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Carl Zeisberg
Courtesy of Tim Boggan No official in the history of our Sport ever tried harder to organize the USTTA than did Carl Zeisberg, an authoritarian and consequently controversial figure. Throughout the 1930’s, his name–both as President of the Association and as Editor of Topics–is synonymous with Law and Order. We first see him, and his…
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Graham Steenhoven
Courtesy o Tim Boggan Topics first mentions Graham Steenhoven when he’s 30 years old and a representative of the Michigan TTA. At the Detroit train station, he has courteously met St. Paul, Minnesota’s Helene “Tiny” Moss, perhaps not yet a teenager, for, unaccompanied, she’s come to play in the Feb. 8-9, 1941 Western Open. Thirty…
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George Schein
Courtesy of Tim Boggan Indispensible to any attempt to recreate the early History of U.S. Table Tennis are the published books and private scrapbooks of those active in 1930’s table tennis–specifically, the popularizations of Neil Schaad, Bill Stewart, and Coleman Clark, and the lovingly kept (if not always so chronologically ordered) clippings of Marcus Schussheim…
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John Read
Courtesy of Tim Boggan John Read rose from near anonymity as a N.Y. player and sometime casual t.t.-in-group poker player, almost a groupie at Lawrence’s, to become for many years the Association’s Ranking Chair, USTTA E.C. member, and Captain and Manager of many U.S. Teams both at home and abroad. Though John of course enjoyed…
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Tom Miller
Courtesy Tim Boggan For the last quarter of a century, 2001 USATT Hall of Fame Inductee Tom Miller of Livermore, California has become progressively more and more involved in local, regional, national, and finally international table tennis. First, Tom was an enthusiastic player–so much so that by 1981 he was President of his local Tri-Valley…
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George “Gus” Kennedy
Courtesy of Tim Boggan George “Gus” Kennedy first comes into the pages of the USTTA magazine in a photo from the Nov., 1970 Tamasu Butterfly Table Tennis Report. What, you may well ask, was a picture of Gus and those other Minnesotans—Chris Faye, Alan Goldstein, Charlie Disney, and Doug Maday—doing in that Japanese magazine? Well,…
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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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William A. Gunn
Courtesy of Tim Boggan Bill Gunn, President of the Gunn Brothers Oil Co., a home heating firm in Mamaroneck, N.Y., didn’t start playing the game until the early-to-mid-1930’s, when he was 33 years old. In 1935, when the Larchmont Westchester, N.Y. Club changed its affiliation (it had been one of the last holdouts) from the…
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Otto F. J. EK
Courtesy of Tim Boggan Surely no USTTA President was ever so anonymous to the general membership as he’s about to take office as Otto Ek was. Not a word had been written about him in Topics, only the line in the monthly list of “Affiliates” indicating he was President of the Ohio TTA—and even that…
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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…
US Table Tennis Hall of Fame
Recognizing athletes and contributors in the sport of Table Tennis in the United States