Published: October 22, 2009 11:14 pm      

ADAMCZYK: Sometimes you take it for granted

Girls are approaching me on the sidewalk, high-school age girls. I’ve learned from experience that, short of insuring we all don’t collide, they won’t pay me a bit of attention.

And they don’t. As I walk in the evening’s gloaming along Delaware Road, they are running, a track team out for a practice. We make way for each other, they run past without conversation, and disappear.

Along Elmwood Avenue, two young women are evidently walking home, and the equipment they carry, long sticks with looped blades at the bottom, suggests they’re returning from field hockey practice.

Your daughters are athletes. Not pretend athletes mimicking something they saw on television or casual rollerskating-down-the-sidewalk kids caught in the act of playing, but practice-hard, stay-in-training, get-on-the-bus interscholastic warriors. And, oh boy, do I approve. Chalk it off, in part, to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a federal law that states: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance ...,” which means that if the boys get funding for school athletics, so do the girls (although the legislation never specifically mentioned sport). Nearly 40 years on, it introduced a generation of American women to the idea that whatever advantages and life skills can be found by participation in sport is theirs for the taking. And these women have passed it on to their daughters; it is now presumed that any student will have access to sport, and gender does not figure into it.

While I hasten to add that, like most men, I have no insights into how and what women think, any female kid growing up today in Ken-Ton, indeed in America, expects the same advantages, opportunities, chances to shine, chances to screw up, and access to a system that will welcome her contributions. And I don’t have to tell her it was not ever thus.

I have lately been browsing through the yearbooks of Kenmore West (The Kentorial) and Kenmore East (The Spectrum) high schools, the 1960 editions, and it has been a revelation. Assuming you’re not searching for a photograph of yourself, rolling down someone else’s Memory Lane can be a series of surprises. Beyond the clothes and hair styles, once so hip and now so 1960, we note only one face that isn’t white, and that Kenmore West’s football team wore leather helmets. And we note a certain segregation in extracurricular activities.

Kenmore East had all-male clubs for chemistry and physics. The future teachers, future nurses and future business secretaries were all female (the biology club was mixed, surprisingly). The “stage crew” was boys only; the “office aids” were girls only.

Go to the back of The Spectrum, the athletics section ahead of the local advertisers underwriting the yearbook (“National Gypsum executive office is located at 325 Delaware Avenue, where air conditioning, sound control and music represent the very finest working conditions”). A page for football (the team went 1-6-1 that school year); one for basketball; the all-male cross country, gold, wrestling and rifle teams; boys on junior varsity teams; tennis, baseball and track; then pictures of girls.

Two pages of Kenmore East High School girls performing something vaguely like sport, but with no interscholastic competition. Exercising, modern dance (barefoot and in plaid, below-the-knee skirts), volleyball and badminton confined to gym class, and that’s it, sports fans.

You’ve got to consider context, the historians will tell you. The suburbs in 1960 were no place for a woman with athletic aspirations, aspirations of any sort beyond housewifery and motherhood (both of which are noble vocations, by the way), except perhaps as a future teacher or future business secretary. So in 2009, the daughters of these Kenmore high school graduates pursue advanced degrees and careers beyond that of secretary, and almost incidentally attend schools whose athletic departments’ gyms, weight rooms, training rooms and buses welcome them.

Sport in America features a variety of crucibles beyond who won and who lost last night; numerous social breakthroughs are made there, too. The story of racially integrating major league baseball is so well-known it is taught as a history lesson in places like Kenmore East and Kenmore West. We are only beginning to appreciate stories from the 1970s, when Europeans broke into the lineups of the National Hockey League.

Will those young women on Kenmore’s scholastic teams ever appreciate the strides they now take for granted? Of course they will; at least one of those runners on Delaware Road is bound to become an historian.

Ed Adamczyk is a Kenmore resident whose column appears every Friday in the Tonawanda News. Contact him at EdinKenmore@gmail.com.