Gallagher, Larry, “A Trip Back in Time,”

Georgia Masters LMSC Newsletter, Dec. 1996, p. 4

 

The National AAU Long Course Championships were held in August ’41 in St. Louis, Missouri:  actually in the small town of Maplewood, a suburb just outside St. Louis proper and within walking distance of my home.  In those days, the only requirement for swimming in the nationals was that you be a duly registered and paid up member of the AAU.  Our coach at the Downtown YMCA, Ernie Vornbrock, encouraged all of us to swim in the upcoming national meet – no qualifying times were required.  We all signed up. 

 

I had just turned 16, was a scrawny 5’7”, 116 pounds, and still swimming age groups.  I was signed up to swim the 200 meter breast – even though I had never competed in that event and never even been timed for that distance.

 

That year, Hawaii sent a team up for the Nationals.  They came a week early to acclimate to the conditions.  They were a little perturbed at the water conditions in St. Louis in August.  The outdoor pool had no cooling system and the water temperature reached 86º or higher.  This was much warmer than they were used to.

 

As little as I was, I was still bigger than anyone on the Hawaiian team – that is, everyone except Bill Smith.  He had a Hawaiian mother and American father, was over six feet and more than two hundred pounds!  Just out of high school, he had broken all the world free style records up to an including the 440.  The rest of their team were all Nisei – Hawaiian/Americans of Japanese ancestry.  The girls were especially small, scarcely over five feet.  But they could swim like dolphins.  The Hawaiians swept the meet; won every event they entered and took first AND second whenever they entered two swimmers in the same event. 

 

Of course, neither I nor any of our team qualified for finals in any event – that is, except for Jimmy Counsilman; Jim just got touched out by Jose Balmores in the 200 meter breast.

 

Counsilman was something of an anomaly as swimmers go.  In high school, he had been an outstanding athlete, played football, basketball, baseball, and ran track, but was not a swimmer.  On his high school swim team, he was the diver!  Following high school, he got a job as a lineman, and after a day of shinnying up telephone poles, came down to the ‘Y’ in the evenings to swim for relaxation.  It was then that Ernie Vornbrook got hold of him, introduced him to the then somewhat new butterfly version of the breast stroke, and in a relatively short period of time, had him ready for competition.

 

Following the Nationals that summer, Mike Peppe, swim coach at Ohio State, recruited Counsilman, Smith, and a couple of other Hawaiians to come with him that fall to OSU on what in those days passed as an ‘athletic scholarship.’  That consisted of in-state fees and a janitorial job at .25 hour.  So, after not winning in the National meet that August, Jim went on to win a 200 breast national championship the following spring while a freshman at Ohio State.  However, by the spring following that, we were all in the service and had our swimming careers interrupted.

 

I only saw Counsilman once after that.  Shortly after we were dischared from the military to civilian life and were getting ready to go back to college, I ran into him again down at the ‘Y.’  Jim, always a great raconteur, regaled us with a wild story of running out of fuel over Yugoslavia and going down near Sarajevo where they were rescued by partisans who hid them from the Germans, smuggled them to the Adriatic coast, and then back to Italy.  He and his crew went on to fly 33 missions over the Balkans and southern Europe (15^th Air Force, B-24s).  Many years later, ‘Doc’ Counsilman would make a return visit to the Sarajevo area while taking his team to the World Swimming Championships held in Yugoslavia.