Fast Girls

by Elise Hooper

  Babe married one of her early golfing partners, George Zaharias, but after a dozen years, she began a relationship with Betty Dodd, another professional golfer. Dodd moved in with Babe and George and lived with them for the last six years of Babe’s life.

  In 1956, competing and winning significant golf tournaments and working to raise cancer awareness right up to the end of her life, Babe succumbed to colon cancer at the age of forty-two.

  In her New York Times obituary, it was noted that though she had once greeted opponents with taunts about beating them, as she aged, she began encouraging and supporting other young women on the golfing circuit.

  Acknowledgments

  THIS BOOK WOULD NEVER HAVE REACHED THE FINISH line without a fantastic group of teammates, coaches, and fans. Librarians and archivists played a critical role in helping me locate information about the women in this story. Thank you to Marge Loitz of the Village of Thornton Historical Society, Lily Mysona of the Malden Public Library, Kevin Leonard at Northwestern University Library, Kristi Sievert at William Woods University, and Tatyana Shinn, Laura Jolley, Heather Richmond, and Elizabeth Engel at the Columbia Research Center of the State Historical Society of Missouri in Columbia.

  I’m sure it’s strange to see a familiar beloved figure fictionalized, and I appreciate the goodwill the families and friends of these women have extended toward me. A heartfelt thank-you to Sharon Kinney Hanson, Brook Doire, and Amy Hicks for their passion and firsthand knowledge about these pioneering women track stars. I’m also grateful to Glenn Stout for championing Louise Stokes and generously sharing his research with me.

  This story’s success relied upon the trusty counsel of early readers. Kerri Maher, S. J. Sindu, Jenni L. Walsh, Nyamekye Waliyaya, and Kelleen Cummings—thank you very much for your time, insight, and encouragement. I’m also thankful for Keely Platte, Madison Ostrander, and Crystal Patriarche at Booksparks.

  My agent, Barbara Braun, read many early drafts of this novel, and her thoughtful feedback and support have been invaluable. My brilliant editor, Lucia Macro, saw the potential in Betty, Helen, and Louise from the first moment I mentioned them, and her wise advice and guidance has made all the difference. I’m forever indebted to the amazing team at William Morrow—Liate Stehlik, Molly Waxman, Asanté Simons, Jessica Lyons, Jennifer Hart, Rachel Meyers, Owen Corrigan, Lainey Mays, and Virginia Stanley.

  My friends and family have been the best cheering squad, and I feel fortunate every day for their love. Dave, Kate, and Cookie, you are my gold medals—thank you.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the Author

  * * *

  Meet Elise Hooper

  About the Book

  * * *

  A Conversation with Elise Hooper

  A Note on Sources

  About the Author

  Meet Elise Hooper

  A native New Englander, Elise spent several years writing for television and online news outlets before getting an M.A. and teaching high school literature and history. She now lives in Seattle with her husband and two daughters. Previous novels include The Other Alcott and Learning to See.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  About the Book

  A Conversation with Elise Hooper

  Q: How did you discover this story about Betty, Helen, and Louise?

  A: When my younger daughter, an avid swimmer, was in fourth grade, she chose Gertrude Ederle for a biography report. Do you know who Ederle is? I didn’t. She was a teenager from Manhattan who won several Olympic medals in 1924 and became the first woman to swim the English Channel. Ederle’s story intrigued me and led me to wonder about the stories of pioneering women athletes.

  I should back up here and explain something else. When I was seven years old, I went to the Ice Capades at the Boston Garden and became captivated by Peggy Fleming. My family and I hadn’t even made it to the parking lot before I was begging to take ice-skating lessons and setting my sights on becoming an Olympic figure skater. It took me several years and many hours of practice in a nearby rink to figure out a heartbreaking truth: I was too tall to be an ice skater. (There were other reasons I wasn’t destined to become an Olympian, but let’s just go with the height issue.) Though I hung up my ice skates, I never quite let go of my Olympic ambitions. I started running, skiing, and playing field hockey and tennis. Each time I picked up a new sport, I fantasized about going to the Olympics, but the hope became a little more distant. During my midtwenties, I set myself to fulfilling another longtime dream, qualifying for the Boston Marathon, and I ran it in 2001. Over a decade later, I played on tennis teams that made it to the finals of the USTA League National Championships—twice. Still, none of these accomplishments was anything close to the Olympics.

  It was at this point, sitting on my living room couch and reading about women Olympians, that my forty-year-old self decided that my best shot at going to the Olympics would be through writing a novel about athletes. Through my research, I came across the story of Betty Robinson and couldn’t believe I’d never heard of this woman. Running was a world I understood. Soon I found Helen, Louise, Tidye, and all of these other early Olympians and knew in my gut that I’d found the subject of my new novel. I would get to the Olympics after all—three of them, in fact—just not the way I’d imagined as a kid. But that was okay. Life is full of surprises.

  Q: Why did you choose to write this book as a novel instead of a history?

  A: Let me be clear about something: I’m a novelist, not a historian. Historical figures and events inspire my imagination to go to work creating and developing characters and putting them into action. For me, real life is a jumping-off point for creativity. When I started telling people that I was working on a book about women Olympians from 1936, I tended to be met with looks of confusion. “I didn’t realize women were even in the Olympics back then,” friends would say. That was all the confirmation I needed that this book was a good idea, so I decided to make it my mission to introduce readers to these women Olympians and their amazing stories, but the historical record contains many gaps and inconsistencies because their experiences and accomplishments weren’t taken very seriously and documented. I used old newspapers to piece together what happened, along with several biographies and documentaries on these athletes. All the unknowns made for a fertile landscape to craft a novel.

  For example, aside from general biographical information, little can be found about Louise’s life. When I first started reading about her hometown of Malden, Massachusetts, I discovered that the town has a World War I monument, erected in 1920, but in 2017, historians determined that the list of names on the commemorative plaque was incomplete, and a movement got under way to create a new monument to recognize all the veterans who had been left off—African Americans, women, and others. Reading about this monument led me to create the Uncle Freddie character and imagine the challenges that a young Louise would face.

  Q: So what changes did you make from the real history of these women?

  A: Aside from the timing of Betty’s plane crash and the very little I could find about Louise’s life, I followed the biographical milestones of these real women’s lives and used them to create scenes, imagining the dialogue and the inner lives of these characters. People from this generation didn’t tend to talk about their feelings, so I had to imagine what they felt about most of their victories and disappointments.

  One of the most complicated sections of this story to figure out was how the women’s relay team was selected for the 1932 Olympics. The accounts of what happened at the Brown Palace Hotel, the encounter with Babe Didrikson on the train, and the existence of the NAACP’s telegram to the women’s track and field coaching staff were confirmed by numerous sources, and all of these incidents led me to believe that racism played a forceful role in deciding which four women would run in the relay. The fact that many of the team portraits in Los Angeles did not include Louise and Tidye supporte
d this view. By studying old reports, newspaper accounts, and photos and employing common sense, I was able to assemble a theory about how the Olympic Committee approached selecting the women’s relay team. In short, its process was inconsistent, subject to political influence, and beset by racism and gender discrimination.

  Without twenty-four-hour television news and social media, people in the 1920s and 1930s were not always as aware of what was happening beyond their local community, so my portrayal of Betty as an advocate for women athletes following the 1928 Olympics is exaggerated, but I wanted to depict the debate that was happening firsthand through a character. Similarly, news of the potential boycott of the Berlin Olympics was widespread, but unlike Jesse Owens, none of these women went on the record to describe their position on the topic, so I did my best to show the range of feelings the athletes might have felt about the prospect of not competing. Of all the women, Helen was the most knowledgeable about the topic and had read Mein Kampf prior to visiting Germany. The language of the boycott letters included in this novel is quoted from the original one she collected during her travels in 1936.

  Unfortunately, historical events don’t always happen in the order that best suits a novelist’s desire for a perfect story arc, so I altered the timing of some events to fit within a tighter narrative of braiding three characters’ journeys together. As mentioned earlier, I moved Betty’s plane crash up a year to escalate the drama leading to the 1932 Olympics. Additionally, the 1936 party on Pfaueninsel Island happened at the close of the Olympics, but I moved it to the opening to build dramatic tension about the risks these women faced and to end the story with the excitement of the final relay race. To the best of my knowledge, Ruth Haslie had no Jewish heritage, but I wanted to bring the issue of the threat Nazis posed to German Jewry closer to the American athletes. The scene during which Helen met Hitler is based on their real encounter, detailed in Helen’s Olympic diary and described to her biographer, but his parting warning to Helen to be careful is fictional.

  Adolf Hitler requested to meet with Helen Stephens after she won the 100-meter sprint at the 1936 Olympics. (William Woods University Records [CA6180], The State Historical Society of Missouri, Manuscript Collection)

  Q: Can you describe your research process?

  A: I always start off by reading everything I can find on a topic: books, academic and journalistic articles, newspapers—all of it. I take notes and start imagining my characters and their journeys. Librarians, historical society archivists, and journalists emailed me scanned yearbook pages and hard-to-find old newspaper stories, the primary sources that helped me flesh out these characters. I also traveled to the places that shaped these women. Reading Helen’s handwritten diary and holding her old track shoes, finding the train tracks that Louise first ran on (now almost completely paved over in a strip mall’s parking lot!)—all of these things provided details and sensory experiences that felt critical to writing this story.

  Old newspapers helped me understand the people and events of the times, both big and small, and also to get an ear for the language and gossipy tone of the 1920s and ’30s so I could write the newspaper articles, letters, and telegrams in this novel.

  The 1936 women’s track and field team aboard the S.S. Manhattan, en route to Berlin, July 1936. Standing (left to right): Fred Steers (manager), Martha Worst, Annette Rogers, Kathlyn Kelley, Gertrude Wilhelmsen, Louise Stokes, Elizabeth Robinson, Dee Boeckmann (coach). Kneeling: Evelyn Ferrara, Helen Stephens, Harriet Bland, Alice Arden. Sitting: Tidye Pickett, Simone Schaller, Josephine Warren, Olive Hasenfus, Betty Burch. Missing: Anne Vrana O’Brien, Katherine Dunnette (chaperone). (Helen Stephens Collection [C3552], The State Historical Society of Missouri, Manuscript Collection)

  A Note on Sources

  I must have read through hundreds of articles on Newspapers.com to help me flesh out this novel. This website allowed me to access stories from all over the country dating back to the 1920s and ’30s and read about everything from FDR’s political rallies in Chicago to the women competing in rolling pin throwing contests outside of Boston.

  The oral histories at LA84.org should be read by anyone with an interest in Olympic history. I paid special attention to those by Evelyne Hall Adams, Maybelle Reichardt Hopkins, Simone Schaller Kirin, Jean Shiley Newhouse, Anne Vrana O’Brien, and Evelyn Furtsch Ojeda to help me build my imagined world of Olympians. The official Olympic reports of 1928, 1932, and 1936 offer photos, maps, engineering plans, and very detailed accounts of everything related to these Olympics.

  I also read the following books and highly recommend all of these to better understand the women who inspired Fast Girls and the times in which they lived:

  Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August, by Oliver Hilmes

  Black American Women in Olympic Track and Field, by Michael D. Davis

  Fire on the Track: Betty Robinson and the Triumph of the Early Olympic Women, by Roseanne Montillo

  The First Lady of Olympic Track: The Life and Times of Betty Robinson, by Joe Gergen

  The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh: The Greatest Female Athlete of Her Time, by Sheldon Anderson

  The Life of Helen Stephens: The Fulton Flash, by Sharon Kinney Hanson

  Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936, by David Clay Large

  A Proper Spectacle: Women Olympians, 1900–1936, by Stephanie Daniels and Anita Tedder

  Their Day in the Sun: Women of the 1932 Olympics, by Doris H. Pieroth

  Yes, She Can! Women’s Sports Pioneers, by Glenn Stout

  And last but certainly not least, there are several amazing documentaries on this subject, including Olympic Pride, American Prejudice. This film can be easily accessed through multiple video streaming sites and covers the contributions of African American athletes during the 1936 Olympics. I also recommend PBS’s The Nazi Games: Berlin 1936, and of course, Olympia, by Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, serves as a haunting visual primary source on the Berlin Olympics.

  Advance Praise for Fast Girls by Elise Hooper

  “Fast Girls is a compelling, thrilling look at what it took to be a female Olympian in prewar America. Rich with historical detail and brilliant storytelling, the book follows three athletes on their path to compete—and win—in a man’s world. Brava to Elise Hooper for bringing these inspiring heroines to the wide audience they so richly deserve.”

  —Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics and The House Girl

  “Fast Girls is a high-speed, heart-pounding romp as ambitious as its trio of track-star heroines. Golden girl Betty, underestimated African American phenom Louise, and awkward farm-girl Helen make three very different heroines, but they are united by fast feet and big dreams. Their fight to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics in the face of sexism, racism, and the rising tide of fascism makes for poignant, inspirational reading. A gold medal read from Elise Hooper!”

  —Kate Quinn, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author

  “In Fast Girls, a novel about three remarkable women and their journey to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Elise Hooper seamlessly interweaves history and fiction, and the results are kinetic, mesmerizing, and terrifically entertaining. Her frank depiction of the obstacles faced by her heroines, all real-life champions, brings to stunning life three women whose stories have been long overlooked but whose courage and groundbreaking achievements have endured. This is a wonderful novel from an accomplished historian and ferociously talented writer, and it will surely appeal to anyone with an interest in the pioneering women who paved the rocky and uphill way for today’s female Olympians.”

  —Jennifer Robson, author of The Gown: A Novel of the Royal Wedding

  “Fast Girls will hurl you down the track of American history and have you rooting for some of the toughest underdogs ever to aspire to Olympic gold. Three of the fastest girls in history finally get their day in the sun, and we get to bask in their glory. I couldn’t put this one down.”

  —Kerri Maher, author of The Kenne
dy Debutante and The Girl in White Gloves

  “Based on the real lives of three female Olympians in the 1920s and ’30s, Fast Girls is a moving novel of strength, courage, and ultimately perseverance. Expertly researched and deftly crafted, this novel is a fascinating portrait of what it took to survive and thrive as a female athlete at this moment in history. I was absolutely captivated by the lives, struggles, and triumphs of Betty, Helen, and Louise.”

  —Jillian Cantor, USA Today bestselling author of The Lost Letter and In Another Time

  “An exhilarating journey that begins with the humble beginnings of promising female runners and culminates in their inspiring and obstacle-filled quests for Olympic glory. I fell in love with the characters and their stories of determination, hope, friendship, grit, and the strength of the human spirit. Perfect for readers who want to be motivated by strong women and their pursuit of seemingly impossible dreams.”

  —Susie Orman Schnall, author of The Subway Girls and We Came Here to Shine

  Also by Elise Hooper

  Learning to See

  The Other Alcott

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.