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Mildred Wilkinson Shipman
Courtesy of Tim Boggan Neither the Parker Brothers’ American Ping-Pong Association (APPA) nor the break-away New York Table Tennis Association (NYTTA) held U.S. Women’s Championships before 1933. But although the Mar., ‘33 APPA Chicago National’s had a very good turnout of 40 entries in the Women’s, Mildred Wilkinson, one of the locals (from Glen Ellyn)…
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Bernard Hock
Courtesy of Tim Boggan More than a quarter of a century ago, a friend of Bernie Hock’s, Dave Russell, wrote a letter to the USTTA’s Topics to say that this “old buzzard” Hock, “a number-one-class character,” just had to be remembered in the magazine. “You can’t let a champion, a fine man, and a person…
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George Hendry
Courtesy of Tim Boggan More than 40 years ago, at about the same time that Japan’s Hiroji Satoh was astonishing everyone by winning the World Championship with his strange sponge racket, George Hendry married Marilyn Schuessler and soon thereafter gave up playing table tennis to establish his own accounting practice. Then, after an absence of…
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J. Rufford Harrison
Courtesy of Tim Boggan J. Rufford Harrison (the “J” stands for “John”) was born in England in the merry month of May, 1930, and named “Rufford,” so the story goes, after a ruined abbey where boyfriends liked to take their girlfriends. When, however, Rufford himself came of age, he was less interested in “verderous glooms…
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Bobby Gusikoff
Courtesy of Tim Boggan “Bobby, let’s go and watch your cousin Leon play ping-pong tonight.” From that casual suggestion, made by a father to his son on an evening in the late 1940’s, comes Bobby Gusikoff’s half-century recollection that, “As we climbed the stairs to those fabled Herwald Lawrence Broadway Courts, there was no way…
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Mae Clouther
Courtesy of Tim Boggan Reportedly, Mae Clouther “declined an offer from the Ziegfeld Follies to marry a Boston accountant.” One can believe it. And believe, too, that after said husband had “laughed at her” for thinking she might be able to play ping-pong, she began taking the game seriously enough to venture forth from her…
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Douglas Cartland
Courtesy of Tim Boggan The official USTTA publication, Table Tennis Topics, first mentions Doug Cartland when in Apr., 1935, as part of an exhibition at Chapel Hill given by visiting New York stars Abe Berenbaum, Rudy Rubin, Chet Wells, and George Bacon, Doug was said to have lost the University of North Carolina table tennis…
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Charles “Chuck” Burns
Courtesy of Tim Boggan Detroit’s Charles Bernstein, whom I’ll already start calling Chuck Burns, born May 25, 1917, died July 4, 2002, had a sports background before he became a serious table tennis player. As he later told a reporter, he’d “captained the Northeastern YMCA basketball team for two years,” and he’d also “played one…
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Heja Lee
After almost 10 years of serious play–during which she represented South Korea in the Asian Championships–He-ja Lee came to the U.S. as the wife of 6-time U.S. Champion Dal-Joon Lee. In those days, like her arch-rival, Insook Na Bhushan, He-ja was based in Columbus, Ohio, where of course she practiced with D-J, while Insook practiced…
US Table Tennis Hall of Fame
Recognizing athletes and contributors in the sport of Table Tennis in the United States