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WOW2 – February 2023: Women Trailblazers and Activists, 2-1 thru 2-8 [1]
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Date: 2023-02-04
February 3, 1918 – Helen Stephens born, American athlete dubbed the “Fulton Flash.” Her athletic career, at a time when few schools had any athletic programs for girls, started when Burton Moore, the coach for the boys’ track team, noticed how fast she was in a pick-up basketball game. He asked her to run a 50-yard dash on the high school’s driveway. With no training on technique or form, in a pair of beat-up sneakers, she was clocked at a mind-blowing 5.8 seconds — then the women’s world record. He asked her to do it again, and she again made the record time. Moore asked her to start running with his boys’ track team, and tried to figure out what to do with her. After about a year of training with Moore, sixteen-year-old Helen Stephens borrowed track shoes and sweats from one of her male teammates and traveled nearly four hours in Moore’s Ford to the girls National Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) Championships in the St. Louis Arena. There, Stephens stunned the crowd by beating Olympic gold medalist Stella Walsh, one of the most well-known women athletes of the time, in the 50-meter dash. Stephens went on to win two gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for the 100 meter sprint and the 4 x 100 metre relay. She was six feet tall, and had to undergo a medical examination before the Games to prove she was a woman, but after she won, she was felt up by Adolf Hitler and invited to spend the weekend with him, which she declined. Walsh retired from amateur competition shortly after the Olympics, played professional softball and baseball, and went to William Woods University. From 1938 to 1952, she was the first woman to own and manage a semi-professional basketball team. She worked as a technical librarian (1950-1976) for the Research Division of the U.S. Aeronautical Chart and Information Service in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. She died at age 75 in 1994.
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