The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Read online

  The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh

  The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh

  The Greatest Female Athlete of Her Time

  Sheldon Anderson

  Rowman & Littlefield

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield

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  Copyright © 2017 by Rowman & Littlefield

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Anderson, Sheldon R., 1951– author.

  Title: The forgotten legacy of Stella Walsh : the greatest female athlete of her time / Sheldon Anderson.

  Description: Lanham, Maryland : Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016058110 (print) | LCCN 2017002523 (ebook) | ISBN 9781442277557 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781442277564 (electronic)

  Subjects: LCSH: Walsh, Stella, 1911-1980. | Women track and field athletes—Poland—Biography. | Women track and field athletes—United States—Biography. | Olympic athletes—Poland—Biography. | Polish American athletes—Biography. | Intersex athletes—Poland—Biography. | Intersex athletes—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC GV1061.15.W37 A64 2017 (print) | LCC GV1061.15.W37 (ebook) | DDC 796.42092—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058110

  ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: From Russian Poland to Cleveland’s Slavic Village

  Chapter 2: Cleveland’s “Twentieth-Century Flyer”

  Chapter 3: Stanisława Walasiewicz Runs for Poland

  Chapter 4: Winning Olympic Gold and a Challenge from Missouri

  Chapter 5: Stella Walsh and Helen Stephens at the Nazi Olympics

  Chapter 6: The Greatest Woman Athlete

  Chapter 7: The Move to Los Angeles and an Arranged Marriage

  Chapter 8: Back to Cleveland and the Murder

  Chapter 9: Saving Stella Walsh

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I have many people to thank for making this book possible. The generous hospitality of Chris and Karen Elzey, and Betsy and Paige Piper-Bach, facilitated my research at the Library of Congress. Sean Martin and other archivists at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland were very helpful, as were the librarians at the LA84 Foundation Library in Los Angeles and the University of Minnesota Immigration Center. Miami University supported my research with travel funds to these libraries. Trina Galauner of the Polish Genealogical Society of Greater Cleveland provided key documents on Stella Walsh’s early life. Matt Tullis of Ashland University generously shared his research, as did filmmaker Rob Lucas. Jeff and Linda Kimball offered crucial feedback on the biography. Grace Butcher shared invaluable personal insights on her relationship with Walsh. I owe a special thanks to Marilyn Elzey, who proofread the manuscript, and Gracia Lindberg, who did the cartography. Finally, I am forever grateful to my wife, Kristie; son, O. Maxwell; and daughter, Lauren, for their enduring love and support.

  Prologue

  On August 2, 1932, the six finalists in the women’s Olympic 100 meters, two Americans, one Canadian, one German, and one Pole, warmed up on the cinder track of the Los Angeles Coliseum. The magnificent arena, an architectural marvel of neo-classicism, had been built in 1923, as a football venue for the University of Southern California, and still serves that purpose today. Before the Olympics, the Coliseum had been expanded to hold more than 100,000 spectators, the largest capacity of any stadium in the world. The crowd was relatively sparse that day, but all eyes were on the starting line as the sprinters dug out their footholds with small trowels.

  This was only the second time that women’s track and field had been included on the Olympic program. At the 1928 Amsterdam Games, women competed in five athletic events: the 800 meters, the 4 × 100-meter relay, the high jump, the discus, and the 100 meters. Sixteen-year-old Chicagoan Betty Robinson was the surprise winner in the 100 meters in Amsterdam, and would have defended her Olympic title at Los Angeles but had been severely injured in a plane crash a year earlier.

  With Robinson out, the favorite on this day was a muscular, curly haired twenty-one-year-old from Cleveland, Ohio. Stanisława Walasiewicz did not have USA on her shirt, but rather the Polish eagle in the red and white colors of her native country. As an infant, Stanisława had come with her mother to the United States from a little village in Russian Poland and had never been naturalized as a U.S. citizen. It was an unlikely odyssey for a girl born in the Russian Empire to compete in America’s greatest sports arena in the world’s biggest athletic spectacle.1

  At the starter’s gun, the diminutive Canadian Hilde Strike broke first off the line, but Walasiewicz’s long strides enabled her to catch Strike at the halfway mark. The local favorite, Californian Wilhelmina von Bremen, fell off the world-record pace as Strike strained to hold off the bigger Pole. Strike and Walasiewicz hit the tape in a near-dead heat. The timers clocked both runners in 11.9 seconds. The judges huddled for several minutes before declaring Walasiewicz the winner. Von Bremen finished third. At the awards ceremony, the winners climbed onto the three perches of the medals podium. Walasiewicz stood on the top tier as the fastest woman in the world, a gold medal and world record in hand. She was feted in Poland and her Polish American community in Cleveland, but many American sports fans were disappointed that she had not won gold for the United States.

  Walasiewicz’s victory at the Los Angeles Olympic Games was her signature achievement, but it was only the beginning of a long and incomparable career. For a quarter-century, she was the best all-around female athlete in the world; in addition to the Olympic gold medal, she set at least fifty world records and won forty-one U.S. Track and Field National Championships. Walasiewicz was the first woman to run the 100-yard dash in less than eleven seconds. She was also one of premier female basketball and softball players of her time, and in 1951, the Helms Athletic Foundation in Los Angeles named her the “greatest woman athlete” of the first half of the twentieth century.

  On a cold wintry night in Cleveland, in 1980, Walasiewicz went shopping at a strip mall not far from her house in the Polish neighborhood where she had lived for most of her life. In the parking lot, two local thugs brandished a gun and demanded her money. She tried to grab the gun and was shot in the stomach. She died at the hospital that night at the age of sixty-nine. Clevelanders were stunned by the news of the murder of their local hero, but her death was barely noticed throughout the rest of the country. Newspapers in Poland, where she was bo
rn and the country for which she had won her Olympic gold medal and numerous European championships, briefly mentioned the tragedy.

  Three days later, Walasiewicz was laid to rest at nearby Calvary Cemetery, the largest Catholic cemetery in Cleveland. There is no sign at Calvary directing visitors to the grave of the Olympic champion. There is no prominent gravestone marking the spot, so no one would stumble upon her by accident. The site is marked by a small, weathered, gray stone slab, slowly sinking into the soft earth. In the winter, snow covers the modest marker, fallen leaves hide it in the autumn, and in the summer the grass creeps up over it, almost obliterating the words.

  The inscription “Olympic Champion” at the bottom of the marker is almost eroded away, a sober reminder of Walasiewicz’s forgotten place in American sports history. The three names on the memorial hint at her complicated, multilayered identity. She was christened Stanisława Walasiewiczówna in Poland,2 but on a 1930 work permit application she gave her name upon arriving in the United States in 1912, as Stefania Walasiewicz. Her family called her Stasia, but she was known to friends and to the American public as Stella Walsh, and she often signed her sports memorabilia “Stella Walsh Walasiewiczowna.” After a brief marriage to Californian Harry Olson in 1956, for many years she used the name Stella Walsh Olson. Any allusion to that curious episode in her life does not appear on the gravestone.

  The inscription on Stella Walsh’s gravestone.

  Walsh’s story leads down intersecting paths of national allegiance, ethnic loyalty, and gender identity. She spent most of her life in Cleveland but lived in Warsaw in the 1930s and Los Angeles in the 1950s. She received financial support from numerous funding sources and represented more than a dozen American and Polish athletic clubs. She was a Polish citizen for the first half of her life and a U.S. citizen for the second.

  Stella Walsh’s modest grave marker in Calvary Cemetery in Cleveland. Author photo.

  The prominence of the Olympic rings on the grave marker point to the central role that sports played in Walsh’s life. The modern Olympics, reconstituted in Athens in 1896, was one of the first truly international institutions of the early twentieth century. Walsh was one of the first athletes, man or woman, to take advantage of this new, globalized world of sports. She competed in the Olympics in Los Angeles and in Berlin in 1936, and in hundreds of track and field meets throughout the United States and Canada. She competed for Poland in the 1932 and 1936 Olympics but was estranged from Poland’s Communist government after the war. She never wore Polish colors at the Olympics again. Walsh was eligible to try for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team in 1956, but age caught up with her and she did not qualify for the Melbourne Games. Before and after World War II, she crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean to run in competitions throughout Europe. Walsh was the original “Globetrotter.”

  Walsh was also a pioneer of women’s sports, but the fame of her contemporaries—swimmer Gertrude Ederle, aviator Amelia Earhart, tennis great Helen Wills, and Babe Didrikson—dwarf Walsh’s memory. Didrikson also won two gold medals and a silver at the Los Angeles Olympics. She went on to become the best female golfer of her time and the most recognizable name in American women’s sports.

  Few people outside of the Polish American community in Cleveland remember Stella Walsh, and that community is rapidly disintegrating. As Washington Post journalist Paul Farhi wrote in 2008, after Walsh’s retirement in the late 1950s, she was “all but forgotten.” After her murder in 1980, the memory of one of America’s greatest female athletes was buried with her.

  Walsh’s life in Poland, Cleveland, and Los Angeles is remembered in these pages. It is a saga of Polish American immigrants, the Olympic Games, and women’s struggle for a place in the world of sports.

  1

  From Russian Poland to Cleveland’s Slavic Village

  The teachers decided my name was a tongue twister, so they changed it.

  —Stanisława Walasiewicz, on teachers at South High School calling her Stella Walsh

  The search for Stella Walsh begins thousands of miles away from her lifelong home on Clement Street in the Polish section of south Cleveland. On April 3, 1911, in the tiny Russian-Polish village of Wierzchownia—about fifty miles east of Toruń and one hundred miles northwest of Warsaw—eighteen-year-old Weronica (Ucinski) Walasiewicz gave birth to her first child. It was a girl, christened Stanisława Margaret Walasiewiczówna. She was probably born in the Walasiewicz house without any doctor present. Most references list Poland as Stanisława’s birthplace, but the Polish state did not exist at the time. She was born a subject of Russian tsar Nicholas II.

  Weronica’s husband was not there to witness the birth of his daughter. In the fall of 1910, twenty-year-old Julian Walasiewicz had taken a train bound for Germany, leaving his pregnant young wife behind. On October 28, in Hamburg, Julian boarded the Graf Waldersee, a steamship of the Hamburg-Amerika line. Łukasz Musial, the father of the greatest Polish American baseball player in history, Stanislaus Musial, had left Hamburg earlier that year on the same ship. After Germany lost World War I, the U.S. Navy took the liner as war booty, and the USS Graf Waldersee became a troop transport. Julian was on the ship’s first voyage to the port of Philadelphia, where he disembarked on November 10. Julian’s brother Bolesław had arrived in the United States a year earlier and was living in a small house on Warsaw Street in the heart of Cleveland’s Polish “Warszawa” neighborhood. Julian boarded a train to Ohio and moved in with his brother.1

  Julian and Bolesław Walasiewicz were among the hundreds of thousands of Poles who left the Russian Empire at the turn of the century. Life in Russia presented few prospects. The dream of all Poles before World War I was the resurrection of their once-great state, but that seemed a remote possibility. The seventeenth-century Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had been one of the largest and most important countries in Eastern Europe. Polish king Jan Sobieski is credited with leading an army that lifted the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, ending the Turkish threat to Central Europe. Poland was also the proud Roman Catholic outpost sandwiched between Protestant Prussia and Orthodox Russia. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the weakness of the Polish central government, noble privilege, and the great power intrigue had enabled Russia, Prussia, and Austria to carve up the Polish polity in three partitions (1772, 1792, and 1795). Poland was gone for nearly 125 years.

  The link between the United States and Poland is the strongest of the countries of Eastern Europe. Polish Americans comprise the largest ethnic group from that region; Julian found a welcoming Polish community in Cleveland. Denied their political freedom at the same time the American colonies were gaining theirs from Great Britain, Poles looked to the American Revolution and French Revolution as inspiration in their quest for the return of the Polish state. Following the lead of the American and French revolutionaries, Poles identified themselves with a tradition of fighting against despotic rule. They touted the democratic character of the Commonwealth, although only the Polish nobility was represented in the Commonwealth’s Sejm (parliament), and the lack of a powerful monarch and an effective central government were fatal weaknesses. The Polish state became an easy target for its expansionist neighbors.

  Poles were also proud of the progressive Constitution of May 3, 1791, which was a desperate attempt to establish a stronger constitutional monarchy and fend off the complete dismemberment of Poland. After the Russian-Polish War of 1792 led to the Second Partition, Polish general Tadeusz Kościuszko, who had fought with the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War, led a failed rebellion against the Russians.

  The key roles played by Kościuszko and fellow Polish officer Count Casimir Pułaski in the American Revolutionary War cemented the close relationship between Poles and the United States. Chicago has the largest Polish American community in the country, and every March the city and the state of Illinois celebrate Casimir Pułaski Day. Cleveland al
so holds a Pułaski Day in the fall.

  Russian Poland in 1911. Map by Gracia Lindberg.

  The many border changes in Eastern Europe in a span of two centuries created multilayered national identities among the people there, including the Walasiewicz family. Poles, whether Catholic or Jew, were also Austrian, Prussian, or Russian. Wierzchownia had been part of Prussia before Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. At the Congress of Vienna, the great powers changed the boundary of Prussia and Russia, and the village became part of Russian-administered Congress Poland. Congress Poland enjoyed a modicum of autonomy until the failed Polish uprising against Russia in 1830, when Wierzchownia and the rest of Congress Poland came under direct tsarist rule.

  The changing borders and governments did not stifle a strong sense of Polish identity and patriotism; on the contrary, in the face of increasing German and Russian oppression Polish national consciousness deepened. In the 1870s, German chancellor Otto von Bismarck began a so-called Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church, giving free rein for Protestant Germans to discriminate against devout Catholic Poles. German instructors replaced Polish priests in schools, and in 1904, the government mandated that religious instruction be conducted in German, further antagonizing the Polish population. Berlin tried to Germanize Polish areas by providing subsidies for Germans to buy out Polish landowners. Polish self-help organizations mobilized to enable Poles to keep their land and maintain their cultural institutions.

  Although Wierzchownia was only a day’s horseback ride from the German border, life was much harder for the young Walasiewicz family in the Russian Empire. Polish peasants working the unyielding soil scratched out a meager living. Russian industrialization and urbanization lagged behind the other great European powers, limiting the opportunities for peasants to get off the land to work in towns and cities. Standards of living were higher and educational opportunities were much greater in Germany, where the GDP per capita in 1870 was double that of Russia. Only 15 percent of Russians were literate in 1870, compared with an 80 percent literacy rate in Germany. Julian Walasiewicz was an illiterate farm laborer with few prospects. Like Stella Walsh, most of the famous Polish expatriates in the early twentieth century fled Russian Poland.