Grand Old Girl

At squash, Eleonora Sears is some punkins. Reputedly the first woman to play squash racquets in the U. S. (in 1918, she demanded that Boston's men's clubs let her play on their courts, house rules or no house rules), the rich Boston Brahmin, great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson and heiress to a big New England shipping fortune, has been going great guns ever since.

In 1928, when enough women took up the game to make competition exciting, Eleo (as she is known in swish circles) won the first national squash racquets championship for women. The following year, she held famed Professional Walter Kinsella, world's squash tennis champion from 1914-26, to a tight score in an exhibition match. This year, at 58, white-haired, lithe Eleonora Sears is still going strong. Last week, in the Atlantic Coast squash championship (at Atlantic City), first big tournament of the season, she reached the semi-finals in a field of top-flight players, most of whom were half her age.

Wearing a short circular skirt and woolen shirt, her strokes as powerful as ever and her reflexes as quick, Oldster Sears amazed the galleries with her extraordinary stamina and agile court coverage, amused them with her rambunctious mannerisms and screaming but good-natured queries to the referee--as though he were way down in the cellar tending the furnace.

Although Eleo Sears is the Grand Old Girl of squash, she can still tire out the average youngster. One morning last week, when she had no match scheduled, she played nine straight games with hard-hitting, 20-year-old Hope Knowles (who later won the tournament). Five games is enough to wind most women squash players, but Eleo said she was not even warmed up.

At other sports Eleonora Sears has been equally staminous. Ten years ago she hiked 73 miles in 17 hours, has often walked from Boston to Providence (47 miles) "just for the exercise." Once she swam five miles off Newport. She was one of the first U. S. women to go up in a flying machine (with Claude Grahame-White in 1910), one of the first to drive an automobile, one of the first to wear breeches and ride astride. In 1909, when she was known as "the best-gowned woman in America" and her name romantically linked with that of Yachtsman Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, Eleo caused a stir by appearing at California's swank Burlingame Country Club in "unconventional trousers," asked if she could join in the polo practice of a British international team.

Before she took up squash, Spinster Sears was a topflight tennis player, won the national doubles title four times (with

Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman twice, with Molla Bjurstedt Mallory twice). She has won 240 cups--mostly at tennis, squash and horse-show jumping.

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