Seventy-five years ago, my mother asked her parents for a tennis racquet to celebrate her 11th birthday. She talked her friend Bill Klare, whose birthday fell the day after hers, into asking for one too.
For some reason unknown to either, their parents agreed.
“Nobody knew anything about tennis,” my mom said. “I have no idea why they agreed to give us those racquets.”
My guess, at least in my mom’s case, is that they appreciated a healthy outlet for their highly energetic, some might say bossy, daughter Peggy Jo.
Hauling their new wooden racquets, Bill and Peggy Jo biked off to the College Hills Public Park, armed only with the knowledge my mom had picked up from a library book she’d read.
“When we got there, a man was on the court teaching his daughter to play,” my mom said. “So we asked him to teach us too.”
The man kindly agreed and not only gave them a lesson that day, he told them to come back on specific days and times so he could continue the lessons.
My mom has played tennis from that day forward.
She taught her fiancé to play tennis on the University of Cincinnati courts. Then she taught my dad.
“We would play and then he would do his off-season workouts with the tennis team,” she said. At the time, my dad was playing for the Bearcat football team. UC men’s tennis coach John Powless, who also coached the basketball team, invited him to workout with the tennis team.
Powless later coached both sports at the University of Wisconsin and is the namesake for the John Powless Tennis Center.
“He was a really nice man,” my mom said. “And that’s how much tennis has impacted my life.”
When they moved to Green Bay so my dad could play football for the Packers, my mom set up tennis games with one of the Packer trainers. She also discovered the Fox Cities Tennis Club, which has been her home ever since. She credits her friend and Fox Cities club manager Ruth Whitlinger for helping her maintain her 75-year streak.
“I cannot say enough positive things about Ruth Whitlinger,” Mom said. “She puts us all on teams. She schedules us. She’s so encouraging. She wants us to stay in tennis and I think that’s amazing.”
Though she has never had a formal tennis lesson, my mom has carved out a nice tennis career.
Her weekly matches on the Erb Park tennis court with Jerry Fisher, Frank Mousley and Ike Spangenberg evolved into her Tuesday Night Tennis League, with Frank, John Jorgensen and Mark Tyczkowski.
She and Frank became Xavier High School tennis coaches. She coached the boys, he coached the girls and Bob Luedke ran drills for both.
“Frank and I were both fortunate to coach at Xavier,” she said. The two remained friends until Frank’s untimely death last year.
“I owe a big part of my tennis career to Frank,” Mom said. “He was responsible for our weekly tennis game. We were on the court together forever.”
In 2010, my mom and her partner Meg Vander Zanden won the Wisconsin Super Seniors No. 1 doubles state championship.
As gratifying as that title is, it’s not the reason my competitive mother plays tennis these days.
“I think right now I just like the camaraderie, the exercise and the challenge to my brain to know what’s going to happen on the court, what the score is and what I need to do next to score points for my team,” she said.
Tomorrow my mom will celebrate her 86th birthday and she’ll spend at least part of it playing tennis.
Congratulations to Peggy Jo on the excellent choice she made in asking for a birthday present 75 years ago, and for the admirable tennis game she has maintained ever since.
