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Early South Bend Participation

      Although Indianapolis was the center of table tennis in the state—its McClure-headed team had vied for the elite seven-team Inter-city title since 1934—other Indiana cities, in an all-points radius from Indianapolis, had shown interest in serious play too, including the Laporte/South Bend area. On November 18, 1934 Billy Condy defeated Carlton Prouty to win the northern Indiana Open at Laporte, and on January 3, 1935 Billy Harris defeated Bob Freashley in what was the first USTTA Topics-acknowledged South bend YMCA tournament. How much of a crowd that Wednesday-evening South Bend final between Harris and Freshley drew I don’t know, but the very next day, at the Y, reportedly 484 spectators came out to watch the Walter E. Buettner-organized leg of the “Coleman Clark Circus” Tour featuring the Hungarian 4-time (soon to be 5-time) World’s Men’s Singles Champion Victor Barna; his 1933 World’s Men’s Doubles partner, fellow Hungarian Sandor Glancz; and the 1932 and 1934 APPA Champions Coleman Clark and Jimmy McClure.

So, interest in table tennis was alive, and stayed very much alive, in South Bend. There was the 1935-36 season’s YMCA Tribune—sponsored tournament in which the Men’s Singles was won by Harold Gensichen and the Women’s by Betty Henry—an emergent teenager destined to have a very short life but at least in 1938 an unforgettable moment of international acclaim. And there was also the again scheduled “Circus”—Barna being accompanied this year by England’s #1 player, Adrian Haydon, former world semifinalist

However, for whatever reason, throughout the whole 1936-37 season neither Cottrell nor Green, nor anyone else in Indianapolis or any other part of Indiana, had the motivation to start a USTTA membership drive. As a result, Indiana was no longer an organized table tennis state, and no longer had any State President sitting on the USTTA’s Board of Directors.

In November of 1936, though a man by the name of W. B. Hester (click on W. B. article- picture at right) began establishing a South Bend Table Tennis Club, and before long the members had formed a local league and were supporting nearby tournaments—such as the Indiana State at Kokomo the weekend before Christmas (won by McClure and Sally Green) or the Dorsey Crites-run Northern Indiana Open, held in Huntington on February 6-7, 1937. With Hester at the Helm, the Feb.20-21, St. Joseph Valley YMCA tournament drew 71 entries in the Men’s Singles. Which certainly suggests the tried and true axiom that “If your guys come to my tournament, my guys will come to yours.

A further boost was given South Bend table tennis with the March arrival of the third performance of the touring “Circus”—this time featuring the 1936 Czechoslovakian World Champion Standa Kolar and the Hungarian 3-time World runner-up Leszlo Bellak who would go on to win both the 1937 and 1938 U.S. Opens. Hard on the heels of that world-class exhibition was the four-day Great Lakes Open at the South Bend Studebaker Athletic Club which reportedly drew tens of thousands of spectators. This Open offered numerous Closed events and $275 worth of prizes. (Want to have that $275 put into some perspective? In June of ’37 my father, mother, younger sister and I would begin a cross-country Ohio-to-California-and back trip by car, and I note from one of my father’s meticulously kept scrapbook entries that on June 18 we drove 529 miles and spent and spent, for gas, food, tips, tourist cabin, and sundries, $12.63).

But even with all this tournament and exhibition activity (Kolar and Bellak also played Indianapolis and Muncie), at season’s end, Indiana had exactly 35 ($.50 a year, including eight issues of  Topics) USTTA dues-paying members. How account for the fact that out of a total USTTA membership of 2511, Massachusetts, eighth among the states in population compared to Indiana’s twelfth, managed to have 329 members? Anybody in Indiana care? Anybody got any ideas?

As it happened, they did. At an historic 1937 meeting in Kokomo (picture left), a number of players and officials forever important to Indiana table tennis gathered together to reorganize the State Association and to elect South Bend’s Hester as their President. A selected Who’s Who at this meeting would include, among others, Bob Green, Hester (click to read W.B.'s history of the formation of our club in his own words), Bernie Hock, Bill Hornyak  (picture bottom right) Kitselman, McClure, and newly arrived on the scene…Hungary’s and now South Bend’s John Varga.

 Varga Joins Hester

John, born John Varga Brewer in 1912 in Baros (a town in southern Hungary on the Croation border, nearer Zagreb than Budapest), was a contemporary of Barna and Bellak, both of whom were born in 1911. In 1922 on his tenth birthday, John reportedly received the present of a London-made Slazenger paddle, though also reportedly he didn’t really begin to play, play presumably with any seriousness, until he was 13 and living with his uncle in Budapest. Certainly Varga’s Slazenger would be a much better racket than Barna and Bellak would own when as 13-year-olds in 1924 they started playing in Budapest and became obsessed with the game.

When John was still quite young, his mother left Hungary to come to the U.S. to be with her father, who was ill; and in 1916 his father died fighting the Russians. Perhaps John’s interest in, and yet distance from, children came in part from the fact that he himself was “orphaned” at such an early age? On being raised by relatives, and after attending schools in five different European countries, he studied mechanical engineering in Paris and Switzerland and got a Master’s degree in Karlsruhe, Germany. Thus, though he’d been singled out with that special paddle, as if perhaps he was to do great things in the Sport, his life would take a different turn from Barna and Bellak’s.