Sport: Congress Inc.

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A Detroit housewife appeared with a black eye. One mother bounced 880 miles from Columbus on a motorcycle. Houston women, like all good Texans of 1936, boosted their State's Centennial by wearing cowboy hats. From San Francisco arrived a team calling itself the Dr. Painless Parkers,* arrayed in jockey caps, white satin blouses, black satin pants. When these and some 1,500 other women reached Omaha three weeks ago for the 19th annual tournament of the Women's International Bowling Congress Inc., the oldest competitor, Omaha's own 67-year-old Mrs. Nevada Helen Robertson Tillson, opened play by cutting a crepe-paper ribbon, then whipped the lopsided ball she has used for 33 years down the alley for a strike.

Though previously warned of the enthusiasm of women bowlers, Omaha's Hotel Fontenelle remained skeptical up to the last minute, had to send out for extra cots for its 600 female patrons. Popeyed, Omaha's citizenry gaped at the husky visitors, most of them over 30, who resolutely dropped the Mrs. from their names, gulped vast quantities of beer, sang their own bowling songs, whooped the Wahoo song in honor of nearby Wahoo, Neb. But what surprised Omaha most was to find that, aside from stenographers and salesgirls who sent ball after ball into the gutters, certain women could bowl as well as certain men.

There was dignified, plump, white-haired Floretta D. McCutcheon, whose shrewd pressagent has built her up into the No. 1 female exhibition bowler. There was robust Marie Warmbier who, with an average of nearly 200 in three years of exhibition bowling, did poorly by sacrificing accuracy for speed in the Omaha tournament. There was freckled Mary Jane ("Little Marie") Huber, 15-year-old schoolgirl, a hopeless cripple until she was 10, who handled the ball like a grape fruit, outscored her coach, Marie Warmbier. Pretty, buxom Ella Burmeister, a grocery clerk, so excited one male spectator with her nine-game total of 1,683 that he fell off his high perch, broke his ankle. Marge Slogar, 22-year-old Lithuanian who starred at left field on the Cleveland Bloomer Girls' softball championship team last year, swaggered around the alleys in a baseball jacket, shot a 612 singles, had a nine-game total second only to Bowler Burmeister's high mark in the first days of the tournament.

As usual, the two outstanding figures were the Congress' President Jeannette Knepprath and Secretary Emma Phaler. A spiritualist, married to a Milwaukee chiropractor, President Knepprath has been handling bowling affairs for 18 years, is still a poor bowler herself. So is Secretary Phaler whose pleasant efficiency ("She is the kind of woman you could run over and borrow a cup of sugar from") has made her the backbone of the organization. A certified public accountant, she sends out the prize money so soon after the tournament's end that the delegates gladly elected her for the fourth time. Despite underground opposition from a rebellious Chicago clique, Jeannette Knepprath received her fifth presidency.