52 Ancestors: #2 - Irmgard (Schoennauer) Cole

This is part of my "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" blog challenge.

Irma (Schoennauer) Cole - My Mother

Highlight

Irmgard Ida Ottilie Schoennauer, born January 15, 1920 in Seattle, Washington, was one of the United States’s premier swimmers in the late 1930s and early 1940s. 

1942 UW Tyee yearbook photo as a senior

Born the year female swimmers became the first American women to achieve full Olympic status, Irma began her competitive swimming career as a child at Green Lake in Seattle, having local swimming champion Helene Madison as her older role model.[1]  Quickly recognized for her natural swimming ability and competitive spirit, Imgard was invited to join the swimming team of the Washington Athletic Club in 1935, soon winning numerous local, regional, state-wide, and multi-state telegraph races,[2] and was a member of the 400-yard relay team that won the National Championship in 1938. Groomed to compete in 1940 Summer Olympics, she continued competitive swimming after the outbreak of World War II, even though the Olympic games were suspended by the IOC. It is very likely, had it not been for the war, she would have competed on the United States Olympic swim team, possibly alongside peer, Esther Williams of California.[3]

 

Two 1938 newspaper articles: The first, about Irma being on the swimming team completing for a national relay title in Santa Barbara, California, and the second, about her being referred to as one of the "Invading Stars" at a Victoria, B.C. swim meet.

Irma was featured prominently in the University of Washington Tyee yearbook for 1939 as a "Titleholder of national prominence...breaking three all-time Western and one National record." 

Irma identified in this newspaper photo as one of "the five beauties" for famous swimming coach Ray Daughters of the Washington Athletic Club in 1941.

 When I visited my grandmother's house in Seattle, I remember well the large trophy case filled with her swimming trophies in her old bedroom right next to her the bed I would sleep in.  I found it interesting to think as an adult, that as many times as my mother and I went to city and community pools when I was growing up, both in Baltimore, Maryland and in Tacoma, Washington, that I didn't learn to swim myself until I took lessons while in college. My mother had been a recognized national swimming champion, but both her children didn't learn to swim until adults!

Biographical Sketch

Irmgard was the daughter and eldest child of Chicago native, Arthur Charles John Schoennauer, and Prussian immigrant, Ida Amalia Ottilie Welk. Irma’s father was a career typesetter employed by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for most of his life; her mother was a seamstress and clothing designer.  As a teen, Irma attended Lincoln High School in Seattle. After graduating, she went to college at the University of Washington in Seattle. In her freshman year, she became a member of "Chi of Phrateres," a philanthropic-social organization for female college students at the university.[4]  She graduated from the University of Washington in 1942 with a BA degree in Communications.  

Family home in Seattle where Irma was born and lived until about 1942. (Although this photo was taken in 2008, it still very closely resembles how I remember it as a child visiting my grandmother and uncle often while growing up. I have many great childhood memories there.)

After graduating from the University of Washington, Irma made her career as a civil servant for the Federal Government for over 40 years; starting first the Department of the War (Army & Air Force) in California during the latter part of World War II, then with the Department of the Interior at Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state, then and finally the Social Security Administration from about 1953, working in various states, including California, Kansas, Maryland and finally Washington state, where she retired about 1982.

While working at Mt. Ranier in 1947, my mother witnessed the famous UFO sighting of multiple "flying saucers" flying past the mountain.[5]  That sparked a lifelong interest in the phenomena for her, which she shared with me multiple times as a teen and young adult.  Her and I went to a presentation hosted by a former Air Force officer at the Tacoma Public Library around 1968 (I was about 12-13 years old at the time), and he talked about UFOs and presented a photographic slide show of what he described as UFO sightings, showing various unidentified flying objects, many saucer-shaped and others cigar-shaped, flying alone as well as in groups, some close enough to see the full shape in daylight, others in the distance with indescribable shapes, and many others as unusual luminescent light patterns at nighttime. My mother, though, privately described to me the flying objects she witnessed at Mt. Ranier as very silvery, reflective, and somewhat crescent-shaped (or as something between quarter-moon and half-moon shaped), rather than completely round or saucer-shaped.[6]

My mother met my father, Melvin Leroy Cole of Arkansas, early in 1955, both working as Claims Representatives in the same Social Security office in Seattle, Washington.   They apparently had a short dating relationship, and when she became pregnant with me, they quietly drove to a Justice of the Peace office in Ellensburg, Washington, and married privately and unceremoniously in June 1955. Because they both worked in the same government office, after marrying, they rarely resided in the same city, due to the Social Security Administration's nepotism policy.  Although two children were born of this union, partly as a result of this forced separation and because both were very independent and strong-willed individuals by nature, they separated formally in 1960 and divorced in 1963.  I never learned of this divorce action as a child, and throughout my teen years and into adulthood thought they were still legally married but permanently separated, until I researched and located the divorce record from the Baltimore courthouse on one of my trips there after her death.

Marriage certificate for Irma and Lee Cole. They were married quietly by a Justice of the Peace in Ellenberg, Washington in June 1955. She was one month pregnant with me at the time, something she never admitted to me.

Besides her lifelong interest in swimming, she enjoyed travelling by train (she never got a driver’s license, owned a car, or flew in a plane), investing in real estate, and researching her family history. 

Irma died in Tacoma, Washington at the age of 83. Her funeral was conducted in the same Lutheran church in Seattle where baptized as an infant and confirmed as a teenager, and her body was buried at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, next to her beloved father. Upon her death in 2003, she was survived by one of her brothers, her two sons, and one grandchild.

Headstone of father and daughter at Lake View Cemetery in Seattle, Washington.

Obituary 

Irmgard Ida Schoennauer COLE 

Irma was born January 15, 1920 in Seattle, Washington to Arthur C.J. Schoennauer and Ida A. Schoennauer, nee Welk. She passed away November 6, 2003 in Tacoma, Washington. Irma attended Trinity Lutheran School, Lincoln High School and graduated from the University of Washington in 1942 with a BA degree in Communications. In 1935 she joined the swimming team of the Washington Athletic Club and was a member of the 400-yard relay team, winning the National Championship in 1938. She worked for over 40 years in various departments of the Federal Government. She is survived by 2 sons, Robert A. Cole of Appleton, Wisconsin and Arthur J. Cole of Huntsville, Alabama. She was a member of Trinity Lutheran Church in Seattle and later, Central Lutheran Church in Tacoma. Memorial contributions may be sent to Central Lutheran Church, 409 N. Tacoma Ave. Tacoma, WA 98405. Funeral Services were held 1 p.m. Monday, November 10, 2003, at Trinity Lutheran Church, 1200 10th Ave. E., Seattle, with a Graveside Service at Lakeview Cemetery immediately following. Arrangements by Columbia Funeral Home. Please sign the online guest book at www.columbiafuneralhome.com.

The obituary above was published in the Seattle Times on 8 November 2003.

Closing

It's been twenty years since my mother's death, and as I been researching and consolidating my various sources of genealogical data to compose this, I'm realizing what a shame there are so many things I didn't know or didn't learn about my own mother during her lifetime.  Although I've discovered many old newspaper clippings about her tremendous youthful swimming achievements, much about her adult life remains vague or unknown. She was a very private person.  I'm in the process of assembling data from records pertaining to her various property investments and my own recollections of them, and will include that information once completed for separate blog entry. 

Yes, this has been another journey down Memory Lane for me!

Bob

Endnotes:

[1]  Helene Emma Madison (1913–1970) was an American competition swimmer, Olympic champion, and former world record-holder. She won three gold medals in freestyle event at the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, becoming, along with Romeo Neri of Italy, the most successful athlete at the 1932 Olympics: women's 100-meter freestyle, 400-meter freestyle, and 4×100-meter freestyle relay. In sixteen months in 1930 and 1931, she broke sixteen world records in various distances. (Source: Pantheon World Profiles – Helene Madison Biography; at https://pantheon.world/profile/person/Helene_Madison/) She began swimming in early childhood, first at Green Lake, one block from her home in Seattle, and later in Seattle Parks Department swim programs. Catching the eye of local coach Ray Daughters in 1928, Madison began swimming competitively on his team at the Crystal Pool, and later at Washington Athletic Club. Between 1930 and 1932, Madison broke all sixteen world freestyle records in various distances, sweeping the freestyle events at national championships. (Source: MOHAI, Olympic swimmers Helene Madison and Georgia Coleman with Frederic March, Los Angeles, 1932 - Museum of History and Industry - University of Washington Digital Collections; at  https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/imlsmohai/id/8779/)

[2]  In the 1930s and 40s, swimming competitions for teams based in different states or in distant locations based their results on telegraph races when all the teams could not compete at the same location. The process involved swimmers in one location swimming against other swimmers in another location or in multiple different locations.  Each of the swimming locations were connected by a telegraph wire and the race for each competitor was timed using a stopwatch.  The official times were then transmitted via the telegraph wire to the other locations, where the other swimmers would start swimming when directed and telegraph their times as well. The winner was determined by comparing the total times taken to complete the races in the various competition locations.

[3]  Esther Jane Williams (1921–2013) was an American competitive swimmer and actress. She set regional and national records in her late teens on the Los Angeles Athletic Club swim team. Unable to compete in the 1940 Summer Olympics because of the outbreak of World War II, she joined Billy Rose's Aquacade, where she took on the role vacated by Eleanor Holm after the show's move from New York City to San Francisco. While in the city, she spent five months swimming alongside Olympic gold-medal winner and Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller. Williams caught the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer scouts at the Aquacade. After appearing in several small roles, and alongside Mickey Rooney in an Andy Hardy film and future five-time co-star Van Johnson in A Guy Named Joe, Williams made a series of films in the 1940s and early 1950s known as "aquamusicals," which featured elaborate performances with synchronized swimming and diving. (Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Esther Williams." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 13 Nov. 2023. Web. 8 Dec. 2023.)

[4]  Phrateres was an international, democratic, social, and service organization that aimed to "uphold the standards and ideals of the University, to develop a friendly spirit among the women on the campus, and to fufill its motto, 'Famous for Friendliness.'" Phrateres was open to all women who chose membership in one of its sub-chapters and were in regular attendance at the University of Washington, passed a pledge test and earned activity points, and paid the pledge fee. The international organization of Phrateres was founded at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1924. The second chapter, Beta, was installed at the University of Washington on February 18, 1929. The Washington chapter was organized into sub-chapters and the All-Phrateres Cabinet (All-Phrateres officers) and Council (Cabinet, sub-chapter presidents, and chairs of standing committees). The Beta chapter of Phrateres dissolved in the 1970's, but the Phrateres Alumnae Association continues to meet and to award the May Dunn Ward Scholarship. (Source: Phrateres Beta Chapter Records - Archives West (orbiscascade.org)  The intention was to bring "independent" women students (i.e. those not in dormitories or sororities) into a collective group for the purposes of socialization and philanthropy. However, the new group proved popular and soon membership was extended to any female student who wished to join. Members later included those who lived in dorms, commuted to campus, as well as members of sororities. (Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Phrateres." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 21 Mar. 2023. Web. 20 Nov. 2023.)

[5]  This was the first post-World War II sighting in the United States that garnered nationwide news coverage and is credited with being the first of the modern era of UFO sightings, including numerous reported sightings over the next two to three weeks. A pilot's description of the objects also led to the press quickly coining the terms flying saucer and flying disk as popular descriptive terms for unidentified flying objects. (Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 6 Aug. 2023. Web. 21 Nov. 2023.)  An individual from Glasgow, Scotland who has decades of study in "ufology" wrote a thought-provoking, well-researched, outstanding analysis of the Kenneth Arnold UFO sightings recorded at his "James Easton's UFO Blog" (jceaston.blogspot.com) in August 2023, and makes a case that attributes what Arnold saw as a flock of white pelicans. He also shows some of the many inconsistencies in Arnold's various statements on the sightings over his lifetime. 

[6]  While this portion of the narrative is centered around my mother, I have to add here that I myself saw such a flying object with that shape in the Fall of 2019 returning from an environmental waste construction project I was working on west of Fort Bragg Army Base, North Carolina.  We left the work site a little after 5:00 pm, so it was just a little past sunset.  I was driving with a co-worker from where we were working in the Hamlet-Marston vicinity, stopped for a short while in Southern Pines along Hwy 1 for an iced tea drink from McDonalds and to change out of my work boots into more comfortable tennis shoes, then continued driving in a north-eastly direction.  We were a little north of Sanford, about halfway to Apex, where I needed to drop my co-worker off where he lived. Then we both saw what I can only describe as a twin arc or chevron-shaped flying object with white and blue-green lights up ahead of us flying in the same general direction we were driving. The object arched from the right to the left sides of the highway, then again a few miles later from the left to the right side, not gradually like a normal private or commercial aircraft, but suddenly. My co-worker took a couple cell-phone pictures of it and called his girlfriend to tell her and describe to her what we were seeing. We pulled off the highway at Hwy-55 in Apex, planning to stop at a gas station so we could watch it without having to worry about traffic and possibly get better pictures, but by the time we stopped and got out of the car, the object was only barely visible in the distance through the tree line and shortly thereafter disappeared from our view altogether. Yes, the flying object could have been some type of military aircraft from nearby Pope Air Force Base or from one of the airfields at or near Fort Bragg, but the shape of the aircraft, the light pattern on it, and the speed of its movements, clearly seemed atypical for the military aircraft I was used to seeing at or around Pope AFB or Fort Bragg (having been stationed there close to ten years).  And seeing that Raleigh-Durham Airport is only a few miles west of the path we were driving, the flight path for the aircraft we saw would not have been typical for commercial aircraft landing at RDU, but would have been too close to the normal commercial flight path to be permitted for other aircraft to fly. When I returned home, I watched the local news on TV and checked on-line local news URLs for any information on such reports from others, but when none were found, I dismissed what I saw as just an unusual aircraft sighting and maybe, in part, our own imagination – but not completely. So whether what I thought I saw was valid or not, I found it intriguing that what I saw so closely matched the description of what my mother said she saw 72 years earlier.  NOTE #1: One website (EXO News at exonews.org) reported there were at least 143 reports of UFO sightings filed in North Carolina alone in 2019.  NOTE #2: Although I don't specifically remember the exact date of my sighting of the unidentified flying object, another website that I just searched and discovered today as I am writing this (National UFO Reporting Center at https://nuforc.org/subndx/?id=lNC) shows four independent reports from other people in Apex, NC reporting UFO sightings on 10/10/2019 between 1930 and 2000 hours (including one video), which matches our return time to Apex from work that evening. Interesting!

This is part of my "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" blog challenge.