Sport: Durable Champion

In the days before Sonja Henie, no crowd would pay good money to see a woman do fancy skating. But Evelyn Chandler, a pretty redhead who had been national junior champion, needed money. Five years earlier, at 17, she had married and had a couple of kids. One night in 1929, she waited nervously in the wings at Madison Square Garden while the crowd howled at a blood-&-thunder hockey game. Hockey crowds were always rough on the entertainers between periods. But Evelyn wowed them. After that, Ev was their pet. As she came spinning near the boards, they would yell, “Hiya, Ev. . . . How’s the baby, Ev?” And Ev would wink at them, and soon her skirts would flash in a series of spirals and loop-jumps.

Last week, after 17 years of putting on a championship performance almost every time she laced up her skates, Evelyn Chandler was back at Madison Square Garden. Things were different now: vaudeville on ice was a million-dollar business, with 80 gayly costumed chorus-girl skaters (average age: 22) in the company of the Ice Follies of 1948. Half an hour before Evelyn was scheduled to go on, she unrolled a mat and limbered up with walkovers, splits and back-bends.

Nineteen Twists. At 40, when most athletes have lost their fine edge of coordination, she is still the star of the show—breezy, agile, vibrant. Unlike Sonja Henie, who is now doing what the trade calls ballet-type skating, Ev specializes in acrobatics. At her own tricks, she puts to shame starlets half her age.

No other skater has duplicated her famed Arabian cartwheel (a complete somersault without touching the ice). Her record for consecutive Axel-Paulsens (a somersault and a half twist) is 19. Says Evelyn: “I do them only five times in a show. People get bored.” Each season, she manages to cook up some new trick to keep the act fresh. She’s working on one for next year which, she says, “looks like you’re turning inside out only you aren’t.”

Lonely Travels. Eleven years after their marriage, her husband, Bruce Mapes, gave up trying to be an architect to become her skating partner. Sometimes, the kids were left with dressing-room attendants while they played shows. She remembers particularly a lonely 1936 Christmas in Birmingham, England: “It was one of those hotels where the food is miserable and the maid throws open the windows when she draws your bath. We didn’t know a soul, so we wound up playing slot machines in the railroad station. I can hardly keep from crying when I think of it.”

After ten years of skating with Evelyn, Bruce ran out of wind (he now handles the lighting effects for the Ice Follies). But Evelyn keeps going. Five years ago, she took time out to have a baby daughter, Susie,* then got right back on her skates. After 34 years at it, she has leg and back muscles stronger than most men’s. But she insists that she is still scared each time she skates out into a spotlight. “When I stop being scared,” she says, “I’ll stop skating.”

* Her eldest son, Bruce Mapes Jr., 21, is now the star of an ice floor show at Cincinnati’s Hotel Netherland Plaza.