Memories Made To Last

On a board 20 feet high, she would stand on her hands and dive into a canvas pool at the Spokane Interstate Fair. It all started there, when she was 6 years old.

It culminated in a swimming stadium in Berlin in 1936, in front of the glowering mien of Adolf Hitler and a throng of 20,000, a week after Jesse Owens had won the last of his four Olympic gold medals.

Mary Lou Skok has not matched a stroke to a stopwatch in the 64 years since those Games.

But let her turn on her television to hear just a few bars of the Olympic fanfare and that’s all it takes to stir memories both grand and trivial, some long buried and surprising even to her.

Like the bug juice.

“That’s what we called it,” she said. “It was supposed to give us energy. I think it was just colored water. I know it tasted awful.

“My, I hadn’t thought about that in years. That’s funny. Bug juice. Yuck.”

She was Mary Lou Petty then, a 1933 graduate of Lewis and Clark High School, a former starter on the Kinman Business School women’s basketball team who had left a good job in the credit office of Montgomery Ward to continue an interrupted swimming career by joining the Washington Athletic Club team in Seattle.

She is 85 now, 14 times a great-grandmother. She splits her time between her family’s ranch near Montesano and her Tempe, Ariz., home. Her athletic pursuits are limited to a dogged quest to lower her 23 handicap in golf, to which end she’s rigged up a net in her garage to snag practice drives.

Just a year ago, she made a rare return to Spokane to attend the Inland Northwest Sports Hall of Fame induction - having gone in herself as the first woman with the class of 1974.

And every four years, she marvels at the wunderkinds of the Olympic pool who have long since blown away her records but may never approach her sense of gratification - having pursued her Olympic dream through the heart of the Depression and some 40 years before Title IX.

“I look back on it now and wonder how we ever did it,” she admitted. “We didn’t have anything - no one did. There was no sense of being a pioneer because everything was so day-to-day.”

Take the trips she made to regional and national meets in California and Chicago. WAC coach Ray Daughters would load his women’s relay team and his one male swimmer, Jack Medica, into an old DeVaux sedan.

“We didn’t eat breakfast, we’d have crackers and milk for lunch, a Coke in the afternoon and then swim for our dinners,” Skok said. “Ray would work ahead with an athletic club or a resort or hotel and we would swim against the locals - and we always had to break a record, of course.

“Then they fed us.”

If it sounds hand-to-mouth, it was.

“But we had the most beautiful life together,” Skok insisted.

And still do. Skok and her relay mates - Olive McKean, Doris Buckley and Betty Lea - remain in touch.

She had joined the WAC after a bitter disappointment in 1932, when she had qualified for the Olympic Trials in New York as a 17-year-old high school junior and expected to attend - only to be told at the 11th hour by her coach at the Spokane Women’s Athletic Club, Margaret Mahoney, that there was no money available to send her.

“She had led me to believe it was going to be taken care of,” Skok said. “I think, really, that she just got cold feet at the thought of going to New York.”

The swimmer’s family could not help. Walter Petty managed Pacific Transfer Company through some tough times, but the company went under in 1932.

“I was kind of in shock most of the summer,” she said, “but there’s nothing like falling in love.”

Bob Skok attended Gonzaga University and worked as a stockbroker, but he also played and sang with Dutch Groshoff’s band, made a name for himself as a handball player and played some golf with a fellow named Bing Crosby. Four years older than Petty, he had reservations when she accepted Daughters’ invitation to replace gold medalist Helene Madison on the WAC team in 1934.

“But this was my dream,” she said.

When the nationals and Olympic Trials came around again in 1936, Skok got some help from her old hometown - the Athletic Round Table kicked in $500 and the Elks $200 - and this time made it to New York. The WAC team had high hopes, but only McKean, Medica and Skok qualified for the Olympics - Skok by taking fourth in the 400-meter freestyle.

In those days, there were but five Olympic swimming events for women; today, there are 16.

The trip to Germany aboard the SS Manhattan has provided Skok with one of the more entertaining chapters of her life - being assigned to share a steerage cabin with Eleanor Holm, who after winning the gold medal in 1932 had married orchestra leader Art Jarrett and embarked on a show business career - and became legendary for being kicked off the U.S. Olympic team for partying en route to the Games.

“Delightful gal,” Skok said. “She had more luggage than all the other girls put together.

“You’ve read about these athletes who could be drunk at night and break a record the next day? She was one of those. She’d get sloshed and I don’t think she could go more than 200 yards - but she could go like wildfire for 100 and that’s all we asked.”

But she was far too headstrong - and brazen - for stodgy Avery Brundage of the U.S. Olympic Committee, whose officials somehow didn’t see the hypocrisy of partying themselves at the next table.

Skok’s Olympic diary is just as full. She was in the stadium to see Owens win the 100 - and witness Hitler’s early departure from his box. She also came down with an inopportune case of ptomaine poisoning and staggered through her three races in Berlin delirious.

She finished fourth in every round - the quarterfinals, semifinals and finals, in the last coming up three seconds shy of a bronze medal.

Her welcome home was worthy of gold, however. There to meet the SS President Roosevelt was Bob Skok, with a ring and $9 in his pocket. They married in St. Patrick’s Cathedral - in the office, since she was a Protestant and he a Catholic - and honeymooned on her USOC train ticket back to Spokane.

Her swimming career was over.

“It’s a thrill to watch these kids swimming now, to see how hard they’ve worked,” she said. “I just have the greatest admiration for them and what they’ve done.

“But, you know - I like the way we did it.”