Despite Helen’s undeniable athletic success, there was no clear path for her to follow when she returned from the Berlin Olympics and tried to make a living as an athlete. Severe AAU rules regulated retaining amateur athlete status and limited the options for many young Olympians to capitalize on their skills and experience, and for a woman, the possibilities for turning professional and snagging endorsement deals were practically nonexistent. Although it made for a rocky existence, Helen forged her own way working odd jobs, playing basketball and softball, and bowling. She even owned and managed a semiprofessional basketball team, making her the first woman to do so.
During the last few months of World War II, Helen enlisted in the Women’s Reserve of the U.S. Marine Corps, but was never deployed, and later worked as a reference librarian for many years. She also fell in love and spent her life with a long-term partner, but fearing discrimination, she never made her homosexuality public.
Helen dedicated herself to promoting women’s athletics. Over the decades, she remained in touch with many of her friends from the Olympics, including Betty, Harriet, Stella, and Dee, and she ran in exhibition and masters races. An early member of the National Track and Field Hall of Fame, she worked tirelessly to have many of her teammates inducted as well, and served as an activist and coach working on behalf of women athletes until her death in 1994.
In Helen’s obituary, The New York Times described her as “one of the great female athletes of her day,” a feat made that much more remarkable for the challenges she had to overcome. Frank Stephens did little to support Helen’s educational and athletic successes; while not as blatantly cruel as I portrayed him, he was distant and made his dissatisfaction with his lot in life plain for all to see. It’s true that she was assaulted by a sixteen-year-old cousin when she was in fourth grade and later experienced a sexual encounter with a visiting teacher.
Louise Stokes
Upon her return from Berlin, Malden honored Louise with a parade. Soon after, she married a professional cricket player and had a son. Though she stopped running, she continued to pursue her love of athletics and took up bowling. She founded the Colored Women’s Bowling League, thereby creating an opportunity for more black women to compete, and over the next several decades, she won many awards. After Louise died in 1978, a statue was erected in the courtyard of Malden High School to commemorate her athletic accomplishments.
Of all the main characters in this novel, I knew the least about the real-life Louise Stokes. Aside from a few newspaper articles and mentions in books, there was very little historical data about her, so I filled in the gaps of the lives of Louise, her mother, and her sisters through researching the lives of black women in Massachusetts during this period. Uncle Freddie is a character of my own creation.
Tidye Pickett
Tidye returned home to Chicago and worked her way through college and graduate school. She married and raised three children. She became an educator and then served as a principal at an elementary school for over twenty years. Upon her retirement, the school honored the former Olympian by naming itself after her. She passed away in 1986.
Louise and Tidye have gone largely unrecognized for many decades, but their perseverance in the face of racial and gender discrimination in the 1932 and 1936 Olympics paved the way for Audrey Patterson, a black woman from Louisiana, to win an Olympic medal when she finished third in the 200-meter sprint in London in 1948. A day later, Alice Coachman, a high jumper, became the first black American woman to win an Olympic gold medal.
Stella Walsh
Despite Stella’s adoption of Polish citizenship, she never settled into European society and she spent the rest of her life living in Ohio, though the American press consistently belittled her athletic accomplishments despite the fact that she went on to set records and win races for many more years.
On the eve of the Melbourne Olympics, at the age of forty-five, she married in Las Vegas, but with her American citizenship finally complete through marriage, she fell short of qualifying at the Olympic trials and announced her retirement.
In 1980, seventy-nine-year-old Stella was shot in the chest during a random mugging in the parking lot of a convenience store in Cleveland. She died immediately. Later, her autopsy revealed that she was intersex. This finding confirmed what her closest friends had long suspected, but it was a bombshell to the rest of the world. The discovery led some officials and athletes to demand that her medals and records be rescinded, but there was never a decisive ruling on the case.
Caroline Hale Woodson
This character is based on several Olympians from this era: Evelyne Hall, Evelyn Furtsch, Kay Maguire, Simone Schaller, Jean Shiley, Anne Vrana O’Brien, and Maybelle Reichardt.
Dee Boeckmann
For Dee, the Berlin Olympics marked the beginning of a long trailblazing career in coaching, teaching, and athletic administration that took her all over the world. During World War II, she worked in China with the American Red Cross. She became coach to Japan’s national women’s track and field team and served as a director for the 1964 Olympics. She was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1976. When she passed away in 1989, she was spending her final days in Creve Coeur, Missouri.
Olive Hasenfus
Though Olive traveled to the Olympics in 1928 and 1936 but never raced, she returned home with a medal she won during an exhibition race in Germany after the Berlin Games. Her talent and persistence also inspired her two brothers to be her teammates and compete in canoeing at the Berlin Olympics.
After 1936, she married, started a family, and continued to support women’s athletics by serving as an official and referee of sporting events. Whenever anyone argued that athletics could harm a woman’s fertility, Olive would refute
