Obviously she would not have been allowed to participate nowadays, since she would have undergone and failed the femininity control of the IOC’s Medical Commission. What happened almost a century ago cannot be taken into account since there was no desire to break the regulations which were valid at the time, or indeed any awareness of having done so.15
Except for her family and a few close friends from Cleveland, no one knew that Walsh was living with a condition that had troubled her throughout her life. Many of Walsh’s fellow athletes had noted that she always arrived at track meets or basketball games in full uniform. “Stella never got changed in front of us or took a shower,” recalled 1932 U.S. Olympic gold medalist Jean Shiley. “She used to arrive at the track in a tracksuit, with her gear already on underneath.”16
Walsh’s condition was a closely guarded secret in Cleveland’s Polish community. Certainly no one was going to “out” the ambiguous sex of their most famous athlete. When Walsh’s autopsy was made public, several close friends acknowledged that they knew Walsh had a rare genital abnormality. Beverly Perret Conyers had inadvertently seen Walsh undressing in a local bathhouse, saying, “She asked me if God did this to her. I said, ‘No, it was a mistake.’ I can’t figure it out. She was raised in dresses.”17 Conyers defended her friend to the New York Times:
It has never affected anything I felt about Stella all my life. I don’t think it changes the image of Stella one bit. When Stella competed, there were no sex tests. . . . You don’t turn against your friends just because they may have a birth defect. She was a lady in every sense of the word. . . . The Polish people adore Stella. I don’t think anything that comes out of this will destroy their feelings. She was kind to everybody.18
Walsh’s ex-husband, Harry Olson, made a statement to the Los Angeles Times that he was as surprised as anyone at the coroner’s findings. “I feel stupid as hell for marrying her. We had sex a few times but with the lights off.”19 That was probably a fabrication. Fearing some sort of legal trouble, Olson was covering up a marriage that had been arranged so that Walsh would be eligible to compete for the United States at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. He said that they had separated because neither one was usually home:
I wish I could say I had a hot, passionate affair with her, but we never really did. Not really. Maybe I was too naïve to realize anything was wrong. People in Cleveland seem torn between loving her and destroying her. All this vicious energy should have been organized toward finding her murderer. Who is this helping anyway? There’s got to be a reason for it. Does it give somebody a morbid sense of satisfaction?20
As the controversy concerning the autopsy consumed the Cleveland press, Casimir Bielen became the unofficial spokesman for the city’s Polish community. Bielen was Walsh’s good friend; on the night she was shot she had stopped by his house on Fleet Street on her way to Uncle Bill’s. They worked on planning publicity for the Polish team’s appearance at Kent State.
Bielen had also grown up in Cleveland’s Slavic Village and attended Cleveland’s South High School, fourteen years after Walsh. After graduating from the Cleveland College of Western Reserve University (today Case Western Reserve University), Bielen received a master’s degree in education at Kent State. He worked as a secondary-school principal and the executive assistant to the state auditor, and coordinated ethnic affairs in the office of Cleveland mayor Dennis Kucinich. At the time of Walsh’s death, he was president of Specialized Ethnic Services at the Nationality Newspapers Service. He was known around the neighborhood as “Mr. Ethnic.”
Bielen told the Washington Post that he also knew that Walsh had a birth defect: “She was ridiculed. We knew this. . . . It was common knowledge that she had this accident of nature. She wasn’t 100 percent pure female.” He revealed, “When she was a little girl . . . in the heart of the Polish community, everyone was aware that she was a little different from the others. It was accepted. It was something we all knew about. When she was younger, she was teased by the other children.” Bielen added, “We knew she had a mutation or deformity. [She] was a little of each.”21
Bielen felt that it was a cruel injustice to accuse Walsh of being a fraud. He vowed to rescue her reputation and honor her memory as if he were fighting for the entire Polish community. He defended Walsh as vigorously as Polish Americans had denounced assassin Leon Czolgosz eighty years earlier. Walsh’s ethnic identity was foremost in his mind. Bielen was incensed by the WKYC-TV report on the results of Walsh’s autopsy. “We were told she was 90 percent female,” he said. “What was common knowledge by the family, friends, Polonia, and the world for sixty-nine years and accepted has been turned into an ugly, sensational disclosure smearing the Olympic reputation of Stella Walsh.”22
Conyers echoed Bielen’s call to stop the insinuations that Walsh had posed as a man to win women’s competitions: “I had known Stella all my life, since I was ten years old. She was a very dear friend. She was my coach for years. I couldn’t sit back and let her be disgraced. . . . Why couldn’t they [police and media] have waited until the results of her test before saying anything?”23 Bielen claimed that Walsh had undergone numerous sex tests during her career, but, in fact, formal sex testing did not exist when Walsh competed in the Olympics or other meets.
Bielen promised, “This will be a battle between the ‘Polish Mass Media’ and TV 3. Publishers and editors of Polish and other ethnic newspapers are eagerly and willingly looking forward to battle, dressed in their heaviest protective armor.” Bielen started the Olympian Stella Walsh Defense Fund with a $5,000 contribution.24 Clara Battiato, Walsh’s sister, said, “I’ll do anything to sue that [TV] channel. They made something of nothing.” The station’s news director, Cliff Alexander, defended the report, declaring, “We knew it was going to be a sensitive story. This was not something we did on a whim.”25
Cleveland’s newspapers were more circumspect in their coverage of the controversy and tended to publish stories that eulogized Walsh. Two days after the murder, the Cleveland Press quoted Sophie Solomon, Walsh’s fellow employee at the Falcons, as saying,
She was wonderful with children. Who else could teach them track as she could? She went out of her way to reach the kids. They will feel her loss greatly. . . . Stella liked to dance a few polkas and eat a few Polish pastries. She was a happy person, but athletics and keeping fit were her whole life.26
Bielen lauded the print media for not sensationalizing the story. In a letter to the editor of the Plain Dealer, he wrote,
Although I have disagreed with the Press [sic] on some issues in the past, the Press deserves to be highly praised for its handling of the untimely death of Stella Walsh. . . . The Press also deserves to be commended for not printing the ugly, sensational rumors being circulated after her death although known by the Press. These rumors, however, were broadcast as fact over some TV stations. An antidefamation lawsuit is pending. In my opinion, the Press has not tarnished the image of this great Olympian. Sound and responsible journalism prevailed.27
Bielen likened Walsh’s murder to the tragic death several months earlier of Cleveland Indians baseball great Luke Easter, who, like Walsh, had been shot in a parking lot by two young robbers. Easter led the Washington Homestead Grays to the last Negro League championship in 1948, and a year later he joined the Indians. He hit eighty-six homers in three seasons from 1950 to 1952, and is said to have hit the longest home run ever at Municipal Stadium. What Walsh meant to Cleveland’s Polish American community, Easter was to African American neighborhoods. According to one reporter, “Schoolboys in Cleveland and Buffalo [where he played minor-league ball] waited in line for a chance to touch his uniform—just like they did for [Joe] DiMaggio and [Willie] Mays.” “Easter is one of the many might-have-been greats,” wrote biographer Daniel Cattau. “But in reality the poor guy never really had a chance.”28
Serving as a union steward for TRW Automotive, Easter was cashing union checks at the Clevelan
d Trust Company in suburban Euclid when he was mugged and killed. Walsh sent a letter to the editor of Cleveland’s African American newspaper the Call & Post expressing her sorrow at Easter’s death. Walsh also wrote this note to the Plain Dealer:
I was saddened by the unfortunate killing of another athlete, Luke Easter; however, on the day of the burial, I was saddened more when I heard several newscasts about his death. One black woman was interviewed live on radio. She said, “The blacks must stop this black-on-black crime in the black community.”
Walsh responded to the interview, saying, “The implications to the white community were puzzling, because these remarks implied that crimes committed against whites were less significant. To me all crime should be opposed—black on black, black on white, white on black, and white on white.”29 Walsh’s reaction was somewhat tone-deaf, indicative of the tense relations between Polish Americans and African Americans at the time. This was a time of transition for the Slavic Village, where East European ethnic groups were moving out as African Americans moved in.
After Walsh’s murder Bielen expected the Call & Post to reciprocate Walsh’s act of sending a letter of sympathy in response to Easter’s tragic death. In a letter to the paper’s editor, Bielen pointed out that Cleveland had two Olympic gold medalists in the 100 meters: “Stella Walsh, like Jesse Owens, were citizens of the world [sic]. Both cared for all. All newspapers should also care and recognize all achievements or deaths—both black and white.”30
Meanwhile, Bielen brought charges of slander against WKYC, although Bielen’s own lawyers told him that “dead people do not have the rights of privacy.” Bielen received an anonymous note warning that the station would play hardball:
The family of Stella Walsh has been warned to stop their fight against TV stations or the body of Stella Walsh would be dug up by court order to prove that she was a man with male sex organs. And the [station’s] lawyers would also get a court order to force [coroner] Gerber to release tests proving that Stella Walsh was a man. Please help them. They [the family] live in fear.
The note was signed “SOS.”31
Bielen pulled out all the stops to clear Walsh’s name. He wrote letters to Ohio senators John Glenn and Howard Metzenbaum, and U.S. House representatives Mary Rose Oakar, Charles A. Vanik, Ronald Mottl, and Louis Stokes, demanding action against WKYC: “In this story they implied, inferred, and stated that Stella Walsh was a male that competed against females. This news broadcast also questioned whether the five Gold and four Silver Olympic Medals [sic] would be forfeited.” Stokes wrote back that he thought that a congressional investigation of WKYC “would be more detrimental than useful.” He added, “Since congressional investigations and hearings attract publicity, my intervention might only cause the rumors to become more widespread.” Metzenbaum also told Bielen that there was nothing he could do.32
As the controversy roiled, Bielen continued to inflate Walsh’s sporting achievements. He always claimed that Walsh had won nine Olympic medals, although she won seven of those at the unofficial “Women’s Olympics,” not the IOC’s Olympics. Bielen often contended that Walsh had won more than 5,000 track and field events, a figure that is impossible to verify, as is the exact number of world records she set. Measurement was inexact in those days, and most of Walsh’s records went unrecognized. For example, in 1948, Track and Field News listed the “Best Marks by Women” for that year, including an entry for Walsh’s time in the 100 meters: “Stella Walsh—11.5 (rumor).”33
Bielen also played the patriotic card, casting Walsh as a loyal American, as well as a true Pole. He told the New York Times, “She definitely was anti-Communist, but she loved Poland.”34 Bielen complained that the Polish Communist government was using Walsh’s murder to criticize the United States for its excessive and random gun violence. The Communists were right about that, as homicide rates in the United States were far higher than in Europe, including the Soviet bloc.
Two months after the murder, Gerber issued the final autopsy results, which revealed that Walsh had male and abnormal female chromosomes, and only undeveloped, nonfunctioning male sex organs. Gerber courageously tried to put the matter to rest, declaring,
The sex of this infant would be ambiguous at the time of its birth. The baby would then be brought to the attention of experts in the field of genetics, endocrinology [hormones], and corrective surgery. The necessary measures could then be undertaken and the infant raised as either a male or a female. She lived and died a female. . . . Socially, culturally, and legally, Stella Walsh was accepted as a female for 69 years.35
The Polish community in Cleveland hung on the words, “Stella Walsh lived and died a female.” Bielen called it Stella’s “final victory.”36 The local newspaper Slavic Village Voice wrote, “Stella Walsh was finally vindicated by the autopsy report of Dr. Samuel Gerber.”37 Nonetheless, WKYC ran another segment titled “Was Stella a Fella?” Plain Dealer columnist James Ewinger called it a “tasteless line,” adding “touting the story in a cheap, snickering fashion is inexcusable.”38
A few weeks after Walsh’s murder, Beverly Conyers tried to explain the tragic dilemma that had faced her friend throughout her life: “How is a woman or male to tell that he or she has a hormonal imbalance? How is someone to carry on a normal life? Does that mean that you have to be ruined and everything taken away?”39 Of course, Walsh had more than a “hormonal imbalance,” but Conyers was right. Walsh never confessed to anyone that she was unhappy with her assigned sex (“gender dystopia,” in psychiatric terms). Probably the best way to determine someone’s gender identity is to ask them. On an application for a job with the city of Cleveland in the spring of 1979, on the line that read, “Physical record: List any physical defects,” Walsh wrote, “None.”40 She always thought of herself as a woman.
Walsh’s family and friends such as Bielen and Conyers were incensed about charges that Walsh had intentionally cheated by hiding her maleness, and that her victories should be vacated and her medals forfeited. There was a precedent for Walsh to be stripped of her titles, however, and it involved another Polish sprinter. In 1967, Ewa Kłobukowska lost her 1964 Olympic and 1966 European medals because tests showed that she had XY chromosomes. The Kłobukowska affair seemed to confirm the suspicions of Western sports authorities that some Soviet-bloc women were, in reality, men. The masculine characteristics of the Soviet Press sisters, East German shot putter Heidi Krieger (who later became Andreas Krieger), and the muscular East German swimmers prompted international sporting associations to force women to undergo various tests to verify their sex. These were, in fact, cases of the abuse of performance-enhancing drugs rather than questions of sex.
The results of Walsh’s autopsy added to calls for sex testing. In the long run, however, as more becomes known about people who are intersex or have chromosomal anomalies, international sports authorities have adopted a more enlightened approach to sex and gender designations. The IAAF and IOC were embarrassed when Kłobukowska birthed a son.
The most strident calls for overturning Walsh’s victories came from the family and friends of Canadian sprinter Hilde Strike, who finished second to Walsh in the 100 meters at the 1932 Los Angeles Games. When the news of Walsh’s autopsy broke, Strike’s granddaughter, Cheryl Morris, demanded that her 70-year-old grandmother be awarded the gold medal. According to Morris, when Strike was told about the results of the autopsy, “You could see the smirk on her face. She was thrilled to get the news that she was actually the fastest woman in the world on that day.” Another granddaughter, Cheryl Toomey, recalled, “Grandma was getting calls from all over the world . . . and we all thought that they would decide to give her the medal.”41
Canadian sprinter and hurdler Roxanne Atkins Andersen also lobbied to invalidate Walsh’s victories. “Stella had replaced a number of women,” Andersen pointed out, “including one of my protégés and a friend of mine, Hilde Strike, in numerous championship meets. In the 1932 Olym
pic 100m, Hilde lost to Walsh by an eyelash. Hilde started really well, but Walsh cut her down with these powerful strides.” Those strides, argued Andersen, were those of a man. “Fair is fair,” she said. “If Stella was a man, she had an unfair advantage.” Andersen also thought that another Canadian, Mildred Fizzell, should have been given the victory in her close loss to Walsh in the 1934 AAU Championships.42
Strike remained magnanimous in defeat. After Walsh’s death and the controversial autopsy came to light, she was asked if she should be awarded the gold medal: “No, I don’t think so,” Strike replied. “When we went out on the track that day, I accepted that field and raced against them. That was what happened that day. Eight of us ran; I came in second.”43 Still, calls for retribution continued. On August 10, 1984, the Times (London) mentioned Walsh in an article entitled, “Who Said Cheats Never Prosper?” In a short report in 1989, on Strike’s death of a heart attack, Sports Illustrated perpetuated the myth that Walsh had had an unfair advantage: “In 1980, it was discovered that the gold medalist in that event, Stella Walsh of Poland, was a hermaphrodite and should have been banned from competing as a woman. Despite speculation that Sisson [Strike’s married name] would be awarded the gold, she never was.”44 Roxanne Andersen had a hard time letting the issue go. In late 1991, she said, “I’m in my eightieth year and counting my sins of omission, and I thought, ‘I should be fighting for my girl’”—namely Fizzell—whom Andersen had coached in 1934.45
At a meeting of the Women’s Track and Field Committee of the Athletics Congress (TAC) in 1991, the delegates took up the Walsh case. A spokesperson for the TAC said, “It’s a unique thing. This is the first time we’ve studied it.” The committee voted not to strip Walsh of her medals and declared that it would not hear any more petitions to take away any of her victories. The chair of the TAC, Lynn Cannon, observed that gender identity was a complex issue. She said that the charges that Walsh masqueraded as a man were “unfair to Stella Walsh,” and Cannon authored a resolution that Walsh had been wrongly accused of being a man, writing, “The women’s committee disapproves of all of the unsubstantiated allegations that have been made in regard to Stella Walsh.” The motion passed unanimously. Even Andersen now recognized that sex designation was more complicated than she had originally thought and dropped her efforts to take away Walsh’s titles: “I feel it is in the interest of track and TAC that I should withdraw that protest,” she said.46
The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh Page 21