Olympic gold medalist, world record holder in multiple sports, and founder of the Ladies Pro Golf Association, “Babe” was the ultimate athlete of the early 19th century.
Babe was born on June 26th, 1911 in Port Arthur, Texas. Her nickname was modeled after another “great”: Babe Ruth. She grew up playing baseball in her neighborhood and earned the nickname by being a fierce competitor and routine home-run hitter. It’s been noted that she excelled in every sport she tried. She even played basketball on the company team, The Golden Cyclones, while working as a secretary at Employers Casualty Company in Dallas, Texas for three years before setting her sights on the 1932 Olympics.
At the time, women were only allowed to compete in three events, yet Babe ended up qualifying in five. At 21-years-old, she earned a gold medal for the javelin throw (143 ft) and the 80-meter hurdle and set a new world record for both, no less. The only “downside” was that she left the Olympic games with a silver medal instead of gold in the high-jump after the judges disqualified her technique. Pretty good for a first Olympics, huh? As it stands, Babe is the only track and field athlete to win individual Olympic medals in running, throwing, and jumping events – male or female.
She’s well-known for these feats, but the most major of her achievements is her career in golf. Throughout her life, she won 82 tournaments and was considered a professional golfer because of her endorsements. At one point or another throughout her career, she was endorsed by Wilson, Wheaties, and Timex. P. Goldsmith Sons Inc. also created branded Babe golf clubs and balls and her most lucrative deal came from Chrysler. Chrysler paid Babe to play the harmonica and stand next to a red Dodge coupe at the Detroit Auto Show. How cool is that?
She met her husband because of golf, too. George Zaharais was a professional wrestler and actor from Colorado and they met at the 1938 Los Angeles Open when they were paired together at the tournament. She was competing as the first woman in the tournament ever. No other woman competed in this tournament until almost six decades later.
Eleven months after meeting Goerge and Babe got married and George became Babe’s manager. They settled down in Tampa, Florida and bought a golf course of their own. As Babe became more well-known, she received amateur status and this allowed her to play in a more competitive league of tournaments. Between 1943 and 1947, she won 17 amateur golf tournaments in a row.
“That little white ball won’t move until you hit it, and there’s nothing you can do after it has gone.”
Um, wow. How profound of you, Babe.
During this period, there were limited options for female golf competitors, so Babe co-founded the Ladies Professional Golf Association with fellow golfer Patty Berg. Babe held status as the president of this organization for the rest of her life. As a professional athlete, she achieved a major feat for women everywhere and in her final years, she reportedly earned close to $100,000 annually from endorsements and tournaments she competed in. $100,000 in the 1940s is akin to 1 million dollars today in 2021.
She was one cool girl and a truly fierce competitor.
The New York Times columnist Charles McGrath has written of Babe, “Except perhaps for Arnold Palmer, no golfer has ever been more beloved by the gallery.”
More cool facts about Babe:
She didn’t excel in school. She had to repeat 8th grade.
Babe was an excellent seamstress and made most of her clothes, including her golf ‘fits.
Although only 5’7” and 115 lbs, she was deemed “manly” by many critics and physically very strong.
She sang and played harmonica. She recorded songs like “I Felt a Little Teardrop” and “Detour” with Mercury Records.
In 1976, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
In 1981, The U.S. Postal Service put her on an 18 cent stamp!
The Associated Press declared Babe Woman Athlete of the 20th Century in 1999.
Rita Moreno is Miss Puerto Rico: Triple Threat. Singer, dancer, actress, and EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) recipient. Her resume is extensive in the entertainment industry; most notably for capturing roles in musical films Singin’ in the Rain (1952), The King and I (1956), West Side Story (1961).
Speaking about Singin’ in the Rain, Moreno has said that Gene Kelly wanted her in the movie and she seemed to fit the role he had in mind for her: silent film star Zelda Zanders. “He (Kelly) never said ‘Oh, she’s too Latina,’ he just thought I’d be fine for it.” Her most notable role? Anita in the original West Side Story. “What was important about Anita to me — and still is — is that Anita, believe it or not, was the only part I ever remember where I represented Hispanics in a dignified and positive way.”
She almost didn’t take the role that made her a huge star after hearing the original lyrics she’d have to sing in “America”: “Puerto Rico. You ugly island, island of tropic diseases.” She threatened to turn down the role, but Stephen Sondheim ended up changing the lyric to: “Puerto Rico, my heart’s devotion, let it sink back in the ocean.”
West Side Story is making a comeback on the silver screen December 10th, 2021 and a role was written specifically with Rita Moreno in mind. She’s also an executive producer. After all, she did win the Oscar for her portrayal of Anita in the 1961 movie. The day before the movie premieres, December 9th 2021, Moreno will turn 90 years old.
After her Oscar win, Moreno thought more was to come for her. She thought she’d be met with offers to play more big roles or even roles written with her in mind. I mean, this happens for actresses that typically win Oscars, right? An Oscar usually propels an actresses’ career, right? Unfortunately, not for Rita Moreno.
After the thrill was gone, Moreno’s life slowly returned to her reality: as a Latina actress. She was offered stereotyped roles as housewives of gang members and of the like. She cites this time as “the heartbreak of her life”. She turned these offers down, and rightfully so, since they were often offensive or insignificant. She didn’t make another movie for seven years after winning her Oscar.
In 1975, she won a Tony for her role in The Ritz. For most of the 70’s, Moreno was a cast member of the children’s show The Electric Company for which she earned a Grammy award for the show’s album. Cue the phrase: Hey, you guys! She also snagged a role in The Muppet Show, another children’s program, and earned an Emmy. Thus, in 1977, she was then an EGOT recipient.
In more recent history, she’s been featured in series like The Golden Girls, Miami Vice, Murphy Brown, Ugly Betty, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? and Oz. She also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.
A new PBS documentary based upon her memoir, Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, narrates her life and career. Coming up in the “Golden Age” of Hollywood, she experienced her fair share of sexism, racism, and sexual assault.
She described Buddy Adler, former Fox Studio Chief and extremely powerful in Moreno’s professional world at the time, as someone she would try desperately not to be alone with. She added her experience in light of the Me Too movement sparked by the disgusting actions of Harvey Weinstein. Unfortunately, men like this exist, and Moreno wanted to shed light on her experience as a woman being hounded for over a year by a man who had the power to sidetrack her career.
Love Life
As for her love life, Moreno has caught quite a few big fish in her lifetime. She dated big names like Marlon Brando and “The King” himself, Elvis Presley.
“I dated Elvis to make Marlon jealous. So for a short while there, I had the two kings of different things, show business royalty.”
She and Brando had a tumultuous relationship that caused her to attempt suicide. After the attempt, Brando sent her a letter giving her closure, an apology, and a final goodbye. Six months later, he called her up and they became friends.
Moreno married Leonard Gordon in 1965. They had one child together, a girl named Fernanda. Gordon died in 2010. Despite being together for 45 years, Moreno describes herself as “blossoming” after Gordon’s death. She felt like she could finally be her “raucous” self, which he often described as her “show business-self”.
“I really did love him, but what happened was … sometimes people make contracts with each other that are never verbalized or spoken. In my case, it was, ‘I’ll be a wonderful little girl and amuse you and make you happy if you will be my daddy and my protector and take care of me.’ That’s what our contract really was, and the day that I decided I wanted to start growing up is when the marriage got into trouble, and that literally started in our seventh year. I remember talking divorce with him at that time. And of course, we didn’t, and I didn’t and that as that. But I was unhappy for a very, very, very long time.”
Maria Sibylla Merian was a naturalist, botanical illustrator, and entomologist.
Merian studied insects, or if you’re like me, you call them BUGS. I’m not a huge bug person, but I do appreciate their presence on our earth and their contributions to the circle of life. I just don’t want them nibbling on me in my bed sheets and I especially do not want them creeping and crawling and making their homes in the corner of my bathtub. Nevertheless, Merian is one of the most interesting women I’ve come across while researching influential women throughout history. Her innate curiosity and depicting the world around her through art proved to be extremely beneficial to the scientific community, even today.
She’s best known for her illustrations of plant life and insects of what is now the country of Suriname. It’s said that she discovered insects and animals previously unknown to the South American country, which isn’t entirely uncommon for the time period. Heck, we’re only now discovering previously unknown species in 2021.
Not only did she accomplish that feat, but in doing so she also recorded and illustrated the life cycles of up to 186 insect species. In turn, she uncovered the phenomenon we know today as metamorphosis.
Merian was born in 1647 in Frankfurt, Germany. At the time, this was a center for the silk trade and silk worms, (aka the domestic silk moth. I guess? Google it.), were very important to the city’s economy. At age 13, Merian began to collect insects and raise silkworms. Her stepfather, an artist himself, encouraged her to paint and so she began to paint the insects and plants of her environment.
“I spent my life investigating insects. At the beginning, I started with silk worms in my hometown of Frankfurt. I realized that other caterpillars produced beautiful butterflies or moths, and that silkworms did the same. This led me to collect all the caterpillars I could find in order to see how they changed.”
Merian married and had two daughters, Johanna Helen and Dorthea Maria, with her stepfather’s apprentice, Johann Andreas Graff, who was from Nuremberg. They moved to Nuremberg where she helped her family financially by giving drawing lessons to unmarried daughters of wealthy families. This helped her social status within the community and as a result, she had access to many of the finest gardens maintained by the elite where she could continue her studies of plant life and insects. During this time in her life, she began publishing many collections of paintings of plant life and, from time to time, insects.
She was not only an artist in the typical sense. She did not only draw and paint, but Merian also started engraving her works on copperplate.
Quite a few years later, she was indoctrinated by a Labadist community, a religious cult led by radical pietists, with her mother and daughters. During that time, she learned Latin and studied the development of frogs, which she often caught and dissected.
After leaving the cult community, she lived for a brief time in Amsterdam. She made a living selling her paintings and by 1698, she was living lavishly in a house on Kerkstraat. Most notably, because of her reputation she was given the opportunity to view personal collections of wildlife from Suriname, a Dutch colony in South America, that some of the highest officials in Amsterdam had in their possession. Thus her next adventure began… Merian and her daughter Dorthea went to Suriname to study the exotic native species of the exotic destination. Their mission would last five years, and in order to fund the mission, Merian had to sell 255 of her paintings. She saw living in Suriname as the opportunity of a lifetime.
These are some of the coolest facts she uncovered:
Sphinx moths have split tongues. She wrote that the two sides of the sphinx moth combine to form one tongue while drinking nectar. This is only true for one brief stage of the sphinx moth’s life, though: immediately emerging from its pupa as an adult moth.
Tarantulas devour small birds, like the hummingbird. This fact shakes me to my very core, so I would really rather not dwell on it. I am a hummingbird fanatic, so it breaks my heart that this happens!
Leaf cutter ants exist. She wrote: “In America there are large ants which can eat whole trees bare as a broom handle in a single night.”
In 1705, at the age of 54, she published her first illustrated book of the insects of Surinam, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, in both Dutch and Latin.
Ironically, Merian returned to Amsterdam in 1701 because she had come down with an illness thought to be malaria. HELLO! Otherwise known as the virus spread by insects, the mosquito. Can’t say those little guys are a favorite of mine!
At the age of 64, she suffered from a stroke and became paralized. Her stroke, however debilitating, did not hinder her from continuing her passions. Then in 1717, two short years later, Merian died. Her final work, Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis, was published posthumously by her daughter.
Her works are held with great respect and shown by many prestigious collections including the Royal Collection kept at Windsor Castle in the United Kingdom.
She’s honored on the 500 Deutsche Mark banknote, the official currency of West Germany from 1948-1990.
Cool Girl History 