• U.S.

Sport: Females In Water

3 minute read
TIME

Spectators jammed the galleries, sat along the edge of the pool with sheets across their legs. Bobbe Arnst, onetime wife of Johnny Weissmuller, now married to a Chicago lawyer named Robert Cavenaugh but still interested in swimmers, arrived the opening night, foiled a bandit who tried to steal her sealskin coat when she was leaving. Signs were hung in the locker rooms to remind members of the Lake Shore Athletic Club what was going on: “Ladies in the Pool; Please Wear Suits.” The meet — annual national A. A. U. indoor swimming championships for women—brought the Chicago Daily News Fresh Air Sanitarium Fund $2,000. When it was over last week, almost all established records, as usual, had been broken, most of them by the four young women who are still, if not the most famed, certainly the most photographed female athletes in the U. S.

Katherine Rawls is 17, 107 lb., with a boyish face, short kinky hair, the physique of a nervous minnow. Brought up in Miami, she was a prodigy at 7, a national champion at 13 and is now considered the ablest all-around female swimmer in the U. S. Last year “Minnow” Rawls was A. A. U. low-board diving champion. This year she decided not to defend her diving championship, to try for a clean sweep in four swimming events, the most any contestant is allowed to enter. The three she won were 100-yd. freestyle, 300-yd. medley, 100-yd. breaststroke, breaking records in each. The one she lost was the 220-yd. freestyle, to Lenore Kight who was defending her title.

Since Helene Madison retired from amateur competition in 1932, Lenore Kight has been the ablest U. S. female practitioner of that super-development of the old-fashioned “crawl” which modern swimmers loosely describe as “free-style.” Brunette, 22, she is a shade less effective than her rivals photographically, a shade faster than any of them in the water. She learned to swim at the athletic club of the Carnegie Library of Homestead, Pa., where famed Jack Scarry is the swimming coach. Last week Lenore Kight demonstrated more firmly than ever her current eminence in her specialty. She won free-style races at 220 and 500 yd., helped the Carnegie Library Club team take the team title, with 29 points.

Mrs, Dorothy Poynton Hill never breaks any records. This is not because she is less able than her associates but because she is a diver, judged on points instead of time. Bright, blonde, vivacious, she is married to a Hollywood salesman, hyphenates her name in swimming meet programs. Her face is less familiar to the public than those of her friends because she is usually photographed in midair. Last week, “Minnow” Rawls’s absence from the low-board dive practically assured Mrs. Hill of the title, which she promptly won.

Eleanor Holm Jarrett is the handsomest girl athlete in the world. At 19, she was Olympic backstroke champion. Last week she took a holiday from the night club where she was appearing in the floor show with her husband, Crooner Arthur Jarrett. In group photographs of girl swimmers, Eleanor Holm Jarrett can be identified as the one with the best-looking bathing suit, the darkest fingernails, the broadest smile which, through all the vagaries of her career, has remained attractively inscribed upon her face as if it were a trademark. After playing about the pool and being photographed for three evenings, Eleanor Holm Jarrett last week finally jumped in to defend her 100-yd. backstroke championship. When she climbed out, she had made her title safe for another year and, as is her custom, had broken her own world’s record.

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