By Kathianne Boniello
Mae Faggs Starr, a 1952 graduate of Bayside High School who became an Olympic champion sprinter and the first star of the Tennessee State University track team in the 1950s, died Jan. 27 at her home in Woodlawn, Ohio. She was 67.
The cause was breast cancer, said her husband, Dr. Eddie Starr.
Her cousin, Adele Anderson of Bayside, said Faggs was the youngest person at 16 to compete for the United States in the 1948 Olympics – a record that has since been broken.
She was the first athlete recruited by track coach Ed Temple for the Tigerbelles, Tennessee State University's women's track team, and at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, she ran the first leg on the 4 X100 relay that captured a gold medal and broke the world record.
At the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, Faggs ran on an all-Tennessee State 4 X100 relay team that won a bronze medal, and she became the first woman to compete in three Olympics.
Faggs also won 11 national Amateur Athletic Union titles and was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame in Indianapolis, Ind., in 1976.
Starr, who described his wife as “outgoing, kind, and generous” said Faggs “took her running very seriously. S
he said she used the ability that God gave her to run fast, to get her college degrees and become a teacher.”
Aeriwentha Mae Faggs was born in New Jersey but grew up in Bayside in a house on the corner of 46th Road and the Clearview Expressway, said Mandingo Tshaka, a civic leader who knew Faggs.
The 16-year-old Faggs was a student at Bayside High School when she competed in the 1948 Olympics in London but failed to qualify for the 200-meter finals.
Tshaka, who attended Bayside High at the same time as Faggs, said she began running with the 111th Precinct's Police Athletic League.
“Mae was a lovely person,” he said, “always smiling – could run like a deer.”
Tshaka said Faggs would run in PAL track meets at Crocheron Park near PS 41 and “ran circles around the boys.”
Anderson said that at the time of her cousin's first Olympic trip, she did not realize how important it was.
“I was happy for her,” she said. “Every year that went by it had a lot more meaning for me.
“She was really a beautiful person,” Anderson said.
Frank Gorman, a 1955 graduate of Bayside High who was an Olympic track champion in 1964 and 1968, wrote a letter to the Bayside High School Alumni Association remembering Faggs, Association President Frank Skala said.
“I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting her at the Atlanta Games in 1996,” Gorman wrote. “We laughed about those of us who followed, having to live with the legends of her outrunning the boys as well as the girls and making it all look so easy. She was quite modest but also proud that she left a legacy we remembered at Bayside High School.”
Tshaka said “as one becomes older, you become touched by the storms of life. Your friends die all around you and you speak of the precious memories that linger in the soul. Mae is one of them for me.”
Starr said “everybody's got a story” about his wife. “That has been very helpful to me,” he said.
After graduating from Tennessee State, Faggs earned a master's degree from the University of Cincinnati and then taught physical education at high schools in the Cincinnati area.
Starr said his wife taught for 31 years at all different levels in the Cincinnati public schools.
“Troubled kids gravitated toward her,” he said. “She was the kind of person who could turn those kids around.”
Faggs was also a girls' track coach, and in 1989 one of her teams was the all-state champion in track and field.
Starr said Faggs was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990 and was in remission after surgery until September when the disease reappeared.
Starr said the 41 years he spent married to his wife were “great years. We both did everything we wanted to do and our kids are great.”
In addition to her husband, she is survived by a son, Eddie Starr II, of Phoenix; a daughter, Evelyn Starr, of Pittsburgh; two brothers, Melvin Faggs of New York and Steve Murray of Huntsville, Ala.; and two grandchildren.
