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Olga Soltesz
Courtesy of Tim Boggan (PHOTO #1) Hungarian refugees Paul and Olga Soltesz are shown here in 1957 with their Budapest-born three-year-old daughter Olga. They’ve resettled in Melbourne, FL, and at the moment are heading off to town. No, they’re not going to any local table tennis club—though Paul (PHOTO #2) had been an enthusiastic player…
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Joe Newgarden
Courtesy of Tim Boggan At Joe Newgarden’s induction into the USTTA Hall of Fame, Billy Neely introduces us to his admired friend’s beginnings. We hear that Joe was born in Westport, New York on Independence Day, 1929, and that “he was one of eight children born to hard-working parents of English descent.” When Joe was…
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Ray Guillen
Courtesy of Tim Boggan (PHOTO #1) The ball, the racket, the player—somethin’s gonna fly. Talk about flamboyance, talk about a player who might be just a little wild, who IS this guy? Why, our next inductee of course (PHOTO #2)—Ray Guillen, a..k.a. “character”/actor “Ray Hollywood.” He’d rehearsed and sharpened his table tennis act at Milla…
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Wendell Dillon
Courtesy of Tim Boggan Wendell Dillon, as he tells us in a brief biography, played in his first sanctioned USTTA tournament—the National Intercollegiate’s—when he was a second-semester freshman at Ohio University in 1954. But you wouldn’t say he’d begun to make his mark in the Sport, not yet, not for a while—in part because he…
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Sean O’Neill
Courtesy of Tim Boggan Sean O’Neill came to the Sport when he was seven—began going to a local club with his dad Pat who as a teenager played in Ohio tournaments. The O’Neill family had hosted the newly arrived Thailand Champions, Charlie Wuvanich and Chuchai Chan, and in the summer of 1975, after the Thais…
US Table Tennis Hall of Fame
Recognizing athletes and contributors in the sport of Table Tennis in the United States