Iris Cummings, Last Living Member of 1936 US Olympic Team, Celebrates 100th Birthday

“We didn’t have any idea until a week or ten days before the boat sailed that we might even be on an Olympic team,” Cummings said in an interview during the 1984 LA Olympics. “And at that point, we won a position on the team and then didn’t know whether we were going to go because the Olympic Committee didn’t have the money to send a full team.”

In 1936, the American swimmers needed to raise their own money if they were to compete in Berlin and Cummings, who had family on the west coast, struggled to find the funds over in New York

“We finally did get most of the team sponsored,” Cummings said. “There were a few left at home, not more than five or six that I knew of. And then we were properly saluted, with ticker tape and confetti, onto the boat. This was the SS Manhattan, and it sailed in August for Hamburg. We arrived in Berlin less than two weeks before the first competitions. And we had been wandering around trying to raise money, not training. In those ten days before the boat sailed, I didn’t even get in a pool, I never saw a coach, and I didn’t have any chance to train. I think we may have gone back to Philadelphia for five days and then back to New York because we couldn’t afford hotels in New York.”

Members of the 1936 US Olympic swim team waiting to train. Photo Courtesy: Iris Cummings

Cummings remained on the national scene after the Berlin Games, defending her national title in 1937, ’38 and ’39. When Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany invaded Austria in late 1939, there were serious doubts that the 1940 Games in Tokyo would go on. So in late 1939, Cummings dedicated herself fully to her studies – where she was taking aeronautics courses at the University of Southern California. In the spring of 1940, she received her pilot’s license at age 19.

And in 1941, when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, everything changed for the American people. In 1942, Cummings joined the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASP) where she was a civilian ferry pilot with the Air Transport Command. Cummings, with a lot of flying background, transitioned rapidly into fighter aircraft.

She flew all four of the single-engine fighters and all the twin-engine bombers in the ferrying division and was with WASP until December 1944. It was during the war where she met her future husband Howard at a base where he was stationed and she used as a ferry stop.

When the war was over, she returned to USC as an educator in the same school she got her degree in and taught four courses – their primary, their advanced, their instrument and their airline transport and multi-engine course, being responsible for the curriculum and the instrument pilot training, running three 16 week semesters a year.