Bobbers

The late Melvil Dewey was a daring man. He invented the library system of decimal classification, crusaded for the metric system of weights & measures, sponsored simplified spelling used on the menus (pe sup, hucklberi pi) of the fashionable Lake Placid Club, which he founded. If Melvil Dewey had been alive last week, he would have chuckled over his daring granddaughter Katharine.

Twenty-two-year-old Katharine is a nurse by profession but her hobby is perhaps the most dangerous sport in the world--driving a four-man bobsled. Last week she competed at Lake Placid against five of the most skillful U. S. drivers for the national senior bobsled championship.

A driver is not the whole works on a four-man bobsled team. There is a brakeman (to bob, check skids and bring the sled to a stop at the run's end) and two men sandwiched between brakeman and driver (for ballast as well as bobbing).

But a driver must use split-second judgment, must take icy hairpin curves with hairline precision at 70 m.p.h., must keep his 500-lb. sled in the centre of the straightaways. Bobsled drivers are usually big, bold iron men.

But the country's biggest, boldest iron men (and U. S. bobbers have defeated Europeans in two out of three Olympic competitions) were not good enough last week to beat Katharine Dewey and her three teammates. Roaring down Lake Placid's Mount Van Hoevenberg run--iJ? miles of whizzing around 25 razzle-dazzle curves--Miss Dewey turned in times of 1 :08.08, 1 :08.52, 1:07.07 1:07.10. Her time for the four heats (4 min., 30.71 sec.) was a full second better than that of Big Bill Linney, winner of four successive major championships.

Not only was Katharine Dewey the first woman ever to win the national championship, but her time for the third heat was only 27/100 of a second over the record for the Mount Van Hoevenberg run, one of the world's fastest. Only Switzerland's St. Moritz is faster.

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