Arlite Smith was a three-time National AAU low-board diving champion from Chicago, in the last three years of the 1930s decade. Smith became famed for having one of the most aesthetically pleasing diving forms of the era, her performances illustrated across the nation in newspaper full-page photographic displays showing every twist and flight point of her winning dives. She retired from diving at the top of her career in 1939, and spent the next five years giving lectures on diving.
Arlite Smith was born December 15, 1915, to Royal and Lillian Kick Smith, a working class family, in a largely German neighborhood in Burnham, a small village in the south suburbs. Many were German speaking including Smith’s mother Lillian. The father worked as an electrician in an auto shop, and Arlite’s name was coined by her father who derived it from some electrical term. The family soon moved to nearby Calumet City, where Arlite attended Thornton Fractional High School, 1930-1933. In her freshman year the school opened a swimming pool, and Smith helped form a girls swimming club, the Terrapins. In the GAA, she also played on the girls’ volleyball team, the captain-basketball team, and the softball team.1
Smith served three years as president of the school’s highly active girls’ swim club, the Terrapins, and each year planned and organized the annual Water Carnival, in 1931, 1932, and 1933. The girls at Thornton Fractional were highly impactful in the school, creating water carnivals, where the girls using a theatrical revue format that variously featured clowns, an underwater singer, mermaids, underwater swimmers, and Terrapin drills.2
Smith began competing in outside swimming competition in the summer of 1931, when she joined the Memorial Park swim team. Her senior year in high school, she traveled all the way up into Chicago to compete in the annual Illinois Women’s Athletic Club (IWAC) annual meet in November, 1932, when competing unattached (she was listed as from Calumet City). She won the meet’s low dive title. By January 1933, Smith was competing for the IWAC. But the IWAC closed before the summer of 1933, and Smith and other refugees from the IWAC joined the Lake Shore Athletic Club (LSAC). This was a significant move as the LSAC program had a great coach, Stanley Brauninger, who would take Smith to the next level. She also was swimming for the Calumet City Swimming Team at this time.3
Smith as a regular on the LSAC swimming team for the next two years contributed points to LSAC team totals with second and third place finishes, usually behind the LSAC’s Marian Mansfield and Shawnee Country Club’s Claudia Eckert. In the 1935 Central AAU championships, she took third in the high dive, and in the 1936 AAU national championship she took second to Mansfield in the low board dive. Smith was also a regular member of the LSAC water ballet team (water ballet was a predecessor to synchronized swim), which gave exhibitions at swim meets and other events. In the Olympic Trials meet to select United States Olympians, Smith took fifth in her specialty, the three-meter springboard dive (low dive), and failed to qualify, But Smith surpassed her fellow Chicago divers, finishing ahead of Claudia Eckert and Marian Mansfield, who finished sixth and seventh respectively.4
Smith broke through in 1937 to become the LSAC top diver, by winning the low dive in the AAU national championship, beating out teammate Marian Mansfield. She also took fourth in the high dive. The following year, Smith was competing for the Medinah Athletic Club, having followed her coach Stanley Brauninger from the LSAC to the rival Chicago athletic club. Under the Medinah flag, Smith repeated as national low dive champion, cited in the newspaper report as “easily was the class of the field,” finishing more than 26 points over her nearest rival, Barbara Cook of Indianapolis Athletic Club. In 1939, at the AAU Nationals at the Medinah AC, Smith took her third low board title by closely nipping her Chicago rival, Claudia Eckert of the Shawnee club, by slightly more than 2 points. Her third national title made her a national star, as her achievement was reported nationwide over the newspaper wires.5
The Chicago Tribune in May 1938 devoted to one of the few women stars of Chicago swimming and diving on a full broadsheet page on Arlite Smith, who also was a member of the LSAC water ballet team. More than half the space was given to stills of the diver in lovely form in the air doing her signature jackknife dive. In this feature titled, “The Water Route to Beauty,” the Tribune lauded Smith of having “one of the most graceful poetically proportioned bodies we have ever seen.”6
While the Tribune took a straight news approach, another full-page feature on Smith put out by the International News Service over the wires in January 1938 took, well, a poetic approach. The feature, called “Symphony of Motion,” presented the strength and beauty of the “athlete” Smith in images of her front jackknife dive in five different positions, suggesting “a poem set to music.” From the “First Stanza,” with the line “Clean cut as a fine steel rapier, Miss Smith is shown in the first stage of her dive,” through to the “Fifth Stanza” with the line “With scarcely a ripple, the slim, white body cleaves water like a knife blade –showing the blend of strength and beauty of the sport of diving. These features can only be understood as a rendering of what cultural historian Liz Conor called “spectacular women.”7
In her great work The Spectacular Modern Women: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s, Conor showed how women in advanced industrial societies had become modern by becoming more confident, more outgoing, and more “subjective.” By ‘subjective” she meant for one that women had more agency, and defined “modern subjectivity” in the context of gender relationships as including “cultural presence, public visibility, and participation in circulation and exchange of looks in the urbanized and commodified modern scene.” All which, in short, means that Arlite Smith represents a strong confident woman whose aesthetically pleasing athletic dives drew audiences to look at her, and Smith to present herself to adoring fans.8
After Smith won her third low dive national championship, she retired from competitive swimming to develop a career as a public lecturer, usually on the “art of diving,” to public service organizations and schools.” She would augment her presentations with color films of her diving. She expressed this desire to give talks on diving, and these talks entailed honorarium or fees. The AAU pointed out that this new job would mean that she had become a professional and could no longer compete in AAU events. Smith acquiesced to this, and for the next five years was a public lecturer. Smith on occasion gave public exhibitions of her diving.9
In 1943, most of Smith’s lecturing was in high schools, as she was working nine months a year with the School Assembly Service Lecture Bureau. But she was busy with a variety of things during 1943, which notably included a tour of the nation with the Aqua Follies (an elaborate water show). In her community of Calumet City she was teaching classes on swimming and diving at the Memorial Park Pool, where she had first learned to dive. Around this time, Smith was giving diving exhibitions, a notable one being at her old high school, Thornton Fractional.10
In December of 1943, she was married to Walter H. Marquardt, who worked for Lockheed Airplane corporation in Los Angeles, and all her activities stopped. She resigned her position as private secretary of the president of Chicago-based School Assembly Service, ended her career as a lecturer. Thereafter, she spent her life in domestic tranquility with her husband in California.11
Arlite died May 10, 2001, at the age of 87, in California, in the state where she spent two-thirds of her life, and in utter obscurity of her spectacular career as a champion diver in Chicago.12
Notes
1. “Swimming Club to Be Formed by Girls,” The Times, 1 May 1930; “Thornton H. S. Girls Wind Up Year’s Events,” 22 May 1930; “Junior Girls Defeat Rest,” The Times, 19 February 1931; “Girl Athletes Have Election,” The Times, 21 May 1931; Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920–Population, Bureau of the Census, Illinois, Cook County, Burnham Village; Enumeration District 212, Sheet 3A. Washington, DC: National Archives and Records Administration, 1992.
2. “Water Carnival to Show Girls’ Skill,” The Times, 7 April 1932; “Swimming Carnival At Thornton Tonight,” The Times, 28 April 1932; “T. F. Tank Show Is Friday Night,” The Times, 27 April 1933.
3. “Crystal Diete Wins 2 Events in Swim Meet,” Chicago Tribune, 27 November 1932; “Park Tennis Aces Advised to Speed Blanks Fedosky,” The Times, 18 August 1931: “Calumet City Will Swim at Burnham,” The Times, 19 July 1934.
4. “Four A.A.U. Swim Titles Decided,” Chicago Tribune, 7 March 1935; James S. Kearns, “Swimming Championships,” The Discus, April 1936, pp. 6-8; Gene Lyons, “Capacity Crowd Enjoys Dedication of New Municipal Swimming Pool Plant,” The Dispatch, 17 June 1936; ” American Olympic Committee Report 1936.
5. “Arlite Smith Wins AAU Diving Title,” Courier News, 16 April 1937; “National A.A.U. Meet: “LSAC Mermaids Score,” The Discus, May 1937, pp. 8 and 22; “Arlite Smith Diving Champ,” Des Moines Register, 12 April 1938; “High School Girl, 17, Wins in First National Meet,” Chicago Tribune, 20 April 1939.
6. Eleanor Nangle, “The Water Route to Beauty,” Chicago Tribune, 22 May 1938.
7. “Symphony of Motion” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 9 January 1938.
8. Liz Conor. The Spectacular Modern Women: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s. Bloomington, IN; Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 2.
9. “Former Diving Star Here,” Green Bay Press Gazette, 3 December 1940; “Arlite Smith Is Rated the Patty Berg of Diving,” Star Tribune, 24 July 1942.
10. Frank Diamond, “Diving Just a Sideline With Lecturer Arlite Smith,” “Memorial Park to Start Classes,” The Times, 10 November 1943; “High School Plans Play,” The Times, 18 November 1943.
11. “Arlite Smith, W. H. Marquardt Marry on Xmas,” The Times, 22 December 1943; “Walter Marquardt Weds Arlite Smith,” Herald Press, 5 January 1944.
12. “Where is Arlite Marquardt Buried?” PeopleLegacy, Peoplelegacy.com, 2022.
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