The Forgotten Legacy of Stella Walsh by Sheldon Anderson

Author:Sheldon Anderson [Anderson, Sheldon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

6

The Greatest Woman Athlete

Naturally I would like to run for the United States this year, but I realize that is impossible. Since I am now a citizen here, it probably wouldn’t be considered patriotic to compete for Poland, but I would like one more opportunity to run in the Olympics.

—Stella Walsh before the 1948 London Olympics

In the fall of 1938, Polish sport authorities offered Stella Walsh a job as a national physical education trainer, but Walsh declined the position, explaining that she did not want to jeopardize her amateur status. Walsh wanted to leave Poland anyway. Life was hard enough in her depressed Cleveland, but the standard of living in Poland was markedly lower. Every chance she got she left Poland to compete in meets in North America and visit her parents back home. In the mid-1930s, she sailed back and forth across the Atlantic at least ten times.

Walsh was happy that her studies in Warsaw were over. She had never adapted to life in the country of her birth. She was a relative unknown on the streets of Warsaw—a university student like any other. It was no time to be caught in Eastern Europe anyway. With little opposition from Britain and France to his unilateral breaches of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler was becoming increasingly bold. In a November 1937 meeting with his financial advisors and top generals, Hitler laid out his plans (in the so-called Hossbach Memorandum of the meeting) to revise Germany’s eastern borders by force in the early 1940s. Western appeasement encouraged him to move up the timetable.

Walsh went back to live with her parents on Clement Avenue. She did not hold down a regular job during this period but was in the prime of her athletic career. She relied on local clubs to subsidize her travel to track and field meets. Walsh joined the Polish Girls’ Olympic Club of Ohio, which won the first Polish American Olympic Games in 1937, in Pittsburgh. Walsh was the club’s one-woman show, winning all but one of the ten events she entered.

The Plain Dealer followed Walsh’s exploits closely, and her name repeatedly popped up in the news, even when it had nothing to do with her career on the track. In 1938, Shaker Heights police set up a sting operation to nab muggers who were active in the area. One cop dressed as a woman and chased down a would-be mugger. Sportswriter James Doyle joked that the robber “must have thought for a few seconds that he’d made the mistake of holding up Stella Walsh.”1 On July 7, 1939, the newspaper reported that Walsh had thrown the fastest ball recorded by the “speedometer” at a Cleveland Indians baseball game.

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