In the last few months of Walsh’s life, there was real hope for a free Poland. In 1978, the conclave of Roman Catholic cardinals elected a Pole, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, as the first non-Italian pope in more than four hundred years. Pope John Paul II lifted the spirits of the entire Polish nation and indirectly challenged the Communist dictatorship and its atheist, Marxist ideology. A year later, on his first visit to Poland as pope, John Paul said, “It is impossible without Christ to understand this nation with its past so full of splendour and also of terrible difficulties.” He hinted that he had not only a spiritual, but also a temporal calling, and foreshadowed the end of Communist rule a decade later: “I must ask myself . . . why it was in the year 1978 that a son of the Polish nation, a son of Poland, should be called to the Chair of St. Peter. . . . Are we not justified in thinking that Poland in our time has become a land called to give an especially important witness?”34
The pope seemed prophetic when a worker’s revolt in the Gdańsk shipyard in the summer of 1980, led by electrician Lech Wałesa, brought the Polish government to its knees. That fall the Polish Communist Party recognized “Solidarity,” the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc. But hopes for a free Poland were dashed in December 1981, when the Polish government, under pressure from the Kremlin, declared martial law. Solidarity went underground until the late 1980s, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev renounced the use of force to prop up the Soviet satellite regimes. In the fall of 1989, Solidarity returned to head the first non-Communist government in the Warsaw Pact. The Berlin Wall crumbled in November, and by the end of the year, the Iron Curtain was no more. Stella Walsh would not live to witness these monumental events.
In the midst of Poland’s political crisis in 1980, the Polish national women’s basketball team left for a tour of the United States. The team was scheduled to play Kent State University on December 10. Ten years earlier, Kent State had gained infamy as the site of the Ohio National Guard’s shooting of four student Vietnam War protesters, immortalized in the Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song “Ohio” and the lyric “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming . . . four dead in O-hi-o.” Dorothy Fuldheim, the pioneering female news anchor of Cleveland television channel WEW, recalled the awful moment: “When I returned from Kent I wept on the air because of the killings of four young innocent Americans and the wounding of others.” Some angry Clevelanders who supported the National Guard’s action against the students called for Fuldheim’s firing.35
Cleveland mayor George Voinovich commissioned Walsh, who was still working for the Division of Recreation, to greet the Polish national team and present it with a ceremonial key to the city. Who better to welcome the Polish team to Ohio than the most famous Polish-born woman athlete in the United States?
Shortly before nine o’clock on the frigid winter night of December 4, Walsh drove her beat-up old brown 1973 Oldsmobile Omega to Uncle Bill’s discount department store at Broadway Avenue and Aetna Road, about a half mile from her house. Uncle Bill’s is long gone, but among the storefronts in the nondescript strip mall today is a sports therapy business. Walsh had several hundred dollars in cash in hand to buy commemorative ribbons for the Polish players. Whenever European teams play a “friendly” against a team from another country it is customary for the players to exchange some small trinkets in a gesture of friendship and goodwill. Usually the players swap a small pennant with the colors and symbol of their respective teams. Walsh was charged with presenting souvenirs to the Polish team on behalf of the Lake Erie District AAU Committee.
This was the Christmas holiday season in the city, but the merry old spirit of Cleveland depicted in the iconic film A Christmas Story (1983) was no more. Walsh’s Polish neighborhood had changed radically in the seven decades since the Walasiewicz family arrived in the Slavic Village. Facing an energy crisis in the early 1970s and competition from foreign imports, Cleveland and other “Rust Belt” cities along the Great Lakes were losing most of their steel and other heavy industries. Clevelanders fled the city for the suburbs, and the old ethnic communities broke down. Cleveland lost 24 percent of its population from 1970 to 1980, leaving behind a city plagued by violence and despair. It was in the top 20 percent of U.S. cities in rates of poverty, unemployment, dilapidated housing, violent crime, and municipal debt. Homicides rose from fifty-nine in 1962 to 333 in 1972, one of the highest rates in the country. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the murder rate in Cleveland and Detroit was the highest of the Rust Belt cities along the Great Lakes.36 Voinovich complained, “At neighborhood meetings, sometimes people jump on me for two and a half hours about crime.”37 The median family income in Cleveland fell 11.1 percent between 1970 and 1980.38 The city defaulted on its bonds in 1979, the first city since the Depression to do so.
In 1969, the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River caught fire, leaving a stark image of the city’s sorry state of affairs. Another song commemorated that event, Randy Newman’s “Burn On”:
Cleveland, city of light, city of magic
Cleveland, city of light, you’re calling me
Cleveland, even now I can remember
’Cause the Cuyahoga River goes smokin’ through my dreams
Burn on, Big River, burn on.
After buying red and white ribbons (Poland’s colors) for the Polish team, Walsh was walking back to her car when two young neighborhood thugs, Ricky Clark and his brother-in-law, Donald Cassidy, sprang out of the dark, brandished a gun, and demanded her purse. This was not the first time that Walsh had been a victim of crime. Since moving back to Cleveland in 1964, her car tires had been slashed, she suffered a broken nose in a mugging, and she had her car stolen.39 It was not safe for a woman to walk around in the dark alone. According to the police report, powder burns on her hands revealed that Walsh tried to knock the gun away and was shot once in the stomach. Clark and Cassidy panicked and fled the scene, leaving Walsh on the ground next to her car. They left more than $200 on the front seat.40
The bullet severed an artery. It took more than half an hour for the ambulance to arrive while Walsh was bleeding to death. The ambulance rushed her the five minutes to St. Alexis Hospital on Broadway, the largest Catholic hospital in the area, and about a mile and a half from the Walasiewicz house. St. Alexis had served the family many times before, but this time it was too late. Shortly before midnight, Stella Walsh died on the operating table. Her body was taken to Komorowski Funeral Home on East 71st Street, a short walk from Clement Avenue. The Walasiewicz family could not cover the cost of her funeral, so Stella’s sister Clara Battiato filed a claim with the state’s Victim Compensation Fund for medical and funeral expenses.41
The parking lot today of the Slavic Village strip mall where Walsh was murdered. Author photo.
The murder was big news in the Cleveland area and in Los Angeles, where Walsh won her gold medal in 1932 and lived for more than a decade. The Los Angeles Times wrote, “To track and field fans of the 1930s, Stella Walsh was to women’s track and field what Jesse Owens is to men’s track, or, to a less vociferous degree, what John [Lennon] of the Beatles was to rock and roll.”42 The national news media barely noticed the shooting. Of the fifteen television news segments on Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News the next night, Walsh’s murder was the second to last story. The New York Times relegated the story to page twenty.
Coverage of Walsh’s death was soon overshadowed by news of another shooting. On December 8, the same day that Walsh’s obituary appeared in the Plain Dealer, Lennon was gunned down in front of his New York City apartment—like Walsh—by a complete stranger. The next day the Polish national team dedicated their game against Kent State to Stella Walsh. Polish coach Ludwick Mietta commented, “She was very popular in Poland. . . . [The United States] is a dangerous country.”43 Indeed it was. Three months later, President Ronald Reagan barely survived an assassination attempt by yet another handgun-wielding assailant.
The news of Walsh’s death was soon forgotten, even by the Polish press, which was consumed at the time by the emergence of the Solidarity free trade union and the political and economic turmoil in the country. Walsh’s death was shunted to the back pages and then forgotten when word came of Lennon’s murder. In the December 6–7 issue of Życie Warszawy [Warsaw Life], there appeared a short article with the headline “Stanisława Walasiewiczowna Is Dead.” The newspaper mistakenly reported that she had been shot during an attempted burglary of her apartment. A day later, the paper ran a longer article about her life and a photo of Walsh winning the 100 meters at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics.
Słowo Powszechne [Universal Word], a Catholic newspaper that generally supported the Polish Communist government, wrote a heartfelt obituary: “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.” Sztandar Młodych [Youth Banner], the organ of the General Council of the Socialist Federation of Polish Youth Associations, did some sloppy research, reporting incorrectly that Walsh had left Poland in 1914, and that her career had ended in 1946. But the paper lauded her efforts on behalf of Poland, saying, “Her connection to the Polish nation manifested itself in stadiums throughout the world.”44
For several years before her death, Walsh had been working with the POC on developing connections between Polish and American athletes. Unlike their counterparts in the Soviet Union and East Germany, Polish sports authorities generally tried to steer clear of politics. After the murder, the POC issued the following statement:
In relation to the tragic death of outstanding athletic Olympic record holder Stella Walsh Olson—we are joining with you in sorrow—an irreparable loss—she served Polish sport and was active in Polonia. She was the world’s most famous athlete in between the wars—and will remain forever—our pride of Polish sport.45
Five days after the murder, more than four hundred people attended Walsh’s memorial service at Sacred Heart of Jesus Church, where her father’s funeral had been held eight years earlier. The Polish national basketball team, clad in their red and white “Polska” sweat suits, filed into the church and sat across from Walsh’s mother Weronica and her two sisters, Clara and Sophia. Two other Cleveland Olympic gold medal sprinters, Harrison Dillard and Paul Drayton, were among Walsh’s pallbearers. Father Bartnikowski’s eulogy referenced Walsh’s life in sports: “There is but one important event—eternal salvation. It is not measured by time clocks or tape measures, only by God Himself.”46 Walsh would not rest in peace, however. A bombshell hit the community when the results of her autopsy were made public.
9
Saving Stella Walsh
When she was a little girl . . . in the heart of the Polish community, everyone was aware that she was a little different from the others. It was accepted. It was something we all knew about. When she was younger, she was teased by the other children.
—Walsh’s friend Casimir Bielen, after her autopsy report
As Walsh’s body was laid to rest in a place called Calvary, her memory was being crucified. Cleveland’s Polish American community came out in force for her funeral because controversy was swirling about the results of the autopsy. The day before the funeral, local NBC television station WKYC (channel 3) ran a story on the preliminary autopsy findings, which revealed that Walsh had a small, nonfunctional penis and testicles, a small opening below the scrotum, but no female genitalia or reproductive organs.
Walsh’s friends were outraged at charges that Walsh was a fraud and suggestions that “Stella the fella” should forfeit her medals and awards. Walsh’s old pal Beverly Perret Conyers said that she was a “victim of every circumstance. A victim of birth, a victim of life, and a victim of death.” Plain Dealer columnist Hal Lebowitz, who had regularly shared a few beers with her at Stan Orzech’s bar, wrote, “The neighborhood men enjoyed talking with her and bought her beers. Her shyness made it difficult for the public to know her. In a sense, she lived in a shadow world, almost a sports oddity. . . . In her death, by a robber’s bullet, she again was the victim of the times.”1 When channel 3 cameras showed up at the memorial service, one funeral goer screamed, “Get out of here. You’ve got a lot of nerve after that garbage last night.”2
Walsh’s condition is known today as intersex or gonadal mosaicism, which occurs in an estimated 0.018 percent of live births.3 Because she had not undergone any surgery, she was not a transsexual. This issue in women’s sports had been headline news several years earlier when Dr. Richard Raskin underwent a sex-change operation to become Renee Richards. Richards caused a stir by going on the pro tennis tour and reaching the quarterfinals of the 1978 U.S. Open. Walsh’s case was different.
The uninformed media assumed that if Walsh was not all woman, she must be a man. Some in the press charged her with fraud. One Australian journalist wrote, “Meet the most outrageous transvestite of all time—she won Olympic medals and set world records back in the thirties, and got away with it.”4 A British newspaper claimed, “Her rivals believed that she was a man, and in 1980 an autopsy revealed they were right.”5 Harry Gordon, the Australian Olympic Committee’s historian for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, concluded, “An autopsy revealed that she had male sexual organs.”6 One journalist called her life “shadowed by mystery and scarred by shame.”7 Even Walsh’s biographical entry in the U.S. Track and Field Hall of Fame leaves doubt about her achievements, saying, “An autopsy revealed that Walsh had male sex organs.”8
Some in the Polish press also reported that Walsh, one of their most famous track and field athletes, was not a woman. Polish journalist Anna Jakieła wrote, “The immensity of the whole confusion forever darkened the sprinter’s achievements, and everyone just remembers now the question of her sex.”9 Życie Warszawy [Warsaw Life] wrongly concluded that the autopsy revealed that “Walasiewicz was a man.”10
If Stella Walsh had died of natural causes, her condition would have gone with her to the grave. Sexual identity is a thoroughly personal, intimate issue, but an autopsy was mandatory in this murder case. The job fell to Cuyahoga County coroner Samuel Gerber, who had gained some notoriety in the sensational trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard in 1954. Sheppard was accused of murdering his wife Marilyn. The doctor was convicted, but twelve years later he was acquitted in a retrial. Gerber’s testimony was refuted at the second trial.
Gerber’s report on Walsh found that her genetic makeup was both male and female:
The majority of her cells examined had a normal X and Y chromosome, and a minority of her cells contained a single X chromosome and no Y chromosome. Individuals with this form of sex chromosome mixture may present a variety of physical forms ranging from almost normal males to individuals that would be indistinguishable from females with Turner syndrome (a condition in which females have just one X chromosome).11
Gerber theorized that Walsh had probably developed more prominent male sex organs as she reached puberty and that she was probably traumatized by it. Two months later, Gerber said, “She suffered from a rare malady known as mosaicism, in which the human body possesses both male and female chromosomes. In her case, Miss Walsh did have male sex organs. That alone does not make her a man. All you can say is that her sex chromosomes were male dominant.”12
Several weeks after Walsh’s murder, Dr. Angus Muir, director of Case Western University’s genetics center, commented on Walsh’s mosaicism, stating, “You have to take into consideration the whole human being,” he observed. “And if biologically you can call someone a male or female by their chromosomes, functionally or psychologically, they may be in fact the other.” Muir acknowledged that to discover as a teenager or later in life that one’s gender identity differs from one’s biological sex, is “very disconcerting. Psychologically, it’s devastating.”13
Mosaicism was still a relatively unknown condition in 1980. At birth a person was either designated m
ale or female. Approximately 1 to 2 percent of the population does not fit into these two biological categories. In 2013, Germany became one of the first countries to acknowledge that some babies are born with traits of both sexes and allow parents to wait before designating the child as male or female and possibly undergoing corrective surgery.
In the early twentieth century, few people, even those in the medical profession, acknowledged that some people were born with genital peculiarities. This might have been the case with Dora Ratjen, the German high jumper at the Berlin Olympics who later identified herself as male. For most of Walsh’s life, sexual ambiguity was not a matter of general public discourse. She had no support system to help her navigate a world in which there were only two sexes and two clear gender identities. She lived in a “no-man’s—no-woman’s—land,” but her birth certificate listed her as a female, she was given a female name and raised female, and she thought of herself as a woman throughout her life. That was her gender identity. Biologist Ethel Sloan makes this very point:
There is more evidence that gender identity differentiation of the brain as male or female occurs postnatally and depends not on hormones, but on the total environment in which a child is reared. Usually, the chromosome constitution, the gonad structure, the morphology of the external ducts, and the appearance of the external genitalia coincide: When they do not, the sex assignment and rearing can apparently override both the genotype and the phenotype.14
Stella Walsh lived in a time when few people acknowledged that there should be a category for her condition. Shortly after Walsh’s death, Dr. Eduardo Hay of the IOC’s Medical Commission wrote,
The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Page 20
