The
atmosphere in Liberty
and the surrounding communities
was no doubt super charged
the week after Christmas
in 1936. The local men’s
basketball team, the
Liberty Emeralds, captained
by Russ Hodge, was to
play the Long Island
Ducklings. The latter
was a name for a team
of women led by Alice
Arden, the only New
York female Olympian
who had performed just
a few months earlier
in Berlin, Germany before
Adolph Hitler and his
Nazi entourage. Alice
was a high jumper extraordinaire.
A Bernarr McFadden magazine
featured her with a photo
taken at the Olympic
trials
in Providence, R. I.
in 1936. This full page
photo shows her clearing
the bar handily with
a scissors jump, then
in vogue, and it is
boldly captioned: “The
Body Beautiful.”
The
venue for this basketball
matchup was the Laurels
Country Club near Monticello.
It had been arranged by
a sporting agent in New
York City for its obvious
appeal of incongruity.
Both teams, in their respective
spheres, were outstanding.
Russ Hodge was not the
usual center for the Emeralds;
but on this night during
that Christmas week he
used his captain’s prerogative to face off as center against the celebrated “Fraulein Arden” - as Dr. Julius Goebbels had addressed her on an elaborate reception invitation only a few months earlier.
By
today’s standards the Emeralds-Ducklings game was a low scoring one, 27 to 24. As Alice explains, the emphasis was on defense. In this early team version of the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs matchup, with all the attendant hype, the Emeralds prevailed. And not only did Russ Hodge save his honor that evening, he also eventually captured the heart of Alice and her hand in marriage in 1937, giving rise to an athletic dynasty.
The
credentials for this dynasty
were confirmed when their
decathlon son Rusty eclipsed
the legendary Jesse Owens’ 100 meter dash world record. Later, in 1964, Rusty became the only son of an Olympian mother to compete in those quadrennial games. To show that Rusty is mindful of the proverb “Pride goeth before the fall,” he is dismissive of his running feat by pointing out that the conditions when he competed were much improved over those faced in the 1936 Olympics by the Cleveland (Ohio) Flash – the man who stunned the incredulous and sputtering Hitler in Berlin with his four gold medals and one world’s record. The Master Race had been compromised. Owens had turned Hitler into a Chaplinesque caricature of himself. But Rusty insists that comparing his time vs. Owens’ is like “apples and oranges.”
Alice
knew Owens , and later
his wife and children,
and knew them well. One
of her mementos is a booklet
which contains the signatures
of most, if not all, of
the 1936 United States
Olympic Team, and Owens’ is prominent among them. There is also a revealing tribute to her by Bill Kelly, later to be a New York Athletic Club maven, who wrote: “120,000 people, and I only see you.”
One
irony of the Hodge-Arden
face-off in December of
1936 is that Alice did
not relish coming to the
Catskills. Indeed, she
came reluctantly. Alice
knew that it was an area
where there were many
TB patients, and respiratory
infections were what she
needed a bit less than
a broken leg. But setting
her anxieties aside, Alice
did show up to play, and
play hard against the
Liberty challengers.
This
was a rather high risk
game for the Emeralds.
After all, the Emeralds
could have been remembered
as having lost to the
Ducklings in spite of
whatever triumphs they
had thereafter. So it
goes with reputations.
And the risk was accentuated
by the Ducklings having
at least one player, Alice
Arden, who a few months
earlier had been feted
in New York City with
a ticker tape parade and
a reception by Mayor LaGuardia.
For the parade she sat
high on the back seat
of a convertible as the
procession made its way
up Broadway, past Trinity
Church, to City Hall.
(Not one of the Emeralds
could match that.) The
United States team had
amassed 59 medals for
second place overall;
the German team garnered
89 medals, aided by anabolic
steroids and testosterone
injections which would
disqualify the German
athletes today. So the
City, and the nation,
had reason to celebrate.
Today
women in sports are very
much taken for granted.
Hence we have little conception
of how unusual it was
for a woman to take up
sports seriously in the
1920s and ’30s when Alice was maturing. For example, Alice recalls that the culture was so opposed to women competitors that it fostered an old-wives’ tale that girls who focused on sports could not have babies! With her characteristic insight and disdain for suffering fools, Alice still laughs when she tells of it. This shibboleth did not deter her from training for state championships in her native Baldwin, Long Island, or after high school, and while working a day job for American Express, from continuing training in New York City – from the Bronx to St. George’s Hotel in Brooklyn .
During
these post-high school
years Alice captured the
national championships
in the High Jump three
years in succession, in
1933, ‘34 and ‘35. In so doing Alice bettered the record then held by Babe Didricksen [Zaharias], with a height that went unsurpassed for 20 years. And as an Olympian she came in fifth in the world. All of this was a prelude to her Catskill appearance where her team came in second – but Alice was number one for Russ Hodge.
After
their marriage in 1937
the Hodges lived in Liberty
where Russ worked on radios
and appliances. He had
befriended David Sarnoff,
the founder of NBC, and
hence in the early 1940s
Sarnoff gave him one of
the first television sets
in Sullivan County. Russ
had to build tall towers
to receive signals, and
these he shared with neighbors.
In
1945 the Hodges moved
to Rockland where they
owned and operated a furniture
store out of the familiar
green barn at the intersection
of the Rockland and Craig-E-Claire
Roads. The barn is now,
of course, the physical
fitness emporium run by
their son Rusty.
The
furniture business was
a link to the families
living in the Upper Beaverkill.
Foremost among them were
the Irving Berlins. This
was deja vu for Alice.
The Long Island Ardens
had followed the romance
of Ellin Mackay, the ingenue
from one of New York’s weathiest families, with an impoverished Lower East Side boy, Irving Berlin. She was Roman Catholic; he was not. So the newpapers Alice grew up with tracked the courtship closely, and when Ellin accepted the Berlin proposal it was headlines on Long Island. The tenement lad won the heart of a woman whose family had homes in New York City, London and Paris, as well as silver mines in the western U.S. Indeed, Ellin’s paternal grandfather was a principal owner of the famed Comstock Lode. Still, it was not exactly a Social Register matchup even though her family could have bought and sold most of those in the book. The close friendship between the Berlins and Hodges is revealed by an inscribed copy of Ellin’s biographical book about her family, “Silver Platter.” This account of her family’s ascendancy to fame and fortune ironically describes in detail the extent of the humiliation, ridicule and slights visited on her MacKay grandparents by New York City society, forcing them to find refuge in London and Paris. Ellin gave it to Russ Hodge for his birthday in 1957.
Hodges
Furniture, which had begun
in Liberty, was active in
Rockland in serving local
families and Catskill resorts.
But it did not take long
for Russ Hodge to cease
doing business with the
resorts. As Alice explains
they purchased volumes of
furniture on installments – three months equal payments – and then neglected to pay the third installment. This sent Russ into the bowels of some of the great hotels (coal bins, kitchens) tracking down the owners for payment. Simply not selling to them was easier and less hazardous.
In addition to the Berlins, the Hodges had an active social life in the Valley. Notable friends were the Osborns, the Loizeauxs and Mrs. Foote. As to the latter, Alice recalls how she was a regal woman who never quite ceased being an actress as evidenced by the various apparel she wore. And near the end of her days Rusty and wife Pam spent many hours visiting with her.
The Hodges also were close to their nearer neighbors, the Hardenberghs (Burr and Cameron), the Schwaningers, the Renners, and Emory Campbell – all denizens of the Iron Bridge community, and to whom they supplied TV cable feeds.
While living in Rockland Alice and Russ also nurtured three children, Laura Lee, Rusty and Jim. And as he matured it was clear that Rusty was to wear the mantle woven for his mother. At the age of 13 Rusty was captivated and emboldened by the movie “The Jim Thorpe Story.” By the time of his late teens-early twenties, Rusty was training for the most demanding of all athletic challenges, the decathlon. As noted earlier, in the course of this Rusty was setting records. His “track record” qualified him for the 1963 Pan American Games held in Sao Paolo, Brazil, and based on his qualifying performances, he was the odds-on favorite to win. At the age of 27, after all, he had broken the world decathlon record. But tragically, during the second day of competition in the pole vault, Rusty’s pole flung him wide of the pit. He landed on the “standard” which held the cross bar, severely injuring his leg, and effectively removing him from competition. Alice watched with horror as the medical team carried Rusty off the field on a stretcher.
Thus the great promise of countless competitions leading up to the international games in Brazil was not realized. In spite of his injury Rusty was still able to compete in the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 but the Sao Paolo mishap had taken its toll and denied Rusty a medal. Rusty continues his active participation with Olympic activities as Chaplain for the former Olympians and for the U.S. teams as they evolve.
But the Grande Dame of Craig-E-Claire has much for which to be thankful: a loving marriage that endured for 64 years, a son as worthy successor to her Olympic accolades, a granddaughter-in-law who joined the elite of mountain climbers by ascending the highest mountain on each of the seven continents, and a granddaughter, April, honored as a Scholar-Athlete of Roscoe High School from which she was graduated in June of 2005.
The memories of the 1936 Olympic Games are kept alive by Alice’s archives. These include the Opening Ceremony program with its fanatical detail, down to half-minutes, of when the processions would take place, when Hitler would do his various duties as host of the games, and how the participants would array themselves before the German Chancellor in the stadium.
They also inspire memories of how athletes in 1936 had to pay their own way to Berlin. In her case, as the only female competitor from New York, Alice received a gift of $750 from a group of New York lawyers for her trip. The Olympic Committee, true to its rigors, made her return $250 as surplus and hence forbidden funding. Then there are recollections of the ship Manhattan that carried the team, and of the Olympic Committee’s banning the famed swimmer Eleanor Holmes from competing because she had had an alcoholic drink enroute while sharing a stateroom with her big-band leader husband, Artie Shaw.
Finally, we must recall that there was intense international pressure to cancel the Berlin Olympics. The Olympic Committee had awarded the venue to Germany before the Nazi party had ruthlessly taken over, and many nations seriously considered withdrawing in protest. But the idea that the games were for the athletes and not for the politicians prevailed.
So today the Beaverkill Valley hosts not only the “body beautiful” of 1936, but more pertinently the “mind, smile and personality beautiful” of 2005.
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