Tennis Racquet

 

Hiram College Tennis Team, 1966

A few days ago there was an obituary in the New York Times. It was for former tennis star Shirley Fry, who won the Wimbledon title a long, long time ago. Link to obit. She also won the three other majors in her career.

I didn’t know Shirley Fry—I’m not even sure that I ever saw her play. I think I remember hearing from the older players that she had once come to Hiram with her dad and worked out a bit with the team. Oh, I wish I’d seen that!

But I did know her father, Lester R. Fry, fairly well, for in the late 1950s and 60s (and probably beyond) he used to come to Hiram College in the fall and spring, park his car by the tennis courts (which in those days were behind the old library, now a computer center), and spend his day selling tennis racquets, stringing them, selling other tennis supplies.

And talk. Oh, could he talk! It was fun just to sit and listen to him, even when I had no product or service I needed from him.

I bought a number of racquets from him—usually the wood-framed Jack Kramer (a popular brand in the day).* I broke a few of them, too: I had a temper and when I did something stupid on the court, which was often, I would smack it into the court—or against my leg (I learned this from Phil Barry, an older, far more gifted player than I on our Hiram College team) and had bruises similar to his near my shin on my right leg.

I liked to watch Mr. Fry string the racquets on a machine that looked as old as a Gutenberg printing press. He could talk non-stop while he worked, and that impressed me as well.

Later on, I would sometimes stop down at his shop on E. Exchange St. in Akron—his shop which was basically his glassed-in front porch—to buy a new racquet—or a couple of cans of balls—or get a re-stringing job. He seemed ageless.

The other day, certain that he was no longer alive, I checked the Beacon-Journal archives (online) and discovered he’d died on Aug. 4, 1984–he was 92 years old.** That meant that when he was working on tennis rackets for me and others in the mid-60s, he was in his seventies. No surprise.

What was a surprise in that obit was that he had been a life-long tennis player himself. He had played regularly with his wife into his 80s.

He never once said a thing to me (that I recall) that suggested he was himself a player. He was just our Geppetto of tennis racquets. 

Oh, and I also learned he was born in Suffield Twp. in Portage County. When I was in high school, we played Suffield in basketball. (It’s now Field High School, merged with some other nearby wee high schools.)

I miss those Hiram days, the days when I would see his car by the tennis courts, his stringing machine in action, his stories emerging from him with simple, fluid eloquence.

Shirley Fry

*I am not holding one in the pic—but other teammates are.

** His obit is in the Aug. 7, 1984, edition of the Beacon.