The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh

by Sheldon Anderson

  Cleveland newsman Dan Coughlin, Walsh’s old drinking partner, once wrote, “Whatever Stella Walsh was, she was one of a kind.”47 Coughlin’s clichéd remark had more gravity than he thought. Walsh was one of a very rare, misunderstood, and ridiculed kind. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, eight female athletes failed a sex test. Nonetheless, all of them competed. The IOC stopped sex testing in 1999, but the controversy regarding what constitutes a woman continues. In 2006, Indian middle-distance runner Santhi Soundarajan failed a gender test and was stripped of the silver medal in the 800 meters at the Asian Games. She later attempted suicide. Dr. Myron Genel, an endocrinologist from Yale University and a consultant for the IOC said, “My suspicion is that she has one of these rare disorders of sexual development.”48

  In 2009, Caster Semenya of South Africa won the same event at the World Championships in Berlin. The short, cropped hair and manly looks of the sturdy South African led to speculation that Semenya was not a woman. The IOC has only two categories for competitors in the Olympics, so athletes have to pick one or the other. Semenya won gold in the 800 at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

  Eric Vilain, an expert on genetics and sexual development at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine, concurred that sexuality is a complicated issue: “I’ll be damned if I could judge [sexuality]. There would certainly be cases where I could not come up with a definitive answer. . . . If you abide by some social construct hoping it will give you a clear-cut distinction, I think you’re in for a lot of trouble.”49 In an August 3, 2008, New York Times article about sex testing in women’s sport, Jennifer Finney Boylan, a trans woman born as James Boylan, wrote, “It would be nice to live in a world in which maleness and femaleness were firm and unwavering poles.” Boylan echoed Gerber’s observation: “The best judge of a person’s gender is what lies within her, or his, heart. The only dependable test for gender is the truth of a person’s life, the lives we live each day.” The truth of Stella Walsh’s life is that whatever personal anguish she might have felt, she always thought of herself as a woman.

  Epilogue

  The slow pace of the investigation into Stella Walsh’s murder kept the media’s focus on the controversy concerning her sex. According to Dan Coughlin, “People lost interest [in the investigation]. The story on her was ‘Stella was a fella.’ Catching her murderers—that was buried in the back of the metro section.”1

  Homicide cases in which the killer has no relation to the victim are the hardest to crack. For two years, the authorities had no solid leads. One of Walsh’s neighbors suggested that a waitress at Lansing Tavern and her “common-law boyfriend should be checked out. [There were] bad feelings between Stella and them for many years.”2 It was a bogus tip.

  A break in the case finally came two and a half years after the murder. The Cleveland police got a lead that they should be looking for two local men in their early twenties named Ricky and Donald. During an investigation of Donald Cassidy for the attempted murder of his two-year-old child, homicide detectives learned that his brother-in-law was Ricky Clark. In late May 1983, Clark was arrested and charged with the murder of Stella Walsh. He lived just north of Miles Avenue across from Calvary Cemetery, less than a mile from Walsh’s grave. Cassidy surrendered to police two days later.

  Before he went to trial in November, Cassidy and two other inmates punched out a small window in the seventh-story commons room at the Cuyahoga County Jail and used a bed sheet to shimmy down to a fourth-floor roof. Cassidy injured his hip in the escape. From a house on East 93rd Street in north Cleveland, the dim-witted Cassidy called for an ambulance, claiming that he had been hit by a car. The police promptly returned him to jail.

  Cassidy fired the shot that killed Walsh. He pled guilty to murder and got fifteen years to life and another one to five years for the escape. Clark copped a plea for voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to six to twenty-five years. They never showed any remorse about the senseless killing. There is no record of how long they were incarcerated. If Cassidy and Clark are back on the street today, they would be about Walsh’s age when she died.

  The autopsy that revealed Walsh’s genital ambiguity was a cruel conclusion to an inspirational story. Walsh made her name in sports, and now that legacy was being questioned. Such noted sports historians as Allen Guttmann and William Murray declared, “Stella Walsh was a man.”3 David Wallechinsky, who compiled a thorough history of the Olympic Games, wrote, “All the while that Walsh had been setting eleven world records, winning two Olympic medals, she was, in fact, a man.”4 They were dead wrong.

  The issue of alleged cheating in the Olympics came up again in 1988, when Canadian Ben Johnson, the 100-meter gold medalist at the Seoul Olympics, tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs and was disqualified. NBC sportscaster Ahmad Rashad did a segment on alleged Olympic cheaters, including Walsh, declaring, “She was a man.” On September 28, 1988, the Plain Dealer, while acknowledging that Rashad was probably just reading from a script, called it an “unfair shot.” The newspaper added, “Walsh, a nice person, certainly was not a cheater. If she had been, the Olympic committee would have removed her name from the list of gold medalists. Her name is still there. Rashad and NBC owe her an apology.”

  Walsh’s long career was unparalleled, but she has lost her place in women’s sports history to Helen Stephens and Babe Didrikson. The three gravesites bespeak their legacies. Walsh’s grave is neglected, as is her memory. The sad, little, weathered grave marker in Calvary Cemetery is barely visible today, in a section of the cemetery that was devastated by a violent rainstorm in the summer of 2009. Most of the trees in the area are gone, leaving it even more desolate.

  Stephens and Didrikson have prominent, well-groomed burial sites. Stephens suffered a stroke and died on January 17, 1994. She was buried in Fulton, not far from the family farm. The Olympics figure prominently on the gravestone inscription, which reads, “Winner of two gold medals in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany . . . the 100-meter dash and the 400-meter relay.”

  Didrikson is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Beaumont, Texas, about twenty miles from her birthplace in Port Arthur. Her grave is marked by an impressive four-foot-high granite headstone and a small granite marker on the ground below. As a young athlete, Didrikson was known for her arrogance and boastfulness, and the words on the marker boldly declare, “World’s Greatest Woman Athlete.” The inscription on the headstone belies Didrikson’s fierce competitiveness: “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”

  Poland, Cleveland, and sports played a central role in Walsh’s life. As her athletic career wound down, she returned to live with her parents in the old Slavic Village in Cleveland, where Polish-Catholic schools had nurtured her and Polish sports clubs had helped her gain international prominence. The Polish American community in Cleveland and the Polish Falcons provided a “nest” for Walsh to find comfort and support. Her neighborhood has lost much of its ethnic character, and the memory of Stella Walsh is fading. Many of Walsh’s childhood haunts have shuttered. As of 1987, Falcon Nest 141 had only 318 remaining members. The old Falcon building on 71st and Broadway still stands, but it is now the Center of Hope Bible Fellowship.

  Four years after Walsh’s death, the Plain Dealer held a poll to determine the greatest Cleveland athlete of all time. The great Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown won the poll. Fireballing Cleveland Indian pitcher Bob Feller came in second, while Walsh finished a distant ninth.

  In 1982, Cleveland dedicated the Stella Walsh Recreation Center on Broadway Avenue, which is adjacent to her shuttered alma mater, South High. A sports venue was a fitting tribute. Except for on the cinder track, Walsh never found solid ground on which to construct her life. Sports gave her a safe space to run away from any personal problems. She had to keep running, competing in senior events well into her sixties and training right up until her tragic death. After the coroner’s repor
t revealed Walsh’s mosaicism, the Plain Dealer wrote,

  In her own community it was long known that in some ways Walsh’s life had been a tragedy. . . . In spite of her sporting triumphs, Walsh’s life had an underlying sadness. But she lived it with great dignity and as a woman. Out of her tragic death at the hands of an unknown gunman has probably come a final victory.5

  On December 9, 1980, Walsh was laid to rest near her father Julian in Calvary Cemetery, less than a mile from her childhood home. Her old neighborhood buddy Casimir Bielen spread some dirt from Poland over her coffin and recalled her birthplace: “Stella had a fierce love of Poland,” he said at the gravesite. “She loved the Polish people. We trust that this Polish soil will unite her closer with Poland.”6 A year after her death, Bielen and Walsh’s friend Monica Pawlowski wrote a memoriam that alluded to Walsh’s personal struggles. The word suffering appears four times:

  She suffered on Earth to the End

  In Silence she suffered, in patience she bore

  She suffers no more.

  The World’s weary troubles and trials are past

  She who suffered is at rest.

  Gone to heaven with the best

  Peacefully sleeping, resting at last.7

  The Stella Walsh Recreation Center on Broadway in the Slavic Village, formerly South High, where Walsh went to school. Author photo.

  Stella Walsh’s legacy is not at rest. As one of the greatest woman athletes of her time, her story is an important part of Polish, Cleveland, Polish American, and women’s history. Many of her friends revered and loved her. Walsh’s protégé, Grace Butcher, still active in her eighties, fondly remembers what Walsh meant to her personally and to other women trying to break into the world of men’s sports:

  Even though our time together was minimal, I still think about her sometimes when I’m running. Track was something wonderful that boys did, and I watched with envy. But then Stella gave it to me, and to a lot of other people. . . . I think Stella’s legacy was saying you can do this, girls can do this, run fast, throw things, jump. It doesn’t matter that you are female, do it and do it well. You don’t do it like a girl, you don’t do it like a boy, you do it like you are supposed to do it.8

  Notes

  Prologue

  1. After the collapse of the Russian Empire and the return of the Polish state at the end of the World War I, by default Walasiewicz became a citizen of Poland.

  2. The suffix -ówna is the Polish feminine form indicating that she was the daughter of Julian Walasiewicz. Walsh usually left off the diacritic when she signed her name, and it does not appear on her gravestone.

  Chapter 1

  1. “Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival,” Ancestry.com, October 28, 2010, http://www.search.ancestry.com/search/category.aspx?cat=40; George Vecsey, Stan Musial: An American Life (New York: Ballantine, 2011), 41.

  2. Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Volume II: 1795 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 236–37.

  3. “Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival,” June 13, 1912; John J. Grabowski and Diane E. Grabowski, Cleveland: A History in Motion (Carlsbad, CA: Heritage Media Corporation, 2000), 106.

  4. Grabowski and Grabowski, Cleveland, 87.

  5. Charles W. Coulter, The Poles of Cleveland, Cleveland Americanization Committee pamphlet (1919), 10.

  6. Plain Dealer (Cleveland), September 8, 1901.

  7. Howard Dennis, “Emma Goldman and the Cleveland Anarchists,” Modern Culture 14, no. 3 (November 1901): 182. Italics in the original.

  8. Edward T. Roe, The Life Work of William McKinley (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2010), 169.

  9. Emma Goldman, “The Tragedy at Buffalo,” Free Society, October 1901, from the microform collection of the Emma Goldman Papers, University of California, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/.

  10. University of Buffalo Libraries, “Pan-American Exposition of 1901,” http://library.buffalo.edu/pan-am/exposition/law/czolgosz.

  11. Roe, The Life Work of William McKinley, 169.

  12. Literary Digest, September 21, 1901.

  13. Plain Dealer, September 9, 1901.

  14. Library of Congress, “Immigration: Shadows of War,” LibraryofCongress.gov, https://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/german8.html.

  15. Davies, God’s Playground, 380.

  16. Coulter, The Poles of Cleveland, 21.

  17. Dearborn Independent, April 22, 1922.

  18. A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case against the ‘Reds,’” in Reading the American Past: Volume II, ed. Michael P. Johnson (New York: Bedford, 2012), 133–34.

  19. William J. Baker, Jesse Owens: An American Life (New York: Free Press, 1986), 18.

  20. Baker, Jesse Owens, 17–19.

  21. Chicago Daily Tribune, October 19, 1962.

  22. Eve Curie, Madame Curie: A Biography (Boston: Da Capo, 2001), 282–83.

  23. Claire E. Nolte, The Sokol in the Czech Lands to 1914: Training for the Nation (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 82.

  24. Brian McCook, The Borders of Integration: Polish Migrants in Germany and the United States, 1870–1924 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 143.

  25. Donald E. Pienkos, One Hundred Years Young: A History of the Polish Falcons of America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 115, 135.

  Chapter 2

  1. Mariusz Kotowski, Pola Negri: Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 7.

  2. New York Times, August 3, 1987.

  3. Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1987.

  4. Kotowski, Pola Negri, 3.

  5. Kotowski, Pola Negri, 64.

  6. Heiner Gillmeister, Tennis: A Cultural History (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 201.

  7. Gillmeister, Tennis, 204.

  8. Plain Dealer, February 16, 1930; Plain Dealer, February 17, 1930. The word parva means “little.”

  9. Diane Karpinski, “Frances Kaszubski,” ClevelandSeniors.com, http://www.clevelandseniors.com/family/kaszubski.htm.

  10. Jennifer Hargreaves, “Olympic Women: A Struggle for Recognition,” in Women and Sports in the United States, eds. Jean O’Reilly and Susan K. Cahn (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2007), 4; Mary H. Leigh and Therese M. Bonin, “The Pioneering Role of Madame Alice Milliat and the FSFI in Establishing International Track and Field Competition for Women,” 73–74, http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/JSH/JSH1977/JSH0401/jsh0401f.pdf; Amanda Schweinbenz, “Not Just Early Olympic Fashion Statements: Bathing Suits, Uniforms, and Sportswear,” in Bridging Three Centuries: Fifth International Symposium for Olympic Research—2000, 136, http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/ISOR/ISOR2000r.pdf.

  11. Ellen Galford, The Olympic Century: The Official History of the Modern Olympic Movement, Volume 1: The X Olympiad (Los Angeles: World Sport Research, 1997), 100.

  12. New York Times, June 23, 1996.

  13. Jeanine Williams, A Contemporary History of Women’s Sport, Part One: Sporting Women, 1850–1960 (London: Routledge, 2014), 138.

  14. Louise Mead Tricard, American Women’s Track and Field, 1895–1980 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 188.

  15. Joe Gergen, The First Lady of Olympic Track: The Life and Times of Betty Robinson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 6.

  16. Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Volume II: 1795 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 426.

  17. PolskieRadio, “Halina Konopacka—pierwsza złota medlistka olimpijska” [Halina Konopacka—The First Olympic Gold Medalist], February 26, 2013, PolskieRadio SA, http://www.polskieradio.pl/39/156/Artykul/789704,Halina-Konopacka-pierwsza-polska-zlota-medalist
ka-olimpijska.

  18. New York Times, July 28, 1928; Plain Dealer, January 13, 1948.

  19. Krzysztof Szujecki, Życie Sportowe w Drugiej Rzeczpospolitej [Sporting Life in the Second Republic] (Warsaw: Bellona, 2012), 142.

  20. Plain Dealer, March 3, 1929.

  21. Evening Independent (Massillon, Ohio), March 24, 1930.

  22. Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2014.

  23. Ron Hotchkiss, The Matchless Six: The Story of Canada’s First Women’s Olympic Team (Toronto: Tundra Books, 2006), 173.

  24. Plain Dealer, February 18, 1932.

  25. Plain Dealer, February 18, 1932.

  26. Florence Times News, February 20, 1930.

  27. Plain Dealer, February 16, 1930; Plain Dealer, February 17, 1930.

  28. Daniel Okrent, “Wayne B. Wheeler: The Man Who Turned off the Taps,” Smithsonian, May 2010, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/wayne-b-wheeler.

  29. Evening Independent, March 24, 1930.

  30. William J. Galush, For More Than Bread: Community and Identity in American Polonia, 1880–1940 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2006), 40.

  31. Plain Dealer, February 16, 1930; Plain Dealer, April 8, 1930.

  32. U.S. Department of Labor, Naturalization Service, “United States Declaration of Intention for Stella Walsh,” April 7, 1930, Ancestry.com, http://www.ancestry.com/cs/us/Immigration-Records.