Hubbards Leap

DeHart* Hubbard, famed Negro athlete, is endowed with a pair of great black legs (TIME, June 15).

For four years, these legs have won fame for Hubbard, protruding from a pair of tiny trunks striped with the colors of the University of Michigan. Last week, in Chicago, Hubbard bent to survey them. Competing in the National Collegiate Track and Field Championships, he had already proved himself the best collegiate sprinter in the U. S. by winning the 100-yd. dash in 9 8/10 sec. from a sparkling field, the most notable performance of the afternoon, though it had been a notable afternoon, with a national collegiate record and six records for the meet broken. Now Hubbard was about to make his last effort as a college athlete, felt tired, ill-prepared for it. His lifelong ambition--to break the world's record for the running broad-jump--had little prospect of being realized, for already he had jumped several times, not surpassingly, He took off his sweater, pawed the ground, ran down toward the pit. To those who watched, it did not seem that his body shot any farther through the air than in its other leaps--nor did it, by much; but it exceeded by 4 7/8% in. the world's record of 25 ft. 6 in., established by Robert Le Gendre of Georgetown at the Olympic Games last summer. Satisfied, Hubbard ran off to cool his great legs in a shower.

* His parents christened him DeHart. His schoolmates dubbeb him "Old Mother"-after the famed nursery rhyme character who went to the cupboard.