19th Hole: The Readers Take Over

For as long as I can remember the record of the Athletics was so pathetic that most fans hoped for a divorcement of the baseball club and the Mack family; and when that did not develop and the franchise was moved to Kansas City, just about the only people who were interested and deplored the situation were the sportswriters and sportscasters, who can no longer spend almost all the summer at Shibe Park.
C. ARTHUR BARTH
Philadelphia

PIONEERS OF THE CRAWL
Sirs:
Please permit me to call to your attention a rather gross error in the article Yale Churns on at the Waterworks by Alfred Wright (SI, Jan. 23).

Mr. Wright states that the American crawl stroke with six beats was developed by Duke Kahanamoku and Johnny Weissmuller. The Duke's era was 1912 and Weissmuller's several years after that.

According to Matt Mann's book of swimming, the American Red Cross book of swimming and the Encyclopedia Britannica , as well as Bob Kiphuth himself, it was I who developed the six-beat crawl stroke as used today, in 1905, some seven years earlier than Kahanamoku and 14 years before Weissmuller.

This letter is in no way a criticism of SI which I read each week with great interest and enjoyment.
CHARLES M. DANIELS
Carmel, Calif.

? SI did not mean to credit Johnny Weissmuller and Duke Kahanamoku with the "development" of the modern crawl stroke. When Wright said "...swimming had come a long piece since the Duke and Weissmuller speeded up the old Australian crawl by kicking six to the arm beat," he had no intention of slighting Mr. Daniels, whom Bob Kiphuth calls "one of the first great American sprinters to use the six-beat crawl."—ED.