Fire on the Track

by Roseanne Montillo

  The proposal to host the Olympics in Los Angeles was first presented at a meeting of the Community Development Association (CDA). Max Ihmden detailed the free publicity the city would receive and outlined the financial boom that would follow. While the members of the CDA entertained the idea, the reality was that most of them had no clue how to proceed. How could a city secure an invitation? That’s when William May Garland entered the picture.

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  Its distinctive urban sprawl made Los Angeles unlike most cities that had hosted the Olympics. Its great distance—nearly six thousand miles—from the nearest European city made it less attractive not only to the IOC officials but also to the athletes who would eventually participate in the Games. In 1904, St. Louis had played host to the Games, the first time the Olympics had been held outside Europe, and those Games, as many Europeans and reporters had predicted, had turned out to be a dismal failure.

  Initially Chicago had won the bid for 1904, but at the time St. Louis was in the process of organizing the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, to be held around the same time that Chicago intended to host the Olympics; it seemed inconvenient, as alongside the Exposition St. Louis planned to host sporting activities that would likely mimic the Olympics. Arguments ensued among St. Louis and Chicago’s officials, each city unwilling to back down, until Pierre de Coubertin became involved in the scuffle and decided to strip Chicago of its privileges, awarding the Games to St. Louis, with disastrous results.

  The failure of those Games was attributed to several things: because the Olympics were held in conjunction with the Exposition, the sports events were demoted to being some sort of minor attraction, the attendees preferring to spend their time in other venues. The weather also played a vital role, the oppressive heat creating dust clouds as tall as tornadoes, preventing runners and other athletes from performing at their best. Coubertin, as well as other IOC officials, were enraged by all this, vowing that the Olympics would thenceforth remain on European soil.

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  Still, California was now a more attractive location than St. Louis. In the 1920s, it had been enjoying unprecedented prosperity, its abundance of sunshine and moderate temperatures adding to its good fortune. Economically, the state was booming, and real estate was at its peak. And with Hollywood churning out talkies with a speed that was matched only by its imagination, the city seemed to have no limit as to what it could accomplish. But Los Angeles officials were also aware of the strikes against it as a host city, including the fact that it did not have a large stadium to host major sporting events (although plans for building one were in the works). Regardless of those apparent inadequacies, as the 1920 Games in Antwerp neared, Garland boarded a ship and made his way to Europe to bid on behalf of Los Angeles. In his briefcase he held proposals for bids on the 1924 and 1928 Games, unaware that they had already been committed to Paris and Amsterdam, respectively. Arriving in Antwerp, he was unable to hide his disappointment from Coubertin when he learned this. But despite the failure in St. Louis, Coubertin assured Garland he believed that Los Angeles’s plans had merit.

  Coubertin was the only one to feel that way. Other members of the IOC, mostly European men, were not keen on Los Angeles. City officials would have to relieve the issues they’d already identified quickly; but Garland, backed by Coubertin, took pains to assure them that that would be done. He promised the Olympics would not be held in conjunction with anything else—no other fair or exhibition was scheduled to take place. The Games would be an individual entity, as they had always been. Garland informed the IOC members that the CDA had agreed on the need to bolster the city’s international sporting reputation, and settled on a plan to build a stadium that would hold at least seventy-five thousand people. The athletic arena, called the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, was located in Exposition Park, just a few blocks from the campus of the University of Southern California. In May 1923, Los Angeles finally secured the invitation to host the Tenth Olympic Games.

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  As preparations for the Olympics churned ahead, a large black cloud loomed: the stock market crashed and unemployment soared; soup kitchens sprang up everywhere. Resentment of sporting pageantry grew, and anger toward officials who were spending so much money on the Games’ preparations instead of helping the needy and the hungry reached its peak. Posters appeared around Los Angeles crying out, “Groceries Not Games!”; others were already plastered near the Coliseum proclaiming, “Olympics Are Outrageous!” as army officers were called in to keep the crowds at bay. It was not the most conducive backdrop for an Olympic spectacle.

  Despite the hardship of the Depression, the preparations continued, and by 1931, as the Games neared their starting date, a degree of caution and pessimism about the new American dream trickled in. In view of the hard times, protesters urged the governor of California, James Rolph, to put an end to the Games. The climate was one of cynicism, not one of big dreams, they agreed; it was time to figure out how to make ends meet, where to find work, how to fill a belly with food, not to jump around a track or swim in a pool.

  Thus, it was not surprising that by April 1932, just three months shy of the scheduled July 30 opening ceremonies, the total number of tickets sold for the events was nearly zero. If that were to continue, IOC organizers would surely be unwilling to return to the United States anytime soon.

  Planners strategized, trying to find ways to cut costs not only for American athletes traveling to Los Angeles but also for those coming from Asia, Europe, and South America. They arranged for rail and ship discounts to offset travel costs and found the best inexpensive accommodations in order to save on budgets.

  The press finally began its coverage of the forthcoming Games, dedicating columns of space to them not only in the sports sections but also in the travel and society pages. Intimate profiles and in-depth interviews detailing the lives of the more prominent athletes were published. Bookies took bets on who would win, whose stride would be longer, if romance would blossom between any of the athletes, whether any of the women would earn a contract from Hollywood.

  Despite the early strikes against it, by the middle of July, the community seemed to line up behind the Olympics. In a three-day period, nearly forty thousand tickets were snatched up, followed by more than thirty thousand the following two days. Olympic fever was in full swing, and by July 20, ten days prior to the opening ceremonies, ticket sales had reached 1.3 million.

  Aside from all that, the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games had another matter to deal with that was really out of its hands: the weather. The temperature had risen to 100 degrees Fahrenheit and was expected to climb higher, once again affecting athletes unaccustomed to extreme heat. Dehydration, muscle cramps, nausea, fatigue, dizziness, and nosebleeds were all health issues medics feared they’d have to contend with—and those were the less serious ailments.

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  Back in Evanston, the female athletes began to make their way to Los Angeles on the evening of July 16. Fred Steers, their manager, believed it was the best women’s team ever (albeit only the second ever assembled): “The United States Women’s Track and Field of 1932 is the strongest of its kind in the history of athletics…easily outclassing the combined Women’s Track and Field teams of the world,” he wrote in a report.

  Coach George Vreeland agreed. As he stepped onto the train, he had to admit (at the very least to himself) that he was anticipating the next phase of an exhilarating journey, however bittersweet. He had hoped that a few of his Newark team’s athletes would qualify, but none had. Thus, all the athletes he was to coach for the international Games were new to him.

  He had heard rumors about a handful of them—one in particular, who was now heading into the Games with a lot of hype associated with her name and who apparently felt the need to journey across the country running up and down the train performing all sorts of exercises, be they jumping jacks or splits. When she tired of that, Babe either blew away at her harmonica or whistled tunes from her
home state of Texas: long, bitter, mournful cowboy ballads that irritated those who were trying to rest. Although he hadn’t coached Babe before, Vreeland reasoned, and perhaps did not entirely agree with how she had behaved in Chicago, at least he felt secure in the knowledge that she would be bringing home a gold medal or two. Those wins would make up for the loss his Newark girls had suffered in Chicago.

  As the train sped west, each athlete and coach cocooned in his or her thoughts, they were met along the tracks by waving fans who had noticed the large visible sign trumpeting “The US Olympic Team” on the side of the car, proudly announcing itself in every town it passed through. For most of them, it was a new and overwhelming experience.

  On reaching Denver, Babe was whisked away to radio and print interviews, while the rest of the team was taken to the Brown Palace Hotel, where they would spend the night and take part in a banquet. The athletes were looking forward to a luxurious meal and festivities planned in their honor, but it was there that they encountered racism—some of them for the first time. The hotel had a policy of not allowing African Americans through is front entrance, whether they were Olympic hopefuls or not. Most of the athletes were ushered toward the main door, but Tidye Pickett and Louise Stokes were directed toward the rear entrance. In a show of solidarity, all of the athletes accompanied Tidye and Louise through the back.

  Their alliance to the two women lasted only so long. Though most of them were given single rooms on the main floors of the hotel, Tidye and Louise were escorted to an attic room to share, and they were not allowed to participate or mingle with the rest, though none of their teammates spoke out about that. “All the other girls had private rooms, went to the banquet, were interviewed by the reporters,” Tidye recalled later. “Louise and I shared a room in the attic and ate our dinner upstairs on trays.”

  Leaving Denver for Los Angeles, the team was in high spirits as they prepared for the last leg of their journey. With the athletes cooped up in the heat of the train compartments, tensions rose, hostilities were renewed, and jokes fell flat. Just as the train pulled away from the station, an incident occurred that compounded Louise and Tidye’s unhappiness. The two athletes were sharing a compartment, Louise resting on the top berth while Tidye had the bottom. Although most who witnessed the event believed it nothing more than a prank, several felt that Babe went too far by walking up to them and emptying a pitcher of cold water all over Tidye. The two argued, accusing each other of incivility, Babe blaming Tidye for being unable to take a joke and Tidye accusing Babe of being a racist. No apologies were offered.

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  The team arrived at the Union Pacific’s Los Angeles station at 8:30 on the morning of July 23 and disembarked the train to loud hoots and cheers. Immediately they were enthralled by the glitz of Hollywood, its movie stars, the full, luscious citrus trees, the perfectly manicured lawns and palm trees, even the heat that greeted them. The open spaces were punctuated by cheerful bungalow-style homes in pastel colors, the sky as blue as they had imagined. It was a large city. By the early 1930s, Los Angeles and its suburbs held nearly a million and a half inhabitants, many of them owning Model Ts, which they used for work and leisure, congesting the streets with the cars and their loud honking sounds.

  Right away, the teams were segregated according to gender; the women were sent to the Chapman Park Hotel, while the men settled into the so-called Olympic Village, built around a circular road and separated in equal numbers along quadrangles on nearly 250 acres of land donated by Elias Jackson “Lucky” Baldwin in the Baldwin area of Los Angeles. To accommodate the nearly nineteen hundred male athletes, builders had constructed more than 550 bungalows, each one able to house between ten and twelve athletes from various countries.

  This was a new concept in Olympic accommodations. Up until that point, most nations had preferred keeping their athletes in discrete quarters, where they could train in private and befriend only other athletes from their own countries. But this new Olympic Village would allow competitors to get to know one another, to break bread together, maybe to become friends and share experiences. Though IOC bureaucrats had originally shunned the idea, when Zack J. Farmer, who sat on the Organizing Committee, proposed it again, they reconsidered it. Going back to Coubertin’s notion of the Games, the Olympics, they thought, were meant as an opportunity for youths of many nations to come together and foster intimacies. What better way to achieve that than to live under the same roof? Farmer’s proposal not only gained ground but this time was accepted, reenergizing interest in the Games. The village also served a dual purpose. By allowing only men and by fostering an air of mystery, it would, ideally, attract tourists to the area, particularly young women, thus becoming one of the many attractions of Los Angeles. The scheme worked. That the village was designed to be bulldozed soon afterward was also ideal, as no trace of it would be left.

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  The women, on the other hand, would not benefit from the Olympic Village. They were relegated to the luxurious Chapman Park Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, located within a safe area of the district but also along a stretch of road with plenty of shopping opportunities. The women would appreciate that, the organizers felt. Newspapers would be allowed to cover their buying expeditions throughout the many stores in the area, photographing many of the athletes as they looked over silk hose and discounted hats and purses. Reporters were also granted permission to visit the athletes at the hotel, where they could chat or have a drink. Male photographers planned to take pictures of the athletes while lounging on chaise longues, fretting with clothes and panty hose, drinking cups of tea and eating sandwiches, or sipping cocktails in their brightly patterned kimonos, those little activities that made such a difference to women, they said; or perhaps as they knitted, as a few of them were inclined to such hobbies. The photos, the reporters believed, would send a clear message that although the athletes were taking a break from their lives in order to participate in the Games, they had not forgotten about their feminine duties, to which they would return promptly after the Olympics.

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  Babe was so unpopular with her teammates that no one would even share a room with her. She had no modesty, false or otherwise, and the athletes had grown to detest that, seeing her only as a stuck-up, bragging prima donna. Never shy about revealing a good measure of self-confidence, she smirked as they stood back, fidgeting nervously while names were called as possible roommates for her. They couldn’t have known that her brash exterior and attitude concealed a young woman plagued by self-doubt or that all of her seeming bravery was nothing more than a fabrication. She feared disappointing her team, but mostly she feared disappointing her parents. She rehearsed her meets over and over in her head, her opponents never knowing that she was hypervigilant in monitoring her opponents’ progress, memorizing every record they had set, broken down to the inch and the second; the improvements they were trying to make as the season wore on; and their tactics, both those that had worked and those that hadn’t. They had no idea that if she even sniffed the possibility of anyone outperforming her, she increased her already strenuous workout schedule to inhumane levels.

  Eventually, when no one volunteered or agreed to room with Babe, Mary Carew was picked as the sacrificial lamb. Eighteen years old, Mary hailed from Medford, Massachusetts, and had competed at the Olympic trials in 1928, alongside Betty and the others, though an illness had prevented her from earning a place on the team.

  When Mary was six, her parents had died within months of each other, and she and her three younger siblings had been farmed out to various relatives across New England. Her siblings had remained in Medford, while she was sent to an aunt’s farm in Connecticut. Right away, she understood that life would be a shade more horrific for her than it had already been. Her aunt made up a room for her in a pigsty, often tying her to a wooden post, and left her to sleep with the animals. Although Mary was allowed to attend school, she quickly fell behind the rest, teachers assuming that she had either not developed
properly or was suffering from psychological wounds due to the death of her parents. They also could not grasp why she always had welts on her body, though the aunt assured them that she was only suffering from poison ivy.

  Mary developed running as an escape mechanism, and also a method of quickly getting out of her aunt’s way. When she was ten, an uncle from Medford arrived at the farm to check on her and, on seeing the situation, removed her from the place and took her to his house. She was enrolled in the Medford Public Schools District, where she thrived in sports, becoming the star of her new school’s first girls’ track team, setting records in the 40-, 50-, and 100-yard dashes.

  At five foot two and barely one hundred pounds, she was an unimposing figure. Though she gained a spot on the Olympic track team, she was timid and quiet, and no one expected her to make much of a splash. She was seen as insignificant by the other athletes, always so taciturn as to make them forget when she was around.

  As she and Babe headed up to their room, Mary could hear the rest of her teammates laughing behind them. She was soon overwhelmed by Babe’s grandstanding. Babe would not shut up. But “everything she bragged about, she could do,” Mary said. “And she bragged all the time. She wasn’t liked by the other girls because nobody likes a bragger, but she didn’t care.”

  Yet after that inauspicious start, the two developed a close friendship—Mary learning that Babe’s act was just that, a front she put up when people were around. Mary confided in Babe about her anxiety over the upcoming competition; she was set to run against Stella Walsh. And Mary knew she would never beat Stella.

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  As July 30 approached, even those who had not expressed an interest in the Olympics suddenly found themselves looking forward to them. There was a last rush for tickets, but not enough to be found. Hotels, boardinghouses, and bed-and-breakfasts were full; those who had arrived late struggled to find a place to stay. Though signs of the Depression still lurked, the Olympic Committee tried to add sparks of goodwill to an otherwise gloomy era. There was a festive feeling in the air, and for a short while, at least, everybody’s worries seemed lightened.