As an athletic-minded girl growing up in Los Angeles, Markey Eakland had the good fortune of having the world’s best athletes visit her city for the 1932 Olympics. But 77 years later, what she recalls most vividly isn’t a triumph but an injustice.

Eakland, now 89 and a longtime resident of Pilgrim Haven in Los Altos, Calif., saw the great Babe Didrikson break the world record in the high jump. But Didrikson’s gold medal was reduced to silver because a judge ruled that her head cleared the bar before the rest of her body. No judge objected to her unorthodox style in preliminary jumps, and the rule she violated no longer exists.

The incident underscored the precarious status of women athletes during much of the 20th century. When it came to athletic acceptance and success, attitudes and traditions made it hard for women to clear the bar.

Fortunately for Eakland, her father saw no such limits. He had two daughters and no sons. He assumed all young people should be interested in sports. So he regularly took his daughter Martha (Markey was an early nickname that stuck) to baseball games, saw her develop as a golfer and tennis player, and watched her flourish as a guard for the Los Angeles High School basketball team despite her 5-foot-4-inch stature.

“I was athletic. I’m short, but I had quick hands and reflexes. I was a good guard,” says Eakland, whose maiden name was Nordling.

That early athletic development put Eakland in a position to break down some of the history that limited women in sports. In 1941, while a student at Stanford University, she was among a group of intramural basketball players brought together to play the University of California, Berkeley.

The two schools had met informally for years at the San Francisco Armory (Stanford and Cal are credited with playing the first women’s intercollegiate basketball game in 1896), but neither school had a varsity women’s program in the 1940s. For that special game, the women’s team met at Cal’s Harmon Gym, a venue also visited by Stanford’s All-American Hank Luisetti, one of the pioneers of the jump shot who had recently led Stanford to a win over Cal.

“I could not believe I was playing basketball in the very gym where Hank Luisetti thrilled everyone with his one-handed jump shot,” Eakland wrote in a 1996 essay. “It was so exciting to play an intercollegiate game.”

The excitement was heightened with a Stanford win by the remarkable score of 4-3. “The baskets were higher than we were used to,” Eakland says.

But the bar to women’s intercollegiate competition, at least for one day, was lowered. It would be a generation before the federal law known as Title IX compelled schools to provide equal athletic opportunities to women, but Eakland was on the court when that future had one of its first glimmers. Later, she would be a season ticket holder watching Stanford’s women play a full intercollegiate schedule.

In the 1990s, Stanford recognized the early role of Eakland and other women athletes by awarding them an official varsity letter, the coveted Block S.

Eakland spent most of her life after college as a homemaker raising three sons and a daughter. She encouraged them to enjoy the outdoors and sports, but she didn’t talk about her accomplishments.

Eakland’s son Peter also attended Stanford and served as sports editor of the student newspaper. But growing up, he wasn’t aware of his mom’s athletic history. “She took me out and taught me to play golf. She ferried us to Little League games, but she didn’t talk about what she did in college,” he says. “I played basketball in high school and I never knew that she played at Stanford.”

Eakland plays down her history even now, but she’s glad to see the expansion of women’s sports and she encourages all women – athletic or not – to pursue fitness.

“It’s important that women take heed of what’s going on. I don’t want them to compete with men. That’s strange. We’re different,” she says. “But I think it’s very important to have a well-rounded life and lifestyle.”

These days Eakland is her own coach, and a good one. She stays busy, but doesn’t press her limits.

“I keep going. I walk a lot. I go to exercise [class] to help my balance. I don’t want to live forever, but I do take care of myself,” she says. “I’m pretty much a moderate in everything.”

Except, perhaps, in athletic history.

Founded in 1949, ABHOW is widely known for its pioneering leadership in senior housing and health care. The company serves more than 5,000 residents in 20 affordable housing communities and 10 continuing care retirement communities in California, Arizona, Nevada and Washington. To learn more about ABHOW, go to www.abhow.com.
This article originally appeared in the July 2009 issue of ABHOW Words.