Tuesday, July 20, 2021

The strange life of Ethel Catherwood, the only Canadian woman to win an individual Olympic gold in athletics

Saskatoon’s Ethel Catherwood found stardom on Labour Day of 1926, with one jump in Regina that changed everything.

© Provided by National Post Ethel Catherwood


Kevin Mitchell 


She was 16 years old, and had just leaped higher than any woman, ever. It was “epoch-making,” as a Saskatoon reporter noted in his dispatch out of the provincial track championship.

Curious eyes turned her way, and she regretted it later. The whole thing.

So much flowed from that world-record high jump by a precocious teenager: Fame, headlines, an Olympic gold medal, spurned movie offers, a secret marriage, public divorce, bitterness, a life wrapped in mystery and — later — seclusion.

“Go away!” she told Toronto Star journalist Rosie DiManno, who showed up at her California door one day in the mid-1980s.

“This woman, with a red wig askew atop her head, was bent over with age. And rage,” DiManno later wrote of that encounter — a failed interview attempt that ended with the writer clambering over a chain-link fence to escape the Olympian’s Doberman.

Catherwood was tired of attention.

She’d been showered in it, once upon a time, and she remains a trivia oddity as Olympians head to Tokyo: Catherwood is the only Canadian woman to win an individual athletics gold medal. Nearly a century has passed without a repeat of that 1928 high-jump victory in Amsterdam.

The medal itself has seemingly vanished. Catherwood discarded it at some point in her later life, along with the rest of her laurels.

But before all that, sportswriters typed unabashed love letters to her on their Underwoods. They praised her body, her face and sometimes — with slightly less fervour — her considerable athletic prowess.

Women’s sport was still viewed with suspicion in many circles. Pierre de Coubertin, who founded the modern Olympics, didn’t feel women belonged there. He again made his objections public in July 1928, as Catherwood completed her final Olympic preparations. She was one of six Canadian women forming this country’s first female athletics team.

Leaving for the Olympics from Union Station in Toronto are Myrtle Cook (far left) and Ethel Catherwood (with handbag) flanked by Jane Bell, left and Bobbie Rosenfeld (with white hat)

Catherwood was fast becoming an international sensation — a “gorgeous Canadian beauty who had the boys at the 1928 Olympic Games goggle-eyed,” one writer put it a few years later.

“A flower-like face of rare beauty above a long, slim body simply clad in pure white,” the Toronto Star’s Lou Marsh famously wrote at the 1927 national championships, where Catherwood had her first mass media experience. “She looked like a tall, strange lily and was immediately christened by the crowd The Saskatoon Lily.”

Catherwood was the talk of the town during her Toronto trek. Writers delved into her story. No woman had ever defeated her. She had eight siblings. She’d never seen a sailing vessel until she got to Toronto; she’d never seen apples growing on a tree, or picked fruit from an orchard.

She wrote (or, possibly, dictated) bylined, first-person stories for the Star about what it was like to be Ethel Catherwood. ‘Saskatoon Lily’ stuck as a permanent nickname.

“It is just like home here,” she told an interviewer, “except when I go out to practice, and then photographers and crowds gather. I would much rather have some place where I could be alone when I am jumping, for people do look at me enough at the meet.”

Many years later, with Catherwood dead and gone, StarPhoenix feature writer Bob Florence summarized her essence.

“She was a small-town girl,” he wrote. “She was dirt roads and tumbleweed, not brass bands and ticker tape.”

Catherwood, born in North Dakota, spent her childhood in tiny Scott, Sask. She was raised on country fairs and back-yard jumps. Her dad, once an accomplished sprinter, put his kids through their paces most summer evenings, and Ethel entered meets that ran in tandem with livestock judging and baked goods. Her prize-ribbon collection swelled.

The family moved to Saskatoon in 1925, where the 5 foot, 10 1/2-inch Catherwood starred on Bedford Road Collegiate’s basketball team with a looping, one-handed shot. She scored a city-record 49 points one night, eight months before her gold-medal showing at the Olympics.

On the baseball diamond, she played a loping centre field and hit for a high average. She won the Northern Saskatchewan Winter Carnival beauty contest — earning the title of Miss Prince Albert 1927 — and collected both a cup and a gold medal.

The first time she picked up a javelin, she set a Saskatchewan record with a throw of 95 feet, six inches. Shortly after that, she busted the Canadian standard by throwing 114 feet, seven inches, and later stretched that mark another four feet.

Joe Griffiths, Saskatoon’s famed track and field coach, was the first to discover her; the first to see Catherwood’s transcendent athletic greatness. He trained her in a makeshift high-jump pit behind his house, picking her up each day in his Model T, coaxing her ever-higher.


Joe Griffiths, who ‘discovered’ Ethel Catherwood when she was 17 and coached her to break the world high-jump record, helps her with her coat. Photo by Dick Bird, Courtesy of Saskatoon Library

Catherwood was good at everything she tried, and because of that outrageous talent, she trained only as hard as she needed to. She required challenges, and the Olympics provided the biggest target of her athletic life.

She moved to Toronto in early 1928, and stepped up preparations.

Olympic teammate Bobbie Rosenfeld later told Ron Hotchkiss, author of ‘The Matchless Six,’ that Catherwood “did no great amount of training” — that her perfect day was “to lie abed with a box of rum-and-butter toffee and a ukulele, eating and strumming.”

When Catherwood won the gold medal in Amsterdam while setting a world record, she was hoisted onto shoulders: A “slim, blue-eyed fairy, who high jumps five feet three inches,” wrote Olympic correspondent Negley Farson.

There was no question this time what kind of reception she’d receive when she returned to Saskatoon.

Catherwood had been snubbed by Saskatoon’s city council the year before, after returning from that conspicuous record-breaking excursion to Toronto and a presumed Olympic berth.

A local service club had paid for Catherwood’s journey and made her an elaborate jumping outfit — white, with ‘Saskatoon Elks’ displayed in purple across the breast, and a purple cloak.

Canada’s 1928 Olympics sweetheart Ethel Catherwood wearing the cape of her benefactors, the Saskatoon Elks Club, poses with coaches Percy Williams, left, and George Young. Photo courtesy of Saskatoon Public Library

Despite resident pleas, Saskatoon council voted 6-5 not to offer civic recognition of her exploits when she returned.

Alderman Mills opined that jumping over a bar would help neither science nor womanhood. When Alderman Underwood protested that the publicity Catherwood provided the city was worth celebrating, Mills shot back:

“Was it mentioned in South Africa? I got a letter from South Africa today and there was not a word about it.

“I think it is a want of proportion. We would just be encouraging a false sense of proportion.”

There was no such snubbing in 1928 when she landed back in Saskatoon, gold medal in tow. An international superstar returned to her prairie city, backed by adulation, speeches, gifts, photos. They declared a civic holiday; kids got out of school early; a Moth biplane did a fly-over as the throng sang ‘O Canada.’

And then, Ethel Catherwood lived the rest of her life.

© 8 Ethel Catherwood. Photo by George Freeland, Courtesy of Saskatoon Library

She secretly married, then sought to divorce, a Toronto bank clerk. The news broke in December 1931, two years after the initial coupling. It was embarrassing, sensational, and landed in newspapers across North America. The story got even bigger when Catherwood conceded that she was leaving her once-secret husband for another man, American Byron Mitchell.

“I’d like to know who my son-in-law is,” Catherwood’s confused mother told a Saskatoon reporter.

She divorced Mitchell, too, a couple of decades later, citing extreme cruelty and adultery.

He sometimes beat her, she testified; he hit her on the head with a highball glass; he forced her to listen to his poetry.

Catherwood was, according to that 1953 wire report, “a comely brunette of 45” — her physical appearance getting unashamed media play even in divorce court.

She worked as a stenographer. Receded into isolation. Estranged herself from family; refused to appear at team reunions and hall-of-fame celebrations. Grew ever more mysterious.

“It was an unfortunate period of my life,” Catherwood told Today Magazine’s Earl McCrae in 1980, when he attempted to interview her via phone about those heady days as the world’s greatest jumper. “I was never an athlete. I was a natural. It was no big thing. I went, I did it, and quite frankly, I’m sick and tired of the whole thing. I haven’t thought about it in years and I don’t want to think about it. Okay?”
Ethel Catherwood, third from left, with group of Canadian Olympic hopefuls, was “the most photgraphed girl at the Olympic Games” in 1928, according to the Toronto Telegram. Courtesy of Saskatoon Library

She hung up the phone, after noting that she had “no (bleeping) interest in being interviewed.”

Catherwood died of bone cancer in September 1987, in Grass Valley, Ca. The press didn’t get wind of her death for eight months, which must have prompted a chuckle on the other side of the grave from the Saskatoon Lily.

“A dream in repose and a sweetheart in action,” the Toronto Star called her, many decades before she chased one of their reporters off her property with a Doberman.

“You’ve no idea just how popular she was,” a Bedford Road friend, Elda Shannon, told The StarPhoenix after news of Catherwood’s death broke into the wider world.

“Perhaps too much success is not always a good thing,” sister Beatrice Van Nice said in 1961.

Everybody had a take, but nobody had an answer. The story died with Ethel Catherwood, her protective Doberman, and the finality of a slammed phone.

That, we presume, is exactly how she wanted it.


No comments: