By Miranda Ruzinsky
“WALK A CELEBRITY MILE!”: This call to action circulated around Houston in 1977 on a poster advertising the final stretch of the torch relay for the National Women’s Conference (NWC). It encouraged local residents to join in the final leg of a 2,610-mile journey from Seneca Falls, New York, to Houston, Texas, where runners from across the country carried a symbolic torch of freedom for women. The flyer promised appearances from famous figures like Olympians Wilma Rudolph and Donna de Varona, political figures Bella Abzug and Judy Carter, and tennis star Billie Jean King as the relay inched its way through downtown Houston towards the Sam Houston Coliseum. What the flyer could not predict was who would become the real “celebrities” of that final mile.
Organizers of the relay chose three young women from the Houston area as the finishing torch runners in this unprecedented national event. These female athletes from the younger generation symbolized the youth and vigor of the feminist movement and the growing popularity of women’s sports. Planners also prioritized diversity, choosing women from Houston’s Black, white, and Latino communities. Michelle Cearcy, a sixteen-year-old African American track star from Phillis Wheatley High School, and Peggy Kokernot, a white marathon runner, joined Sylvia Ortiz, a Latina student athlete at the University of Houston (UH), to complete the trio.
In 1977, Ortiz was a collegiate athlete in her last year of undergraduate education. She balanced her classes in physical education and health with games and practices for the university’s nationally ranked volleyball and badminton teams. But Ortiz was not just a player; she was an advocate for equality on the court. Her experience with the rampant gender discrimination of sports programs during this era inspired her to fight against sexism in athletics.
Both in her high school and college days, Ortiz recognized the difference in resources among the female and male sports programs. “We had a third of what they offered the men’s programs,” she recalled. “When I was at UH…Nothing [was] equal. We were driving vans. We’d go to tournaments in the wee hours of the morning, coaches driving us.” Another UH volleyball player on the 1978 team, Darlene Meyer (now Evans), recalled that while the men played in the main sports arena, Hofheinz Pavilion, the women’s facility had a “concrete floor and no air conditioning.” These inequalities encouraged Ortiz to participate in campus-wide lobbying efforts to improve the UH women’s athletics program, focusing on funding and better practice facilities.
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https://sharingstories1977.uh.edu/essay/3
Click this link to learn more about the torch relay.
Click here to see an interactive map of which cities the torch relay went to!
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