 Hello, and welcome to the October National Archives Comes Alive Young Learners program. My name is Ann Drydell, and I am an education specialist in Philadelphia. This morning for our program, we are going to meet Babe Diedrichsen, one of the most influential American women athletes of her time, portrayed by Linda Kenyon, actor and storyteller. Let's start with a little background, though, first. Babe Diedrichsen is perhaps best known as a professional golfer. She won the U.S. Women's Open twice, founded the Ladies' Professional Golf Association, and helped revolutionize the game. Athletic by nature, she grew up trying different sports and excelled at all of them. Babe was invited to represent the United States at the 1932 Olympics. Later she won two gold medals for women's track and field events, breaking world records. Throughout her career, Babe faced discrimination in sports, but she also helped to break barriers for women to become professional athletes. The National Archives has historical records related to Babe Diedrichsen. Here is a short clip of her at the 1932 Olympics, as well as a later clip of her playing golf. So that was exciting to see a little bit of history there before we hear from Babe. Unfortunately, at the height of her professional career, Babe was diagnosed with cancer. Her determination to continue playing sports after undergoing treatment helped raise public awareness about cancer. In 2021, more than 60 years after her death, Babe posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She has often been cited as the greatest female athlete of the 20th century. We have a number of educational activities and historical sources about sports and athletes in DocsTeach, our online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives. So here's how you would access them. Go to docsteach.org. You're going to, in the drop-down menu, look for popular topics and then go to sports. There you'll find a variety of records that demonstrate how sports can unite people, teach values, and inspire hope and pride. Here is the page I was just talking about, All American, the Power of Sports. In the United States especially, sports have powered efforts to bring citizens together, shape us, and project a vision of what it means to be American. Sports can also convey power to athletes in breaking social barriers, like you see here with Jackie Robinson or like we'll hear today from Babe Dedrickson. In this next slide, you can also see a lesson specifically about Babe Dedrickson. All right, looks like it might take a little bit for this to come up. There we go. Docs shows us on DocsTeach how you can get to the sports-related documents. Now let's go to that lesson specifically about Babe Dedrickson. And teachers, for those of you who aren't familiar with DocsTeach, you'll see that we not only have documents there, but we also have teaching activities. So you can browse through our documents or you can go directly to our teaching activities. And so here is that page I was mentioning. The name of this particular activity is the greatest female athlete, Babe Dedrickson. So check this out on DocsTeach, our documents, and this great activity recently created by one of our staff members. So a few logistics before we get started, we're going to be taking audience questions via the YouTube chat box and have a question and answer session with Babe Dedrickson at the end of her presentation. So if you have a question, go ahead and put it in the chat, and we will get to it at the end. The chat box is being monitored by National Archives staff. And also if you want to put in the chat box where you are watching from today, that would be great. We'd love to hear, you know, everybody who's joining us and where they're from. And one final thing, all the Young Learners programs are brought to you by the National Archives Public Programs and Education Team and the National Archives Foundation. And now, let us give a warm welcome to Babe Dedrickson. Hi, I'm Babe, Babe Dedrickson Zaharius. Nobody calls me Mildred. The most important sports writer in America, Grant Lynn Rice, calls me the most flawless section of muscle harmony of complete mental and physical coordination the world of sport has ever seen. I got my nickname Babe as a kid playing baseball because of all the home runs I was hitting. Like Babe Ruth. Only better. Trouble is now I got cancer again. But I'm going to beat it just like I did last time. It's like I always say before a tournament, here's Babe who's coming in second. I've always been the most competitive female I ever knew. One or two men came close. I built my life to be invincible. I was born June 26, 1911 in Port Arthur, Texas, and I played every game and every sport I could my entire life. But the real love of my life, golf. Counting amateur and professional golf, I've won 82 tournaments. Between 1940 and 1950, I won every women's golf title there was. U.S. women's open three times. World championship four times. I was so strong that I went over to Scotland in 1947 and beat all those ladies at their own game. The Associated Press named me athlete of the year six times. That's more than anybody else. And in 1950, the Associated Press named a female athlete of the half century. That was me too. Then there were the 1932 Olympics. I don't like to talk about that, but I have three medals from track and field, gold medal for the javelin, another gold for the 80-meter hurdles. And that silver medal they gave me in the high jump was unfair. The officials said my head went over the bar before my feet, so my jump qualified as an illegal dive. It all started in 1928 in Beaumont, Texas. Papa was reading the newspaper coverage of the Amsterdam Olympics and me, 17 years old, sat there listening to him. I didn't even have to think. I just knew I'm going to do that and I'm going to do one better. I'm going to be the greatest athlete that ever lived. My sister Lily was my best friend growing up. We did everything together. I made her train for the Olympics with me. I decided I would jump hurdles and Lily would be a runner. We trained next to each other. Lily would run down the street and I'd jump hurdles over the shrubs in the front yards. I beat her a couple of times, even with those bushes in the way. Hello, George. My husband, you can't miss him. He weighs 300 pounds. He's always been a hulk of a man. When we first met at the Los Angeles golfers open, he was a professional wrestler. He was only 200 pounds. He didn't expect his golf partner to be a woman, never mind falling in love with her. George and I both know how to put on the show. We hadn't known each other five minutes before he began pretending to put wrestling holds on me and the photographers were eating it up. More than putting on a show, though, we both knew about hard times. In both of our families, you had to work hard to get by. My parents were immigrants from Norway and George's from Greece. But that wasn't going to stop either of us. George did everything he could for my career. He supported me. He pushed me. He booked appearances for me and he wouldn't let me back out even if I'd been on the road longer than I could remember because that's the thing about being a sports star. You have to keep showing up places. Even if you're tired, even if you're sick and tired and the appearances pay your pocket change and your husband doesn't join you half the time, but he pockets your change anyway. You know what George helped me with just yesterday? In this very room, we announced to the press the start of the Babe Dietrichsons Zaharius Cancer Fund. We're going to help people. They're going to do research. They're going to get the best equipment and we're going to help people pay for treatment too. I want to give people hope. Why other public figures keep their cancers a secret is beyond me. We need public awareness and support to defeat this disease. They just published my autobiography. You know what the final line reads? My autobiography isn't finished yet. The doctors can believe what they want, but I know what it's like when all the odds are against you and nobody's counting on you. And yet on that 18th hole, it's your name the gallery's cheering. The Babe doesn't show up to play. The Babe shows up to win. I don't see any sense in playing any game unless you win. Do you? When we were growing up, there were seven of us kids and mama took in laundry for a little extra money. And sometimes when we didn't have enough food to eat, our neighbor friend would come bring us dinner. But mama kept her pride. She said we were never to accept handouts. The only reason we would eat that food was because it was a social occasion. First thing I did when I was making money on my own was sending it on back home. Sometimes I barely had enough money to feed myself, but I made darn sure mama and papa did. Probably my proudest day was mama's birthday when I got her a great big oven. Nicest thing you ever seen. And by then she had food to put in it too. Mama deserved it. She put up with it an awful lot with me. I'd run away every chance I got to join any game I could find. I'd forget all about the chores. I'd forget all about that package of meat I was supposed to deliver home an hour ago until I saw a neighborhood dog chewing on it. Mama chased me down the street hollering. I was going to get it, so I was running as fast as my legs would go. When I turned around to check on my lead, I saw I had a good lead on mama, but I also saw her out of breath and limping. So I stood stuck still where I was and let her catch up. She just gave me a hug at that point. I never liked to see mama struggle. That's why when I got the chance to leave high school early and take a job with insurance company in Dallas, I jumped at it. They hired me as a typist, but they really wanted me for their athletic teams. Lots of companies had teams because they found that the athlete employees were more productive and more loyal than the others. Coach McCollum recruited me for their women's basketball team after seeing me play in Beaumont, and I told them I'd come, and I got on the track and field team too, and the baseball team and the tennis team and the diving team. I didn't make very much of a good impression on the other girls because I knew I was more skilled and more practiced than they were. I wasn't shy about saying so, but I bet they hated me in 1932. The AAU, the amateur athletic union, was holding track and field championships in Illinois. All the other company teams were going. All of us girls knew that this track meet was the tryouts for the Olympics. Now Coach McCollum was all about publicity. The more publicity the track team got, the better business was for the insurance company, so he's going to stir up all the publicity he could. The way I'd been performing all season, he suspected I could go to the track meet as a one-person team and win the whole thing for the company. Boy, were my teammates upset! But that's just what I did. Each of the other teams had about a dozen girls competing. I upset those other teams too. I showed up so excited I started yelling, I'm going to win every event I enter. I didn't mean no disrespect, and I couldn't imagine anyone would take it that way, but they did. As I say, I don't see any point in playing any game unless you win. I won six events that day, and I broke four world records. The reporters didn't know what to make of me. Some reporter said that was the most amazing series of performances ever accomplished by any individual male or female in track and field history. With that quote, I was on my way. I was 20 years old and going to the 1932 Olympics. I remember the train ride out to Los Angeles. We all rode out together, all the girls of the American track and field team. Some of the girls were sleeping, but I was too excited to sleep. I took to running up and down the aisles of the train, hollering. I admit, I may have pulled some pillows out from under sleeping heads. And I guess they didn't like what I was hollering either. The station stop in Albuquerque, I hopped on a bicycle, so I hopped on it. And while I was riding, I yelled, Have you ever heard of Babe Detrickson? Well, if you haven't, you will. I toned myself down in later years. People can be incredibly cruel for most of those reporters. It wasn't enough to be strong and fast. They wanted you to be pretty too. They wanted you to wear nice dresses and powder your nose, heaven help you if you had a short cropped hair and an angular jaw. After the Olympics, I had a real rough time of it. I wanted to capitalize on my success on my newfound fame. But it took a while for me to realize how hard it is to stay in the headlines. It's amazing how fast your star comes in and how fast it goes out. When I got back to Texas after winning the three medals, they had a big welcome home parade in my honor, followed by a luncheon at the fanciest hotel I had ever seen. Mama was so impressed and feeling so proud of me. She wanted a memento of the occasion. So she took one of the hotel's gleaming white fabric napkins. She tried to return it right after. She was embarrassed. But the hotel told her to keep it. So she took it home and she washed it and she ironed it and she kept it folded in her drawer until the day she died. Those were some of my roughest days, the days after the Olympics, the years after the Olympics. It's just saying a lot considering my current condition. In those days, if you were a female athlete, you didn't have professional opportunities. I didn't start the LPGA, the latest professional golf association until 1949. Before that, you stayed an amateur with the AAU because those were the only ones giving you the opportunity to compete. Besides that, as a woman, if you were not eligible, if you were not a member of the AAU, you were not eligible for Olympic competition. They handled amateur track and field, amateur baseball, amateur golf, amateur tennis. They performed in 1988 for Crime Outlaw, they handled everything. I formed the LPGA out of necessity. As it was, it was very expensive to play golf as an amateur with equipment costs and travel costs. Really, there was no way for skilled female athletes to make a living in the 30s and 40s. It was only slightly easier now. Honestly, it was George who first put the seat in my mind. He said, why not form a tournament circuit for women just as there already is for men? It was hard work, organizing venues, trying to raise prize money, trying to get folks to take us seriously. But boy, it felt good having our own golf association. I remember my first tournament. I showed up and I didn't have fancy clothes to wear. You know what those other girls said? They said, we really don't need any truck drivers' daughters in our tournament. I turned around and beat them all. Anyway, Papa was a cabinet maker. He wasn't a truck driver. You know, Bertha Bowen taught me how to be a lady. She taught me how to do my hair and my makeup. She taught me how to wear a girdle too. But I'm no part of those things. A lady is one thing, but a lady still needs to breathe. So like I say when people ask, how do you hit so far so well? I say, I just loosen my girdle and let go. You know, I was in a movie with Catherine Hepburn in our scene. She was playing a professional golfer and I was playing myself. Her character was supposed to beat me on the 18th hole, but I wouldn't hear that. Of course I beat her. You simply can't be starstruck when you're a star yourself. I remember 1953, days before I learned I had cancer the first time. I was playing in the inaugural year of the Babe Zaharius Open in my hometown. I was tired. I'd been traveling, like always, playing hard and entertaining hard. In my heart, I knew there was something wrong with my body. An athlete knows. But it was my own tournament. Where did I get the energy to play? After the first two days I was in the lead, but several of the girls were down by just a few points. Coming off the 16th green on the last day I knew I had to make par on the 17th and the 18th. Well, I missed par on the 17th. On the 18th hole I got up there trying to pull myself together. This was my last chance. So I took a deep breath and I slugged that ball with all my might. And wouldn't you know I hooked it behind a tree. But after years of tournaments, after years of being a winner I didn't give up. I carried that ball to the green on the next shot and I sank it from 30 feet away. It was cheering, there was hollering, but I couldn't take part in it. I had never felt so completely exhausted in my life. The next day I went to see my doctor and found out that I had cancer. But you know what? I got stronger and I came back and I won the US Women's Open the next year. And that's what I'm going to do now. I'm going to come back. Like I said, my autobiography isn't finished yet. Thanks so much, babe. We really appreciate hearing your story and the compelling things that you went through in your life. Now, I want to address some of the questions we have. And the first question is, did you and George have any children? No, we didn't. We actually tried to adopt because we love children. I love children. I grew up in a big family, seven kids and neighborhood kids all around. But the adoption agency thought that our life was too... We're going here this way and that way and all over the place. And it wasn't a real stable life for a child. And so we got turned down. But I like children. I visit children in cancer war and so. Oh, that's fantastic. What about the different types of sports you played? I'm really interested to hear a little bit more. So we've heard about your golf career. We've heard about the track and field. What other type of sports did you play? Well, tennis, I beat Peter Laurie at tennis. He was pretty good. But actually, what happened at the 1932 Olympics? They didn't allow the women to warm up as much as the men. They didn't allow us enough time to warm up, given the constraints of the program that was going on. And so when I threw that through the javelin, I actually strained my arm. And so my serve in tennis was not quite right for a few years. But after that, I came back, almost got to be a professional, but not quite. I decided I'd concentrate on golf. But tennis is a lot to run. Oh, I love it. Car racing and anything. If I get in a car, I start driving as fast as I can. I know I shouldn't say that. I hear you, though. It sounds like you did just want to achieve an excel all the time. Yes, yes. All right. So we have another question that came in. So and it's a question you talked a little bit about or a subject you talked a little bit about, but maybe you could expand on it. And the question is, were women truly admired for their skills and abilities? Or were they looked at as too masculine and out of place? Well, I was surely looked at and teased and made fun of for my boasting, my attitude, my looks. If you were cute and pretty, that was quite different. But we were not taken seriously. It was hard to get folks to take us seriously. I think I made a contribution to that. And I did learn to powder my nose and wear fancy dresses and stuff. But right, but that had to be such a challenge to it was a big challenge. A lot of us face that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, to be such a good athlete, but then still have all these additional expectations on you. Yes. Yeah. OK, so so we talked about the sports and we talked about the children. We talked about a little about the about your Olympic career. Did I read to that you played some baseball also? Oh, yeah, I played baseball as a kid all the time. We my mother, my we play in the backyard and she did not like that with her rose bushes and all. But I played with a team called the House of David. I got $1,000 a month for that. And they all had beards and they ride down because it was sort of just a joke kind of baseball game. But OK, a ball to Joe DiMaggio. I'd sometimes show up and pitch an inning at the exhibition game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox. And we'd have pitching contests and stuff. Yeah, that sounds like anything. All right. So it looks like we've got one more question. So what advice do you we've heard about some of your challenges, including the challenges of the expectations people put on you and about your cancer challenges, physical health? What advice do you have for young people today based on all those challenges you've faced and the things you had to overcome? I think overcome is the word and challenge is the other word. When you get a challenge, you make up your mind to overcome it. Just keep trying. I mean, I would stay up until midnight until my hands bled practicing hitting golf balls. I had 1500 golf balls every single day. Oh, my goodness. Just just practicing. Yes. And learning about the sport. Now, there's some things you can't do. But if you put your mind to it, just don't give up when you made a mistake. When you I'll tell you the truth. After after my cancer operation, I went back. I went back on the tournament circuit. I came in 15th place. I am not a crier, but I cried 15th place. Next time I came in fifth place. And then before the year was out, I won the US Women's Open. Have to keep at it. You have to keep working. Work hard. Yeah. OK. Thank you so much for your presentation today and for your words of wisdom about persistence and overcoming challenges. So let's show that docs teach sports slide one more time. We'll get that pulled up so that those of you who are interested in learning more about the records that the National Archives has, you'll be able to take a look at that. And then we up here. Here we go. Here's the docs teach again. That's docs teach dot or G and you can find out information about many different athletes, the challenges they faced and the hurdles that they had to had to overcome. And I wanted to remind everybody about the next program, how to find out information about it and what's it about. So anytime you go to archives dot gov, that's the National Archives website, you can just look for a tendon event or you can look on the National Archives Facebook page. And the slide you're seeing here is our next program, our next Young Learners Program Children's Book Talk, Chester Nez and the Unbreakable Code, a Navajo Code Talker story. That sounds really good, too. That is going to be on Thursday, November 10th at 11 a.m. And our author and storyteller, Joseph Bruchak, will talk about the important work of our veterans while celebrating Native American culture and Navajo heritage. Thank you so much for joining us today and for participating and we look forward to seeing you next time. And thank you, babe.