John Godfrey lived a long hop from his Great Aunt Ethel when he was a kid. She had a place down in California. He was up in British Columbia.
They met once in person and several times by mail. When he was seriously injured in a 1976 car accident, Aunt Ethel, then 68, sent him a string of cards and notes — funny, whimsical, expressing her love and hopes for a quick recovery. “I hurt because you hurt, baby,” she wrote.
John didn’t know that his old Aunt Ethel was once one of the world’s great athletes. He didn’t know that smitten writers praised her beauty and grace with high-blown prose. They called her the Saskatoon Lily.
The Toronto Star, nearly a century ago, wrote that people “flocked to see this prairie flower who looked like a movie star, but could spring like an antelope.” The family didn’t talk about those times. Neither did Aunt Ethel, whose full name was Ethel Catherwood, and who remains the only Canadian woman to win an individual track and field Olympic gold medal.
At some point, Aunt Ethel no longer wanted that 1928 high-jump medal. It reminded her of things she’d rather forget. Of a past she preferred to erase.
She shunned the spotlight. As an old woman, she chased a reporter from her yard. Interlopers wanted to talk about the old life, things that happened a long time ago, and she had no interest.
“Look, cut the crap,” she told another writer, Today Magazine’s Earl McRae, when he phoned her out of the blue in 1980. “Let’s get to the.