Word: first
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...squash, Eleonora Sears is some punkins. Reputedly the first woman to play squash racquets in the U. S. (in 1918, she demanded that Boston's men's clubs let her play on their courts, house rules or no house rules), the rich Boston Brahmin, great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson and heiress to a big New England shipping fortune, has been going great guns ever since...
...when enough women took up the game to make competition exciting, Eleo (as she is known in swish circles) won the first national squash racquets championship for women. The following year, she held famed Professional Walter Kinsella, world's squash tennis champion from 1914-26, to a tight score in an exhibition match. This year, at 58, white-haired, lithe Eleonora Sears is still going strong. Last week, in the Atlantic Coast squash championship (at Atlantic City), first big tournament of the season, she reached the semi-finals in a field of top-flight players, most of whom were...
...other sports Eleonora Sears has been equally staminous. Ten years ago she hiked 73 miles in 17 hours, has often walked from Boston to Providence (47 miles) "just for the exercise." Once she swam five miles off Newport. She was one of the first U. S. women to go up in a flying machine (with Claude Grahame-White in 1910), one of the first to drive an automobile, one of the first to wear breeches and ride astride. In 1909, when she was known as "the best-gowned woman in America" and her name romantically linked with that of Yachtsman...
...effect was electric. Irresistibly Doug Fairbanks grinned and leaped his way to stage success as a bounding Lothario, a leaping Lochinvar who made love on the bounce. Hollywood gave him higher walls to scale, longer ropes to swing on, scores more swordsmen to engage in single-handed combat. His first picture, The Lamb, jumped his first ten-week contract, under puttee-wearing Director David Wark Griffith, from $2,000 a week to a three-year contract at $4,000 a week, typed him for life as an acrobatic comedian. Grinning, he slashed, sprang and flew through such cinema classics...
Selznick read the synopsis. With the sad fate of So Red the Rose in mind, he was in no hurry to pay $50,000 for another Civil War book, and a first novel to boot. But when Selznick International's Board Chairman John Jay ("Jock") Whitney offered to buy the novel on his own, Selznick, saying, "I'll be damned if you do," closed the deal. Then he took the book on an ocean voyage to Honolulu to see what he had bought...