Permission to Play

Last night I finished scanning all the pictures and documents from my Grandma Wendorff's Book of Remembrance.  While scanning all the track meet newspaper clippings, ribbons and photos of my athletic grandmother, I found this tucked neatly inside the pages:

My jaw dropped.  It really shouldn't have been that surprising since I am studying Sport & Recreation and have taken classes on sport history.  But to see that my own Grandma had to receive permission from her physician to "partake in sports" kind of hit close to home.

To be honest, I've been pretty ignorant of how lucky I am to have been born when I was.  In reality, the opportunities I have had athletically really haven't been around for as long as I assume.  Katherine Switzer, one of the first women to run the Boston Marathon, did so in 1967 (the organizer of the race tried to physically remove her while she was running).  That happened in my mother's lifetime!  Title IX (equality in federally funded programs, ie. athletic programs at American universities) wasn't implemented until 1972.  As a child I loved to listen to my mom's stories about the track meets she competed in and the races she won, but in reality, her childhood athletics was different from mine, simply due to the times we were born.  Unreal!

I'm grateful I was born when I was and I had the childhood I did.  Although I often wish I was born decades, perhaps even a century, earlier, this is certainly one thing that would not have been the same.  And I definitely would have never played peewee football….