Word: sonja
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...Paavo Nurmi was the world's greatest distance runner, Yankee Babe Ruth cracked out his 416th home run, Bobby Jones won his third national amateur championship and Jack Dempsey was training for a return match with Champion Gene Tunney. That year a brown-eyed little Norwegian girl named Sonja Henie, having won her first world's championship, was about to win her first Olympic crown. For the comparatively few who took an interest in skating, she was the most famous woman skater in the world...
Last week Sonja Henie, vacationing in Norway, was still the most famous woman skater in the world. In competition no longer, at 29 she was a greater box-office name, a more compelling magnet for crowds than ever before. She was not only, in Sportswriter Joe Williams' words, "undoubtedly the biggest individual draw sports ever produced," but she was also Hollywood's third-ranking box-office star* with four phenomenally successful pictures behind her and another, just released, well calculated to ring the bell again. Sonja Henie has been called variously Queen of the Ice, Pavlova on Skates...
...Follies of 1939 (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). With no individual star to rival Sonja Henie, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Producer Harry Rapf, eager to capitalize on the vogue for skating spectacles launched by Twentieth Century-Fox's rotund little ex-Olympic skater, was forced to fall back on the reliable formula of the show within a show. Approximately half the footage of Ice Follies is devoted to the spinnings and whirlings of a troupe of professional skaters, photographed from all angles. The other half is devoted to a dull narrative in which James Stewart and Joan Crawford...
...there are ice shows on night-club floors where once there was tap dancing. In the Midwest fancy skaters have supplanted hula-hula dancers as dinner entertainment at conventions. In Los Angeles suntanned citizens skate outdoors on artificial ice in bathing suits. And many ambitious mothers, well aware that Sonja Henie has made over $2,000,000 in the three vears since she turned professional, are making sacrifices to give their little girls expensive skating lessons...
Last week while Queen Sonja was winding up a transcontinental personal-appearance tour, which attracted 757,000 spectators and grossed $1,000,000, five little ladies-in-waiting met at St. Paul to see who is the best amateur figure skater in the U. S. Contrary to popular impression derived from the dozens of professional ice-skating shows that have been touring the country, figure skating is neither acrobatics on skates nor dancing on ice. The sport of figure skating has a set of explicit school figures, 41 in number, which must be executed with hairline precision...