Page 1 2

Members of the Fish Fans swim club, 1948.

One day in 1948 four Washington State College students tugged on their white rubber swim caps, adjusted their nose plugs, and plunged into a cold swimming pool. Three of them locked together head to foot to form a vertical underwater ring, and the fourth swam through it toward a photographer who captured the maneuver on film.

Last year Ryli Clark '06 found that picture—one of a series of photos of the Fish Fans, WSC’s swimming club—and she was stunned. “At first I couldn’t tell what or where it was,” says the alumna who had just graduated from WSU with a degree in digital technology and culture. “But the more I looked at it, the more amazing it seemed.”

Clark had discovered the image in WSU’s Department of Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC), where she held a one-year post combing through photographs from the University’s collections hunting for visual records of women athletes at WSU from 1900 to 2000. Thanks to a state grant for preserving women’s history, she was able to digitize and put online more than 300 of those photos.

At first, Clark wasn’t sure how she’d connect with the project, especially since she’s not particularly athletic. But once she started looking through the scrapbooks and collections, she was hooked. She found women laughing, smiling, running, jumping, and dancing. She uncovered thousands of images of a campus alive with activity. “I even came across a few sports I didn’t even know existed,” she says. Field ball, for example, seemed to be a big sport in the 1920s. The ball was soccer-size, but Clark knew the game wasn’t soccer. The athletes were obviously using their hands to catch and throw the ball.

Her curiosity moved beyond what these students did for exercise to the logistics of doing it. “I can’t imagine participating in sports wearing the clothes they did,” she says. “In the early years they had big wool pants, big bows, and big shirts.” On their feet, she saw old-fashioned, well-worn shoes and boots with no cushion and no arch support.

Page 1 2

Continued