She continued to volunteer for any relay competition that would accept her, each time—on reaching the finish line—finding herself visibly shaken. Her teams often lost their meets, which prompted other members to blame their losses on the former Olympic champion, who they said could no longer pull her own weight.
The accusations pained her, and while she struggled to regain some measure of strength, both physical and mental, she watched from the sidelines as other athletes—Stella Walsh in particular—received the accolades that had once been hers. Each time she attended a meet she found herself, by instinct, heading for the track where the 100-meter race was being run. Though she was grateful for the chance to participate at all, it was the 100 meters that tugged at her, the place where she wished to be. She’d sit in the bleachers, watching as the runners dug their holes, crouched down, and dashed off when the pistol fired. She felt her own body react as the gun went off, her hand automatically rubbing her sore leg, her mind flashing back to the finish-line tapes she had broken, the ribbons and medals she had received, the records she had demolished. But even though she privately grieved, no one ever saw her cry; she never allowed herself to.
Her goal had become the relay team bound for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. It would bring her much-needed consolation, she thought, as well as a sense of closure. But as she trained with renewed determination, she realized that her chances were growing slimmer. A whole new generation of talented runners had blazed onto the scene, vying for the same spots, and, much as she herself had done years earlier, another young woman was lighting up the national landscape, a girl most people expected to dominate in Berlin.
—
Helen Stephens was born in Fulton, Missouri, a small town deep in Callaway County, situated about 100 miles west of St. Louis and 150 miles east of Kansas City. The tiny rivulets traversing Fulton grew heavier and wider as they traveled down to join the Missouri River, which frequently flooded the banks of nearby Jefferson City. Fulton was a simple, rustic place, but its inhabitants were very proud of it, the few roads leading in and out of the town itself often congested with the latest Model Ts as soon as the cars came onto the market.
By the 1920s, Fulton was home to nearly six thousand people, while the county had grown to twenty-five thousand inhabitants. It boasted a handful of racially segregated schools, several veterinarians, two flower shops, a blacksmith, a theater, a doctor’s office, an adjacent drugstore, and a scattering of shops that sold everything, yet nothing in particular.
Helen Stephens herself arrived in Fulton on February 3, 1918, in what was then a diverse neighborhood of Irish, English, French, and German immigrants, not to mention a good smattering of first-generation Americans. There were a few African American families living in Fulton, but they kept to themselves, residing on the other side of town and scarcely ever mingling with the white population. Helen’s birth year was a calamitous one, not only for the country but also throughout the world. In Europe, World War I was ending, but its effects were felt at home; closer to Fulton, an influenza epidemic was sweeping the county, eventually moving through the country and killing more than half a million individuals, several hundred in Calloway County alone.
Helen did not spend a lot of time being a child. Her parents always spoke to her as if she were an adult, sharing their concerns about money or the lack of it, the farm that never returned its harvest, physical labor, and the economy. In this large extended family, everyone seemed to have strong opinions about how Helen should be raised, especially when it came to her appearance and behavior. She grew up tall like a beanstalk, with feet that grew to size 12 and flopped like wings when she walked. On her face, she bore a purple birthmark that did not fade with time. But her eyes were big and expressive, fringed by long eyelashes and thick eyebrows, and they lit up with a spontaneous, genuine smile.
Her hands seemed as large as her feet, though they were delicate on her harmonica, playing cowboy songs about the wide-open fields. She blew on the instrument in the way her idol, Babe Didrikson, had once done—in fact, she had learned to imitate the Babe when she was very young. She herded sheep and cows; cleaned the pigsty; and dragged bales of hay across acres of land, to the delight of her father, who always believed she should have been born a boy, her gender a cruel trick the heavens had played on him.
Shortly before Helen was born, her father, Frank Elmer Stephens, had worked as a brick master for several companies in Fulton and Mexico, both in Missouri. But he soon realized that he was not meant for that kind of work and turned to farming, as, having married Bertie Mae Herring in September 1916—a college graduate, no less—he felt she deserved a better life than the haphazard jobs he had been doing.
Most people who first met Frank and Bertie Stephens found them an odd pair. She was soft and rather quiet, whereas he was loud and rough. She was reserved; he wanted to be the center of attention. He brought to the marriage old farming skills that had long gone out of fashion, while she brought her own college education and a Wurlitzer piano, upon which she unleashed her nimble fingers. She was taller than he was by several inches, but he compensated with a big mouth that often got him into trouble.
Upon their marriage, Frank and Bertie moved to a rented farm west of the Illinois Central Gulf Railroad. It was a large farm, well over 150 acres, a place he hoped to fill with sons. Being one of seven children—five boys and two girls—he desired a large family more than anything.
Frank liked being a farmer; he liked the independence of it, an attitude he would pass on to his children. Unlike his neighbors, who relied on the latest technologies to plow their fields, he toiled away at the land in the old-fashioned way, believing that one day his sons would help him do the same. That dream kept him going at backbreaking work that would have destroyed the strongest of men.
When, in 1918, Bertie handed him a (nearly) ten-pound baby girl with a fine mop of wheat-colored hair, Frank stared at the child with suspicion. Immediately he noticed that the baby had been born with two horrific defects: there was no penis, and what was apparent more than anything else was a large, uneven purple blotch on her right cheek. But he told his wife not to worry too much; she would do better next time. As Bertie took the baby back into her arms, she asked her husband what they should name her. He shrugged, not having given any thought to girls’ names, so his wife selected Helen. Helen Stephens had a strong ring to it—and strength was something Bertie had a feeling this child would need.
By the time Frank’s boy, Robert, arrived, on April 16, 1923, Bertie had suffered several miscarriages and the family had moved to a new farm. Though Frank was pleased with his son, it was a short-lived happiness—he was already looking forward to the next. But there would be no next son. Bertie’s insides were too scarred. The doctor told Bertie she could never have any more children.
Helen and Robert got along as well as siblings could, and they soon became best friends with the seven sons of a farm family who lived several miles down the road. The boys taught Helen how to smoke, use a BB gun, and eventually fire a real rifle. She unloaded that .22-caliber freely behind her father’s farm, bringing down large birds and black crows that circled the midwestern sky—or, if chance would have it, aiming it at the rabbits that disturbed her garden.
Though Frank found happiness on the farm, Bertie did not. She knew there should be more for her and her children than a life tending unyielding fields, corn that never turned to gold, vegetables that never ripened—and she wished they had greater opportunities. She was a retiring type who never shared those hopes and dreams with her husband, who couldn’t have understood. Frank presumed that Bertie’s fondness for music and poetry, together with her college education, would be frivolities his own daughter would eventually fall victim to, and he noticed those tendencies in Helen from an early age. Helen loved reading so much that her schoolteachers eventually began to give her their advanced materials, which she gleefully accepted and often took to Fulton’s Methodist church, where she secretly devoured them wi
thin its pews.
It wasn’t difficult for Helen to see the differences between her mother’s and father’s characters and how those differences played out within the household. Inevitably, an invisible line was drawn, with Helen and her mother on one side and Robert and her father on the other. Frank doted on Robert, but Helen and her mother often took the brunt of Frank’s anger, which sometimes involved the sting of his hands. He had become a bitter man, ill tempered due to the troubles on the farm, which did not produce at the level he had wanted and expected; the extra sons who had not come; and the women, neither of whom, according to him, seemed capable of fulfilling the duties a female was supposed to fulfill—Bertie with her poetry and piano, Helen with her reading and her awkwardness. During the few moments she had to herself, Helen hurried to her favorite hiding spot, an isolated depression that Frank never plowed called Salt Lick, which she had made into a sanctuary. From there she loved to imagine all that existed beyond the farm, and how she yearned to see it.
—
Frank’s siblings included Charles, Oliver, Ray, and a sole sister, Laura. But it was Oliver of whom he was jealous. Ollie, as he was known, was fond of reading literature and playing music, traits not unlike Bertie’s, which did little good on a farm. He had a particular fondness for Helen, and Helen for him. She appreciated his company more than that of her own father, which did not go unnoticed by Frank. Even worse, it seemed that Bertie felt the same way. It would not have been implausible, he reasoned. After all, the two were very akin to each other, and the more he thought about that, the more it ate at his soul, and the more it nagged him, the angrier he became.
Despite the challenging politics at home, Helen benefited immensely from the fresh, wholesome, farm-grown food she ate and the exercise she got by performing the chores her father assigned to her. Her body changed, and she grew into a muscular girl, taller than her schoolmates and able to outrun anyone, even the boys. She attended Middle River School, a one-room schoolhouse filled with nearly thirty students, mostly daughters of farmers. The school educated pupils from first to eighth grades. Though most of the students rode their ponies to school, Helen walked or ran, regardless of the weather. Along the way were hilly lanes flanked by tall trees, mostly oaks and elms, that her father never visited but that Helen liked to explore.
That she was meant to travel and leave Fulton was further reinforced one summer afternoon in 1931, as she climbed a hill behind her house and found a quiet spot. Sprawled on her back, a blade of grass between her teeth and sunlight warming her face, she watched the movements of the clouds overhead and began drifting not quite into sleep but into a sort of reverie. On that occasion, she saw herself at a starting line inside a stadium, waiting to run a race on a cinder track. She heard the thunderous applause coming from the crowd and saw herself breaking a winner’s ribbon and raising a medal to the sky. A multitude of flags flapped loudly in the breeze, and national anthems echoed in her ears.
She opened her eyes, convinced that she had experienced not a dream at all or even a hallucination brought on by the heat; it was an actual glimpse of the future. She had read of Babe Didrikson’s accomplishments at the Olympics and beyond. Suddenly she saw no reason why such accomplishments couldn’t be hers as well. Seeking her father’s approval was out of the question; he was as unyielding as the land he plowed. But she could keep the vision close to her heart, just hers, at least for now.
In the fall of 1931, Helen was thirteen and a half years old and starting as a freshman at her new high school. Taking stock of herself, she became aware that she did not look like anybody else. Tall and long-limbed, an awkward girl who had adopted a boyish look by wearing hand-me-downs that weren’t her mother’s or aunts’ but her uncles’ (their dingy overalls and tennis shoes were the only things that fit her). An air of poverty clung to her. Though many of her schoolmates were also the sons and daughters of farmers, their parents thrived on their lands, thanks in part to the innovations they had implemented. Her father still refused to go along with the times, either out of lack of money or just out of sheer stubbornness.
She had entered a class of cliquish adolescents in which the contrast was even more striking. The girls wore silk blouses adorned with pins, long skirts of fine fabrics, nude hose, and shining pumps. Their eyebrows were plucked, but hers remained bushy arches; their hair, teased to a magnificent height, surprised and amused her as she touched her own limp strands; their gleaming fingernails glittered in the light. Those girls epitomized the standards of beauty and fashion that newspapers and magazines advertised. The blotch on her face would start to throb, as it always did on awkward occasions, as if a reminder of her unpolished manners, more fit for a farmhand than a lady.
—
Coach W. Burton Moore was the track coach at Fulton High School when Helen enrolled. He was in his third year of teaching and had only recently been a student at Westminster College in Fulton, where Brutus Hamilton, the Olympic track star who had been a coach for Westminster before taking a higher-paying position at the University of California, had cemented his knowledge of track and field. Moore was twenty-six years old and very tall, with movie-star looks. He was soft-spoken but direct and had impeccable manners, all of this conspiring to make the physical education requirements more tolerable for the girls who had to endure them. (To their great sadness, he was already engaged to Mary Lou Schulte, a local girl who’d caught his eye and whom he planned on marrying.) At the high school, sports for girls were typical of the time: they fulfilled their physical education requirements by taking classes, while the boys became involved in any sports they desired, as the after-school programs offered many options.
Moore had spotted Helen at the end of the summer, just a few weeks before the fall term began, while she was playing in a women’s basketball game at the local Methodist church. Her height and agility had impressed him, but not as much as her speed. She was rumored to be quite a runner, and he had a general suspicion of how fast she was, but nothing was certain.
On a day that seemed too warm for fall, Moore placed Helen and seven other girls on a cinder track with the pretense of fulfilling the class’s educational obligations. In reality, he wanted to clock Helen’s time. Clad in tattered pantaloons her mother had stitched together and a pair of worn-out tennis shoes, she took her place on the track and waited for the starting whistle. She was aware that the other girls were looking at her, ungainly as she was, which caused her to reflexively lift her hand toward her birthmark.
She was not excited about the prospect of running; lately she had not been excited about anything at all. She was still concerned about fitting in at her new high school, but there were other matters on her mind. The Depression had hit Fulton, and Frank, unable to keep up with the mortgage, had lost his property. Appraisers had shown up at their farmstead, setting a value on every object the family owned. The farm had eventually been bought by a local farmer for four thousand dollars. It was difficult, but not unlike the hardships facing other farmers in Fulton. Helen tried her best to bear her sufferings stoically, but in truth they pained her. Her worries also revealed a young woman who had never carried herself with pride, as her other schoolmates did, and who now was forced to stoop even lower. Although she continued her studies and fulfilled her school duties, she felt no joy in them. Coach Moore sensed all that.
The 50-yard dash was not a strenuous run. All of the girls Moore lined up should have been able to complete it. When Moore called its start time, Helen streaked down the track well ahead of the other girls. She felt the brief rush of wind in her face, her legs lifting off the ground, and then it was over. Moore pressed his thumb over the stopwatch. He asked her to run the course again, to be certain his time was accurate. It was. 5.8 seconds. Helen Stephens, a poor, untrained farm girl from Fulton, Missouri, had just tied the 50-yard outdoor world record time held by the nation’s first female track-and-field gold medalist: Betty Robinson.
—
For very different reasons, her pare
nts only grudgingly tolerated Helen’s new passion. Her father suspected that her training would prevent her from finding a paying job, and Bertie saw it as further proof of her daughter’s tomboyish inclinations, which were growing stronger each day. She would have preferred that Helen take a typewriting course, specifically at William Wood College, her own alma mater. Nonetheless, with their reluctant blessing, Helen’s training began in earnest, with Moore christening her an “Amazonian” who could go all the way to the Olympics.
No one shared his faith in her; the school’s officials even refused to pay the two-dollar entrance fee for the AAU National Championships in St. Louis, scheduled for March 1936. Moore was determined to see her compete, even if he had to pay the fee himself. He could not predict the color of the medal, but he was certain Helen would be wearing one around her neck when she returned home from Berlin, as he knew she would be attending those games. He felt it with the same certainty Helen had felt it in her waking dream on the farm.
—
It was a long, rough ride to St. Louis, Moore’s Ford plowing through a relentless rainstorm, the roads muddy and congested. Helen sat quietly in the backseat, listening to the pinging on the roof and to Coach Moore’s rattling off the names of the participants in the race, along with their statistics: Stella Walsh, Betty Robinson—athletes she had heard of, along with many others she hadn’t. As Moore ticked more competitors off his tongue, Helen could feel her body tingle with anticipation.
Fire on the Track Page 18