aging, and urban renewal attempts had mixed results. Downtown Cleveland, like many older eastern cities, struggled to maintain its vibrancy. Forbes columnist Kevin Badenhausen called it the “most miserable city in the United States.”2

  From 1950 to 1970, an estimated 144,000 African Americans migrated to Cleveland, and approximately 307,000 whites moved out. Racial tensions were high in the city, especially in 1964, after Reverend Bruce Klunder—protesting the building of a segregated school on Lakeview Road—was accidently run over by a bulldozer. In the summer of 1966, the city experienced a serious race riot on Hough Avenue and E. 79th Street on the city’s East Side, about four miles north of Walsh’s neighborhood. The Ohio National Guard was called in to restore order, but not before four people were killed and more than two hundred fires gutted the community. Another outbreak of violence followed in 1968, despite the election of African American mayor Carl Stokes a year earlier. The unrest had a profound impact on the Slavic Village. As the ethnic character of the neighborhood changed, Poles moved out to Parma and other Cleveland suburbs. Jobs in the steel mills were drying up anyway.

  The success of a city’s sports teams cannot reverse economic and social decline, but winning teams can provide a temporary morale boost. In the 1940s, Cleveland was called the “City of Champions” or “Title Town.” The Cleveland Browns won four All-American Football Conference championships, and the Indians won the World Series in 1948, led by fireballing pitcher Bob Feller and power hitter Larry Doby. Even the minor league hockey team, the Cleveland Barons, garnered titles. The city’s pro teams were also in the vanguard of desegregating football and baseball; the Browns signed Marion Motley in 1946, and in 1947, Doby joined the Indians to become the first black player in the American League.

  In the 1960s, the misfortunes of Cleveland’s pro teams mirrored the city’s troubles. The Cleveland Indians won 111 regular-season games in 1954, the fourth-highest total in Major League Baseball history, but the New York Giants swept the Tribe in the World Series, beginning four decades of Indian futility. From 1960 to 1993, their highest finish was third once and fourth six times. The team played to sparse crowds in cavernous Cleveland Municipal Stadium on the shores of Lake Erie, which seated almost 80,000 people. In 1974, a “Ten-Cent Beer Night” promotion resulted in a fan riot and fights with the players on the field. The Indians had to forfeit the game. In the 1980s, some wag dubbed the stadium the “Mistake on the Lake.” The city got a new baseball stadium in 1994, and the resurgent Indians made it to the World Series in 1995, losing in six games to the Atlanta Braves. Two years later, the Indians played in the World Series again and were three outs away from Cleveland’s first championship in thirty-three years. The Florida Marlins rallied for the win in extra innings.

  The National Football League’s (NFL) Cleveland Browns also played in Municipal Stadium, but with little more luck. The Browns won the NFL Championship in 1964, but after losing the National Football Conference title game in 1969, the Browns became a patsy, making the playoffs three times in the next ten years and losing every time. The Browns reached the American Football Conference championship game in 1987 and 1989, but Clevelanders had their hearts broken in two narrow losses to the Denver Broncos. Cleveland fans were devastated when Browns owner Art Modell moved the franchise to Baltimore in 1996, taking the name Ravens. Cleveland got an expansion team in 1999, but a team named the Browns has never played in the Super Bowl.

  Cleveland got a National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise in 1970, but the Cavaliers were usually lousy too. Cleveland businessman Ted Stepian bought the team in 1980, promising to change the racial character of the team: “I need white people. . . . I think the Cavs have too many blacks. . . . You need a blend of white and black. I think that draws, and I think that’s a better team.”3 After a series of money-saving moves that made his team noncompetitive, the league adopted a rule to stop any team from trading away all of its best players and draft picks, dubbed the “Stepian rule.” In the 2000s, the NBA’s greatest star, Akron native LeBron James, could not bring a title to the beleaguered city, losing in the 2007 finals. He left the Cavs in 2010, much to the anger of Cleveland fans. “King James” returned to the team in 2014, losing in another NBA Final to the Golden State Warriors. Finally, in 2016, after a fifty-two-year drought, the Cavaliers beat the Warriors in seven games to bring a championship to Cleveland.

  After returning to Cleveland, Walsh coached kids at her old Polish Falcon Nest 141, up the street on Broadway Avenue. She got a job as a supervisor in Cleveland’s Division of Recreation and moonlighted as a sports editor for the Nationality Newspapers Service. She also tended bar at the Sunshine Café, just south of Harvard Avenue on East 71st Street.

  Walsh was still in the news because she could not bring herself to hang up the spikes. She trained three hours a day at Cuyahoga Heights High School field, about a mile south of her house. She ran exhibitions anytime she could, basking in the limelight as long as people in Cleveland remembered her. In January 1965, she was recruited to play for the Westerners Basketball Club. At fifty-three, she was three decades older than her teammates. She excelled at volleyball as well, leading her team to the championship in the Polonia Millennium Volleyball Tournament in 1966. She was named one of the top players in the tourney, which commemorated the millennial anniversary of the conversion of Polish ruler Mieszko I to Christianity in 966. Walsh was also the leading scorer on her tournament’s basketball team. She even served as an assistant coach for a women’s professional football team, the U.S.A. Daredevils, which played any men’s team they could. The Daredevils were coached by former Cleveland Browns great Marion Motley.

  In 1965, Walsh went to a meet in Columbus, Ohio, to try to qualify in the discus for a spot on a U.S. team that was to go to Kiev and Warsaw. According to the Sports Illustrated account of the meet, Mrs. Stella Walsh Olson

  walked happily through the swirl of stopwatch-toting officials and sweat-suited ingénues to the discus circle. She was going to compete against the kids. Although she looked broad-shouldered and powerful enough to put on a juggling act with 16-pound shots, she knew she had no chance to win.4

  Walsh was envious of the opportunities that young women had in sports during that time. “When I see all these wonderful facilities available to the girls, and the understanding, I wish they had it in our day,” she said regretfully. “I guess I was just born thirty years too soon.” Walsh did not make the team, but she traveled to Poland anyway for three months to dedicate a new Polish athletic stadium named for her and to put on track and field clinics.5 At a meet in Warsaw, nineteen-year-old Polish sprinter Irena Kirszenstein stole the show, winning the 100 meters and then anchoring the first-place 4 × 100 relay team. Walsh was on hand to congratulate Kirszenstein on the victory stand.

  In her prime, Walsh competed at a time when women were just getting onto the Olympic track and field program. In middle age, she also took advantage of the nascent “masters” sporting competitions that became popular in the 1960s. The first U.S. Masters Track and Field Championships took place in 1968, in San Diego, but the meet was for men only. Three years later, at the age of sixty, Walsh returned to California to compete in the first Masters Championships for women. The meet was held at the Los Angeles Coliseum, the scene of her Olympic victory thirty-nine years earlier. The age limit for women was only thirty-five. Competing against athletes a quarter of a century younger, Walsh did not win any events.

  Walsh was still one of the best Polish American woman athletes, however. In the summer of 1977, in Pittsburgh, she won the Polish Falcon District 60-meter championship. In September, Walsh represented her neighborhood Polish Falcon Nest 141 for the last time at the World
Polish Olympics in Kraków. Walsh, now sixty-six, won the 60-meter sprint in the masters division. Nest 141 president Bertha Modrzynski accompanied Walsh to Poland and remembered the trip: “Believe me they rolled out the red carpet for us. That’s how they honored her as the queen of Poland.”6 This was her last victory in a major competition, but Walsh promised to “continue to exert my very best energies to promote the most positive image of the United States [in Poland]. After all, I am extremely proud to be an American. I want to extend the best image possible ‘as a Polish American.’”7

  After coming back to Cleveland, Walsh became a regular visitor to the newspaper offices of the Plain Dealer to chat with Coughlin, and they developed a lasting friendship. Walsh had long shed her shyness. She was now a mature, confident athlete, trainer, and world traveler, renowned in Cleveland and Poland. One newspaper called her the “effervescent platinum blonde.”8 Walsh repeatedly badgered Coughlin—thirty years her junior—to run a 100-yard race. Walsh was still running competitively in meets throughout the Great Lakes area, so she was fit. Coughlin finally relented, and the two met on the Cuyahoga Heights track on July 13, 1967. Walsh gave the rotund, out-of-shape Coughlin a ten-yard head start, just to “make things fair,” as she put it. Given the handicap, Coughlin beat her, so Walsh insisted that they race again, this time from the same starting line. Walsh beat Coughlin by six yards. According to Coughlin, after the race they went back to Stan Orzech’s Tavern at East 71st Street and Lansing. At the time, Coughlin said that he was too tired to drink, so he had a coke and Walsh had two beers. He admitted later, “She drank me under the table, which gave her a sweep of the doubleheader.”9