by Frank Deford
Well, I told you she was my best friend in all the world, and so, given that, I just told her flat out, “I wanna swim in the Olympics. That’s what I’m up to.”
“The Olympics?”
“Yeah.”
If I’d said I’d just come down from the moon, she couldn’t have been any more surprised. “You mean the Olympics? The ones in Berlin?”
I looked at Mom strangely. She’d said Berlin, like to rhyme with Merlin, King Arthur’s magician. She saw the expression on my face and laughed. Then she repeated it the same way:
Berlin. Exactly. There was this town on the Shore down in Wicomico County, and everybody knew it, because the road went through there on the way to Ocean City, which was the big seashore resort. Everybody on the Shore went to Ocean City sometime, to the boardwalk and the beach, and they’d all go through Berlin on Route 50 over from Salisbury. And it was spelled just like the one in Germany—B-E-R-L-I-N—only it was pronounced the way I just did. Not Ber-LIN. But—
“BURR-lin,” I said.
That’s the way we said it on the Shore. So it threw me off when Carter mentioned Berlin. “Berlin?” I said, thinking she meant the one in Wicomico County. “No, not Berlin, Car. The Olympics. I think Los Angeles.”
But, as I said, Carter was smart. She was well read. She didn’t know how to pronounce Berlin the way people did off the Shore, but she knew that’s where the next Olympics were. “No, Trix, they’re in the Berlin in Germany.” She said that as if people around the world were regularly mixing up the two Berlins. But at least she had the right info.
“I didn’t know that. I just know they’re the summer after next, after we graduate.”
“And you think you can actually go to Berlin, Germany and be in them?”
“I think I got a chance. The man who kind of coaches me up at the college, Mr. Wallace Foster, he keeps my times, and he says if I keep getting better, maybe I can make it.”
“Wow,” was all Carter said.
Then I panicked. “But Carter, you gotta swear to me you’ll never tell a soul, not even Tommy. Nobody.”
Carter nodded and stuck out her hand, and very solemnly, she said, “I promise, Trixie.” Then she just shook her head. “I had no idea. When did this come over you?”
“Oh, just when I realized how fast I was.”
“A girl doesn’t wanna be known as fast,” Carter smirked.
“You know.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, when I found out, I thought that maybe to be real good at something, maybe even the best of all, that that was something not very many people could shoot for, and I’d be lettin’ myself down if I didn’t at least try. And I’d be lettin’ my Daddy down, too, if he knew.” And I misted up a little, and Carter came off her chair and put her arms around me and hugged me.
“It’s okay, Trix. I didn’t realize you were amazing.”
So I really cried some, thinking about Daddy, but after that, Teddy, after I’d actually told someone the way I felt, it committed me all the more. All the rest of the fall and the winter, all I thought about was those Eastern Interscholastics.
Mr. Foster took care of all the registration work. I believe he used the college lines to call long distance, because he had to make several calls before they allowed me to swim in the Eastern Interscholastics, and it would’ve cost him a pretty penny otherwise. You had to go through an operator for long distance then. It was terribly expensive. Just to get a long-distance call was an exciting thing. Now, I know Mr. Foster was an honest man, but let’s just say he cut a corner here when it came to getting me into the Eastern Interscholastics. It was all for a good cause, though.
It seemed like all the other swimmers were from private schools, the ones with indoor pools. Also, it was mostly boys. There were only three events for girls: the hundred-yard freestyle, the breaststroke and the backstroke. The boys, now, they even had relays.
At first they weren’t even going to let me in because I didn’t have any record to substantiate myself, except for that one meet down in Easton, and nobody had kept the times or anything there. It wasn’t sanctioned. That’s a big word for people who run these things. Sanctioned. Because they do the sanctioning. It did help that Mr. Foster was calling from a college. That gave him some authenticity, and he laid it on a little thick by saying that I was preparing for Washington College myself, which was ridiculous, because they didn’t even have a swimming team—not even for boys. But who knew that up in Philadelphia? It was a harmless enough fib. As I said, Teddy, all for the greater good.
The hardest part was getting the meet director to believe what Mr. Foster told him about my times that he’d clocked. They were too good. The meet director said, “If that time is right, she could be in the nationals.” To make sure there’d been no mistake Mr. Foster timed me again that afternoon, and I’d actually improved some, so he reported that I had even faster times. So, the Eastern Interscholastics agreed to let in Trixie Stringfellow from Chestertown High School to compete against all the swells.
The Interscholastics were held at the Penn Athletic Club pool, which was right on Rittenhouse Square, a very fancy address in Philadelphia. They gave Mr. Foster the schedule, which had the girls backstroke going off at two o’clock, so we knew we had plenty of time to drive up. Still, we left at the crack o’ dawn to be sure. We went in Mother’s car, the maroon Ford we’d gotten from the insurance to replace the car that Daddy was killed in. Carter’d been dying to watch me race, but I let her come along only if she promised—cross her heart and hope to die—not to tell another soul about it. Frankly, Teddy, I was scared to death.
Now, we got there in plenty of time, hardly past noon, but wouldn’t you know it, they’d screwed up when they told Mr. Foster that the girls backstroke would be at two o’clock. Instead, it was the breaststroke at two. The backstroke was going at twelve-thirty. And here I was still in my street clothes, and I had to pee terribly, and this man, who was the meet director, came running over and said, “Are you the girl from the Eastern Shore? Where have you been?” And so forth and so on, wailing like a banshee.
Well, Mr. Foster explained about the time confusion, but, of course, the meet director wouldn’t believe that he was the one who’d made the mistake, so he didn’t have any sympathy at all, and he just told me to go to the locker room and get into my suit if I wanted to swim. Teddy, by the time I got back to the pool there couldn’t’ve been but about two minutes before my race. All the other girls were standing there, cool as cucumbers, and here I was completely frazzled.
“I hope at least you’d peed.”
Thank you very much for that line of inquiry, but, yes, I did have time to take care of that, and, you know, the Lord works in wondrous ways. Maybe it was good that I didn’t have time to sit around and get all nervous. I didn’t even realize I’d left my bathing cap in the locker room. It was all happening so fast. I just jumped into the pool and took my position. There were six of us. The other five girls all seemed to know each other. And the gun went off, and I just pushed off and won easily. Piece o’ cake.
“You whipped their asses.”
Yes, I did—but I think we’ve beat that dead horse enough. In fact, there was a great flurry of excitement because my time was so fast. You’ve got to understand, the pool in Chestertown was just a regular old pool. This one at Rittenhouse Square was built more for competition. It created less waves and all that. So I swam faster than ever before.
“What was your time, Mom?”
Oh, I don’t remember exactly, and it gets all confusing because we swam most of our races in yards, and already back then, the races in the whole rest of the world were meters. The Olympics was all meters—and, of course, like most Americans I didn’t know a meter from Adam. Be that as it may, I think I did the hundred yards in about a minute and thirteen, maybe twelve-five. That was lickety-split for that crowd.
So Mom and Carter and Mr. Foster were all congratulating me when the meet director came bustling over an
d pulled me away for the victory ceremony. It wasn’t much, just me and the girls who finished second and third stood there by the diving board. They both had their school sweatshirts on. I just had a towel around my shoulders. And then, suddenly, out of the blue, this beautiful little young woman materialized with the ribbons. It was just ribbons, no cups or anything. But I was thrilled. And she gave out the yellow and the red, and then she handed me the blue ribbon, and I thanked her.
I was already grown to my full height, Teddy. I think I’ve shrunk a little now, but I was about five-six, and I was taller than she was, even though she had heels on. She was really snappy, though, very fashionable, in a tailored worsted suit, and just absolutely gorgeous. I could see Carter even stopped looking at all the cute boys in their bathing suits to check her out. We didn’t encounter that sort of style down on the Shore. I shook her hand, and I thought that was that, till she pulled me aside and said, “How long you been swimming, honey?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I guess all my life.”
She shook her head a little. She had a sort of a bob cut, very stylish then. Brown hair. “No, I mean how long competitively?”
“Oh,” I said, thinking back to Easton. “Since Labor Day.”
“You mean this last Labor Day? That’s all?”
“Yeah. I just took it up.”
“I was wondering why I never heard of you.” Then after she lit a cigarette with a long holder, like the one President Roosevelt used, she asked me, “How old are you?”
“Sixteen. Well, I turn seventeen next month.”
“You started swimming late.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know when you’re supposed to start.”
It was probably a pretty stupid thing to say. I was so naïve. The woman laughed, but it was a nice laugh, not mocking. “Well, most of us start younger. I won my first Nationals when I was thirteen.”
That rocked me. “No foolin’?”
“No foolin’.” She paused then. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“I’m sorry. Am I supposed to?”
“Well, they introduced me earlier, but I guess you weren’t here.”
“We just got up from the Eastern Shore.”
“Oh,” she said. It was apparent she didn’t have the foggiest where the Eastern Shore was, but she let that go and just stuck out her hand. “Well, I’m Eleanor Holm . . . Jarrett.”
“Hi. I’m Trixie Stringfellow.”
“Well, Trixie, I’m the world record holder in the hundred-meter backstroke. I won the Olympics in ’32.”
“You did? What are you doing here?”
That was another stupid question, but she only laughed nicely again. “Well, when you get to be a champion—and I can tell already, honey, you’re gonna be one—they expect you to do things.”
“Who does?”
“The stuffed shirts who run swimming. I call ’em ‘the blazers,’ ’cause they always wear blazers with fancy shields on their pockets. And you have to play ball with them, or there’s hell to pay. Of course, we’re amateurs, we’re just doing this for the love of it, so we don’t get paid, but they still expect you to do things . . . for the good of the sport.”
“Oh.”
“So I happen to be over in Atlantic City for a week. My husband is Art Jarrett. He’s a singer with the Ted Weems orchestra. You know him?”
“The band with the fellow who whistles?” She nodded. That was Ted Weems’ signature: he had a guy who just whistled along with his band. It was a weird specialty, but it worked for Ted Weems, and he milked it to death. That guy could whistle just about anything. “I’ve heard him on the radio, on the Jack Benny Canada Dry Program.”
“Well, my husband’s not the whistler, but he’s the vocalist in Ted’s band, and so you’ve probably heard him. He’s a swell singer.” Actually, Teddy, it was just the whistler I remembered, not any singer, but I certainly didn’t clarify that. However, the lady was delighted that she thought I remembered her husband, the vocalist. “We’re playing at the Claridge Hotel for a week. I sing a little myself, too. So when the blazers asked me to come over here and hand out ribbons, I agreed to do it.”
“Oh, I see.”
“Yeah, you gotta stay on the good side of the blazers.”
“I’ll remember that, Mrs.—”
“Mrs. Jarrett. But I’m just Eleanor, okay? Because if you get a little bit better, you’re gonna be swimmin’ against me before too long.”
“Really? You think so?”
“Honey, you’re that good. And you’d be even faster if you’d wear a bathing cap.”
“Oh, I know. I was so rushed when I got here I completely forgot about it and left it in the locker room.”
“Well, don’t do that again. That hair of your’s probably cost you another half-second, maybe more. Course, it didn’t make any difference against these gals, but when you start swimming nationals, that’s the difference between winning and losing.”
“I won’t forget again. I promise.”
“Okay, honey.” She started to step away, and then she turned back. “Now, I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”
“Trixie Stringfellow.”
She pondered that. I thought she was confused about my last name, because Stringfellow is an unusual name. You can just imagine some of the variations the wiseacres in school made up, including some off-color versions. But Stringfellow wasn’t the issue. Instead, she said: “That . . . Trixie. Is that your real moniker?”
“My what?”
“Your moniker? Your real name?”
“Oh no, my real name is Sydney. I’m just called Trixie. When I—” I was going to explain about how my late father gave me the name, but she interrupted.
“Sydney? Where I come from that’s a boy’s name.”
“Well, not where I come from. And it’s spelled with a y which is different from the boy Sidney.”
Eleanor considered that for a moment, and then she said, “Well, a little piece of advice. Ditch the Trixie.”
“What?”
“Honey, if you’re gonna be a champion, if you’re gonna swim in the Olympics, you don’t wanna be Trixie. Names like Toots, Babe, Chickie . . . Trixie. No offense, but you don’t want names like that when you’re standing up there and they’re playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ for you. You want a grown-up name. Not something some cheap dame gets called.”
“I never thought of that.”
“Yeah, well, if I were you, even if most people think it’s a boy’s name, from now on, I’d be Sydney.”
And you know what, Teddy? I was, from that moment on.
Well, Michael Phelps did indeed win again that night, and so Mom asked me to pop the cork on the champagne, and we raised our glasses high to him. “You mark my words,” she told me, “that boy will do even better in 2008.”
“That’s a long way off,” I said.
“Yeah, but he’s young, and you can tell how much he wants to win. That’s the way I was. And he can make the big bucks, too. It was all amateur back then. The rules were insane. The next time I saw Eleanor Holm, she told me how she could’ve made a whole lot of money in Hollywood swimming in movies, but if she swam in movies, the American Olympic Committee would declare her ineligible. Of course, that’s what everybody wanted to see, though. Everybody wanted to see Eleanor swim—especially since she couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. But she was pretty as a picture. They were always posing her in these sarong-type things and putting her next to giant clamshells to show that it was, you know, marine.”
“Prettier even than you, Mom?”
“Oh yeah. No contest.”
“Now, Mom. Is that modesty compelling you to say that?”
“Oh no, I could be as vain as the next one, sure, but Eleanor was a real doll. Ziegfield wanted her to be one of his girls on stage. Now, Teddy, all right, I could turn some heads when I had it all going for me, but nobody was giving me any movie contracts to sign. I’ll tell you, tho
ugh, we weren’t a bad-looking group, us swimmers. It wasn’t very fashionable then to be a girl athlete. They said it gave you all the wrong muscles, and a lot of people assumed we had to be dykes.” Mom paused a moment. “I know that’s out of line to say now, but I’m just quoting what people said then, you understand. They said ‘dykes.’ So I’m just quoting.”
I told Mom I understood where she was coming from.
“They also called us ‘naiads?’”
“What?”
“No, I didn’t imagine you ever heard that. It’s spelled n-a-i-a-d-s.”
“Naiads?”
“Right. First time I saw it in the newspaper, I didn’t know what to think, and I didn’t want to ask anybody for fear of looking like a naïve little girl from the Eastern Shore—”
“Which you were.”
“Which I was. But I suspect there were a lot of sophisticates from Park Avenue who didn’t know what in the Sam Hill naiads were either.”
“Well, I give up.”
“I looked it up in the dictionary. It turns out to be some kinda water nymph in Greek mythology. I’ve sorta forgotten now, but I think we naiads were supposed to guard the brooks and rivers and such from ogres and trolls and what-have-you. There, I’d been a naiad all my life swimming in the Chester River, and I never even knew it. I think the newspapers thought it was some kind of compliment. They always called the men swimmers ‘mermen.’”
“But they didn’t call you ‘mermaids’?”
“No, I think they thought that would be an insult to mermaids naming a bunch of dykes after them. So we were naiads.”
“But the naiads weren’t insulted?”
“Evidently not. But I’ll tell you, Teddy, it was a bad rap they gave us. There was this prejudice that all girl athletes had to be ugly. And that was nonsense. Lemme tell you, Eleanor wasn’t the only looker in our crowd.”
“Would you get the silver medal?”
“For looks?” She rubbed her chin very thoughtfully. “No, but maybe the bronze. We had a diver named Dorothy Poynton. She’d won a gold at Los Angeles, and after Berlin—she got the gold there, too—Dorothy figured to make hay while the sun shone. She had all sorts of contracts signed to dive professionally. Dorothy didn’t even want to be photographed in our team suits. After she’d finish diving, she’d rush back and change fast into a real snappy number, with this kind of bandanna she wore, and then she’d come out and pose for the photography boys. And before she dived, she’d sashay all around the pool in gold lamé high heels. She was very sexy.”
