Walsh could not stop competing, and she went back on her pledge once again. Sport was in her genes; her grandfather, during a visit from Poland to Cleveland in 1929, dared his granddaughter to take him on in a 100-yard dash. Walsh barely beat the sexagenarian. In the United States, vocation often defines a person’s identity, and running was Stella Walsh. She had received great adulation from sports and, like many retired athletes, had trouble transitioning to life without sports. What would be her new mission in life? She had business cards made with a drawing of a sprinter, with the name “Stella Walsh” on the left-hand side and “Stella Walsh Olson Walasiewiczowna” on the right. Beneath the runner is the inscription, “Olympic and U.S. Champion Holder of 65 World and National Records.” She once said, “Every year I think of retiring, but I get out on the track with the youngsters and want to run myself.”27 She challenged everyone, young and old, to a race.
A new AAU event rejuvenated Walsh’s career. In 1950, she won the national pentathlon championship (shot put, high jump, broad jump, 200 meters, and 80-meter hurdles). The next year, she successfully defended her title at the national championships in Berkeley. Walsh won five consecutive pentathlon titles from 1950 to 1954, competing for the Polish Falcons in 1950 and 1951, Dreyer AC in 1952, and the Knickerbocker PC in 1953 and 1954.
Walsh used her married name and Polish name on her business card. Western Reserve Historical Society.
For a quarter-century, Walsh was among the most famous Polish American athletes. Another Polish Clevelander, spitballing pitcher Stan Coveleski, led the Cleveland Indians to the 1920 World Series championship, the first of only two Indians World Series wins. St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame first baseman Stan Musial won seven batting titles and three MVP titles, played in twenty-four All-Star Games, hit .331 for his career, and led the Cardinals to three World Series championships. Cincinnati Reds slugger Ted Kluszewski was the other Polish American baseball player of note in Walsh’s cohort, walloping a major-league high of 171 home runs from 1953 to 1956. Middleweight Tony Zale, whose real name was Anthony Zaleski, was the most famous Polish American fighter. In three epic fights with Rocky Graziano, Zale retained the middleweight title in 1946, lost it in 1947, and regained the title in 1948. Zale lost the championship later that year to Frenchman Marcel Cerdan, who was famous for his love of French songstress Edith Piaf. Cerdan died in 1949, in a plane crash, on his way to New York to see her.
In a 1950 poll of Polish American daily newspapers, Walsh, not Musial or any of the others, was voted the greatest Polish American athlete of the first half of the twentieth century. Musial came in second, and 1947 Notre Dame Heisman Trophy winner and Chicago Bears quarterback Johnny Lujack finished third.28
In 1936, Southern California bakery magnate Paul H. Helms founded a philanthropic organization that honored athletes from throughout the world. Helms had supplied the bread for the Olympic Village at Stella Walsh’s first Olympics in Los Angeles in 1932. From then onward, Helms marketed his product as “Helms Olympic Bread, the Bread of Olympic Champions.” In 1949, he inaugurated the $10,000 World Trophy, which recognized the best amateur athletes from each continent. The Helms Athletic Foundation Hall on Venice Boulevard became a museum of sports artifacts. “[The Foundation] has been set up in trust and financed so that it can be perpetuated perhaps forever and can never be altered,” promised Helms. “Otherwise, I could not accept these valuable trophies, which now have a permanent place in Helms Hall.”29
In 1951, the Helms Foundation named its greatest woman athlete of the first half of the twentieth century; surprisingly, it was not Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Helen Wills, or Helen Stephens, but Stella Walsh. She deserved the award. For nearly twenty-five years—from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s—Walsh piled up victory after victory in the U.S. Track and Field Championships. Walsh won thirty-two U.S. Outdoor Championships, by far the most of any woman in history. In 1955, Walsh and Kaszubski were elected to the Helms Foundation Women’s Track and Field Hall of Fame. In gratitude, Walsh gave the Helms Foundation her first medals from the 1927 Junior Olympics in Cleveland and her 1932 Olympic gold medal.30 In 1952, Walsh moved to Los Angeles, residing close to where her medals were on display until the Helms Foundation shut its doors in 1982, two years after her death.
7
The Move to Los Angeles and an Arranged Marriage
I didn’t go out with boys till I was twelve! . . . People keep asking me why I never married. I tell them that I’ve been running all my life—and where men are concerned, I’m just too fast for ’em!
—Stella Walsh
In 1952, Walsh left her parents and lifelong home in Cleveland and moved to Los Angeles, the city of her Olympic victory two decades before. During that brief stay in Southern California in 1932, Walsh was smitten with the “land of perpetual spring”—the blue skies, the Pacific Ocean, and the wide-open spaces of the City of Angels. California was a place for Walsh to get a fresh, new start, an escape from her parents’ cramped house on Clement Avenue and the congested Polish neighborhood where the rumors and crude jokes about her gender swirled. There she endured many snide, derogatory comments about her masculine looks, muscular body, and lack of feminine curves.
After two difficult decades of economic depression, war, and political rancor concerning New Deal legislation, General Dwight Eisenhower’s election as president in 1952 marked a return to normal. First Lady Mamie Eisenhower was emblematic of that conservative era for middle-American women. She often appeared in public in a long skirt, dainty little hat, and white gloves. Most television fare in the 1950s, for instance, Father Knows Best and Make Room for Daddy, portrayed women in a subordinate, domestic role.
Los Angeles had that conservative side, but Walsh could more easily blend into an anything-goes Bohemian culture. As one historian of the movie industry put it, “The passionate melodramas surrounding Hollywood’s birth challenged the nation’s gendered boundaries by celebrating the exploits of these exotic, glamorous workers out West.”1 In 1947, a secretary at RKO Studios in Culver City published the first issue of Vice Versa—a groundbreaking magazine for women seeking unconventional relationships. I Love Lucy was television’s top show in the 1950s, and in her zany way Lucille Ball nudged the norm of a traditional, submissive housewife. Nonetheless, Ball’s role as a mother was central to the show. One episode in 1953 featured the birth of her son, “Little Ricky,” and it was watched by some 44 million viewers. In the last half of the decade, Elvis “the Pelvis” Presley began to rock this conservative world, foreshadowing the counterculture Woodstock generation of the 1960s.
Walsh left behind a tight-knit Polish community that was an important part of her identity and had nurtured her running career. The Polish population in the sprawling city of Los Angeles was small. In the late nineteenth century, a group of notable Polish intellectuals and artists had settled in and around the southern suburb of Anaheim, among them the famous actress Helena Modjeska and Poland’s greatest historical novelist, Henryk Sienkiewicz.
In the 1860s, Modjeska was a sought-after player on the Kraków and Warsaw theater scene. She was regarded as Poland’s best actress. The Stary Teatr [Old Theater] in Kraków still bears her name. Modjeska arrived in California in 1876. As a reporter for Gazeta Polska [Poland Gazette], Sienkiewicz saw her first performance in San Francisco. Modjeska became the most acclaimed Shakespearean actress in the United States, while Sienkiewicz returned to Poland in 1879, to write his most famous works, including The Deluge, a historical novel depicting the Swedish and Russian onslaught on Poland in the mid-seventeenth century. The book’s title was apropos for Poland’s fate in the twentieth century.
Modjeska built a house about twenty miles southeast of Anaheim, near the Cleveland National Forest, in what is now known as Modjeska Canyon. She called the house “Arden,” after the English forest that is the setting of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The residence is on the list of National Historic Land
marks. Her son, engineer Ralph Modjeski, helped build San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
Walsh moved to Glendale, about five miles north of downtown Los Angeles. In 1960, there were only about 600 Angelinos of Polish heritage in the Glendale area and approximately 44,000 in the entire city. Walsh was a U.S. citizen now, so her move to Los Angeles—the quintessential American city of freeways, movies, television, and free-wheeling lifestyles—put a distinctly American stamp on her naturalization.
Furthermore, Southern California had a perfect climate for a woman who had dedicated her life to sport. Walsh could participate in year-round softball, basketball, and track. On one trip home to Cleveland in 1953, she told the Plain Dealer that in contrast to California, the northern Ohio climate “stinks in spades.”2 In Los Angeles, Walsh could train all she wanted. She even wanted to play more golf, after having won the Polish National Open Golf Tournament in 1948, shooting an 80. A year before she moved to Los Angeles, the Plain Dealer had reported, “Stella Walsh, 40, Eyes Golf Career.” The newspaper wrote that Walsh liked playing softball and basketball more than track and field.3 There was ample opportunity to do it all in California.
Walsh used her connections to the Waldorf Brewery Company to land a job there and then went to work for the Knickerbocker Plastics Company in Burbank, where she played for and coached the company-sponsored baseball and basketball teams. She also became a trainer for the San Fernando Valley Women’s Athletic Club. The North Hollywood Knickerbockers basketball team won the California AAU title in 1955, and Walsh was named the tournament’s MVP.
The U.S. Olympic tryouts for women were scheduled for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in July 1952. Walsh was still good enough to qualify for the Helsinki Games. She dominated the Pacific Coast and the Southern Pacific track meets that summer. Running for the Dreyer Athletic Club of Berkeley at the U.S. National Championships in Los Angeles in late October 1952, Walsh bested her own world pentathlon record, which she had set a year earlier at the National Championships in Houston. On July 2, 1952, the Los Angeles Times’ Jeanne Hoffman, in her column on women athletes called “Skirting All Sports,” noted, “The gal can still run.”
At the risk of being ostracized by the Polish American community, however, Walsh would not contemplate running for Communist Poland in the Olympics. As the Plain Dealer put it, “She declined an invitation to represent Poland in the 1952 Helsinki Games, disapproving as she did of the red complexion of the remnant that’s left of the land of her birth.”4 The United States and the Soviet Union were in the depths of the Cold War in the early 1950s; the Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb in 1949, and the United States countered with a hydrogen bomb in 1952. In 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea, and President Truman set a precedent by sending in U.S. troops to contain Communist expansion. As the Korean War was raging, Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy conducted a witch hunt for Communist sympathizers in the United States. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953, for spying for the Soviet Union.
At first, the Plain Dealer overlooked the IOC rule against running for two different countries in the Olympics and predicted that “Stella Walsh of Glendale, California, is given a good chance to qualify [in the broad jump]. She will also try in dashes and discus.”5 Several days later the newspaper corrected itself, reporting that Walsh was ineligible to compete at the Helsinki Olympics. Walsh pled her case to the IOC as a woman without a country:
I’m an American citizen now, and Poland is no longer a state. It’s recognized as an overrun country. It’s a satellite of Russia. . . . The rules governing entrance into the Olympics also specify that exception is made for naturalization through right of conquest. That would certainly take in Poland.6
The AAU and the IOC would hear none of it. Walsh was among many émigré athletes from Soviet bloc countries who could not or would not compete for their native national teams. One hope was to form an Olympic team without national designation. Before the Helsinki Olympics, Hungarian émigré Count Anthony Szapary organized the “Union of Free Eastern European Sportsmen.” According to the New York Times, “During World War II, he had been sent to a concentration camp for activities with the Hungarian Red Cross and his relief work for Polish and Jewish refugees. He was released through the intervention of King Gustav V of Sweden.”7 Szapary created the Hungarian National Sports Federation after the war, but when the Communists seized power in 1947, he defected to the United States.
Szapary’s Hungary and Walsh’s Poland were the most recalcitrant Soviet satellites. Both countries had deep historical grievances against the Russians. Russian tsar Nicholas I helped Austria crush a Hungarian national uprising in 1849. Hungary fought against Russia in World War I and again in World War II, this time on the side of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in 1941. The Red Army occupied Hungary at the end of the war, ushering in more than forty years of Communist rule. Most Hungarians hated the Soviet-backed government.
The Communist regime tried to gain domestic support by building on a long and successful Hungarian sporting tradition. For such a small country, Hungary had won a disproportionate number of Olympic medals and international soccer matches. Hungarian Olympic teams (separate from the Austrian ones) were among the top medal winners at the 1908 London and 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Budapest sought the 1920 Olympics, but World War I precluded that bid.8 From 1924 to 1936, Hungary won more medals than any other East European country, garnering the third most gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (behind Germany and the United States). Hungary fielded one of the best national soccer teams in the world in the 1950s. From 1949 to 1955, the Hungarians played sixty games and won or tied all but three.
Szapary hoped that the IOC would recognize the union and allow Walsh and other East European émigrés to compete in the Olympics. Walsh was not optimistic: “I have heard that [IOC president] Avery Brundage favors a free nation unit, but many [IOC] members feel that if the group is admitted, Russia would lodge a protest. . . . I suspect that our chances are slim, as undoubtedly more are curious to see what Russia has to offer.” Walsh was right. The IOC had long tried to keep political issues out of the Olympics and only recognized national Olympic committees, not athletic organizations. Furthermore, the IOC wanted the Soviet Union to go to the Helsinki Games, and Moscow and the other Soviet satellites vehemently opposed Szapary’s group.9
In the run-up to the Helsinki Olympics in the fall of 1952, Walsh found herself in trouble with the law again when she allegedly tried to shoplift groceries from Mack’s Farm Market in Glendale, not far from her apartment on Mayfield Avenue. Walsh had already had several brushes with the law. In 1931, she was booked for hitting a bystander during a discus completion in New Jersey, and in 1942, she was jailed as part of a fur heist in Logansport, Indiana. Neither charge stuck. Three years later, she hit a truck and trailer driven by Howard Bartell in Bay Village, a town on Lake Erie about ten miles west of Cleveland. Walsh and her passenger were slightly injured in the crash. Three months later, Bartell took Walsh to court to pay for the loss of his truck and trailer, charging her with careless driving.10 There is no record of what became of that case.
The Logansport Press in Indiana, recalling Walsh’s alleged theft of fur coats there a decade earlier, covered the grocery store story: “A store manager picked her up after he saw her put a half-pound of butter, some peach preserves, and a carton of cottage cheese in her purse and walk out.” Walsh offered to pay for the goods, but store owner S. L. McKernan refused, and Walsh was arraigned on September 6. A week later, the manager of the market, Leon Benon, asked for the charges to be dismissed.11
The failure of Szapary’s organization was a great disappointment to Walsh. In 1954, she again declared her intention to retire. But life without competition seemed impossible. Now in her forties, Walsh surprised herself with her continued success:
I can’t figure it out myself. Each year I say I’m going to retire. Each year I run just as fast. Just this summer I eq
ualed my world record of 6.4 in the 50-meter run, which I established back in 1930. . . . I’m hoping to stay in condition in hopes the AAU will revise its rules and let me compete for the United States in the 1956 Olympics.12
The Los Angeles Times carried a cartoon of an aging Walsh running behind a wheelchair, with the quip, “OLD? Who’s OLD?” Following Walsh is a banner that reads, “Stella Walsh in 1980.” Ironically, that was the year she would be murdered.13
Walsh also continued to play basketball for the Polish Olympics. She was getting better at it, scoring thirty-four points in one Municipal Basketball League game. Jeanne Hoffman called her “Bevo Stella,” a not-so-complimentary comparison to Clarence “Bevo” Francis, the giant center who starred for Rio Grande College in the early 1950s.
In October 1954, the AAU Track and Field Championships were held at Thomas Edison Field in Cleveland. Walsh returned to her hometown to go for a fifth straight pentathlon title. Competing for Knickerbocker Plastics Company, the hometown favorite won the event. That was the last of Walsh’s forty-one indoor and outdoor national championships. A year later, in Morristown, New Jersey, Barbara Mueller dethroned the forty-four-year-old defending pentathlon champion.
Denied the chance to run in the Helsinki Olympics, Walsh turned her attention to supporting American female track and field athletes. She even went on television with California governor Earl Warren, Lillian Copeland, and other former Olympic athletes to raise money for the U.S. Olympic team to go to Helsinki. Soviet women won twenty-three medals at Helsinki to only eight for the Americans. According to an article in Life magazine, Walsh was so disappointed in this poor performance that she started a women’s training center in Van Nuys, California. The magazine also wrote that Walsh, at age forty-five, was still hoping to qualify for the 1956 U.S. Olympic team. In the mid-1950s, she began coaching the women Marines at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station near Irvine, California. She admitted that improving the performance of the American women athletes was a long-term project: “I’m afraid we must concede complete superiority to the Russian women, especially in the field events. What we must think of now is the 1960 Olympics.”14
The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Page 16