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Unlike most girl swimmers—who soon acquire exaggerated bonhomie and so much sophistication about posing for pictures that screen tests are almost superfluous if and when they get to Hollywood —Lenore Kight is almost timid in demeanor. Now 20, she learned to swim when she was 13, in the pool which is part of the equipment of Homestead's public library. Her teacher was Jack Scarry, who was on the Army water-polo team in 1918 and who educated Homestead's other able swimmers. Before his protégés enter a race, Coach Scarry greases the armholes of their suits with vaseline. One reason for Lenore Kight's bashfulness and the fact that, despite her achievement a year ago, she was regarded as a new face last week, is that the Carnegie Library Club has a hard time getting Homestead sufficiently enthusiastic about its swimmers to finance more than two or three short trips a year.
In the sleek little band of girl swimmers whose shiny legs, flexible bodies and sunburned hair annually decorate rotogravure sections and newsreels, Lenore Kight's was not the only new face last week. Spectators at Jones Beach took special interest in a preposterous little tadpole named Mary Hoerger who, aged 9, took fourth place off the loft. springboard. Like 16-year-old Minnow Rawls, whose three little sisters and one little brother are all swimming champions of some sort, Mary Hoerger comes from an aquatic family. Her mother is an instructor at the Roman Pools at Miami Beach; her three little sisters and one little brother swim for four hours every day in a pool behind their house. When Mary Hoerger wants to perfect a new dive, her mother swathes her in sweaters, allows her to practice from a six-inch board into a pile of sand.
Organized by the New York Daily News, last week's meet served to advertise also one of the most efficiently managed public beaches in the U. S. Gertrude Ederle, still deaf from her Channel crossing seven years ago, watched from the grandstand until someone gave her an official's badge. Georgia Coleman tried to teach Eleanor Holm how not to do a back dive.