By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Gloria Speers Davis came to Bowling Green State University 1943, three decades before Title IX opened up athletic opportunities to women. That didn’t stop her from pursuing her love of swimming as part of the Swan Club.
Fifty years ago Title IX prohibited sex based discrimination including in sports on college campuses. As documented in “Forward Falcons,” even before that landmark, women’s athletics thrived at BGSU.
The Swan Club was a synchronized swimming team that put on annual shows with costumes, live music, and announcers, including for one show, future Oscar winner Eva Marie Saint. Male swimmers took part in the productions as well.
Mrs. Davis was recruited for the Swan Club because of her swimming abilities. Her mother taught her to swim in a cow creek, she said, before she and her sister graduated to swimming pools. “My mother was a flapper, and she liked to do everything. She’d take me through the woods looking for watercress.” Once, needing extra seating for a party, she constructed it from what she salvaged in the woods.
At that time, children were expected to learn to swim, Mrs. Davis said. It was a requirement for graduating high school. When she went to school in Detroit, her junior high had a brand new swimming pool. She completed high school at DeVilbiss in Toledo. The school didn’t have a pool, but they would go to the YWCA to swim.
Growing up, Mrs. Davis, who was born in Illinois, said she never attended any school for more than a few years. The family moved frequently. Her father was a chef and set up corporate kitchens for companies throughout the Midwest and as far as South Carolina. She only spent a year and a half at DeVilbiss before graduating. “They didn’t even know I was alive in Toledo.”
So college offered her a chance to settle into a school. She came to BGSU intent on participating in as much as she could. “I was a joiner,” she said. “I loved it. I’d never been in a small town before. I liked that part.”
The Swan Club swam in the natatorium that was in the location of what is now Eppler. There were sports facilities for men and women on opposite sides of the pool.
In one show the theme was Fairy Tales, and she and another swimmer, neither of whom were divers, had to jump from a board, each holding a pail.
These productions, “Forward Falcons” reports, were extravaganzas. Iris Andrews who became coach while Mrs. Davis was swimming, recalled in an oral history that the natatorium would be packed with standing room only. One Saturday a blizzard prevented the audience from attending, so members of fraternities got in their cars and brought kids from the Children’s Home on West Wooster to attend.
Most memorable for Mrs. Davis was her last Swan Club show in 1946. She was to lead the signature underwater chain of swimmers. Each swimmer had her feet around the neck of the next swimmer.
That Mrs. Davis was the lead was testament to her strength as a swimmer, noted her eldest daughter Dianne Klein.
By this time she had married Meredith Davis and was five months pregnant with Dianne. She was called to the dean’s office. She made sure she brought her marriage license. The dean, Mrs. Davis said, was concerned that “I might damage myself.” So Mrs. Davis asked her doctor, who told her that given she’d continued swimming throughout her pregnancy, she could perform, unless she felt any pain. The show went on.
The university had strict rules of decorum, Mrs. Davis recalled. “We had a lot of don’t do’s.
“If we went out, we had to sign the book saying what time you were leaving, where you were going, who you were going with, how you were going, and what time are you getting back. When it came right down to it, it was more fun than just letting us run our anchor.”
She recalled hitchhiking with her Alpha Xi Delta sorority sisters. Each young woman would position herself on corner at the Four Corners in downtown. “Whoever got a ride first, we’d go that way.”
“We were not allowed to do any of those things,” Klein added.
Another time, the sorority sisters had to go on a scavenger hunt to find various items in the community. She and her roommate needed to obtain a set of false teeth. They approached a house and asked the resident whether he had false teeth, and if he’d let them borrow them.
He agreed as long as they brought them right back.
They did. Mrs. Davis doesn’t remember if they won the scavenger hunt. She does remember that when they returned the teeth, the man went to his garden and gave them some fresh vegetables “so we had something to gnaw on.”
Mrs. Davis also participated in drama and literary club. She performed in a play co-written by Bob Bashore, then just out of the Navy on the G.I. Bill. He went on to teach American literature at BGSU and was a founder of the honors program. She played the comedic role that didn’t require singing. Her father, before becoming a chef, was the straight man in a comedy duo on vaudeville. Klein said her mother’s sense of humor has been attributed to her father’s past as a vaudeville performer.
Mrs. Davis also learned to golf while at BGSU. It was something of a necessity “because the guy I was going with would play golf half the night.”
That “guy” was Meredith Davis, who was on the golf team. He was attending BGSU on the GI Bill having served during WWII as an Army supply officer.
Mrs. Davis went to the Bowling Green Country Club to learn to play. She credits some older doctors for giving her valuable lessons about the game. “I really appreciated it,” she said. “It wasn’t the young men that did it.”
Mrs. Davis, 96, continued to play until few years before her husband died in 2015, and she continued to swim until just a few years ago.
Mr. Davis worked for the Uhlman Company for 40 years. After living in Troy where Klein grew up, the family returned to Bowling Green.
Once her younger children were old enough, Mrs. Davis went took jobs as a bookkeeper for an insurance agency and as a “Kelly Girl,” winning the umbrella award for being the company’s “girl of the year.” She also did window displays for the Uhlman store in downtown BG.
The Davises were season ticket holders for Falcon women’s basketball “because the girls were better,” Mrs. Davis explained. She now allows that the men’s basketball team is catching up.
