Jan Romary: Iconoclast

December 2023

In any sport, there are always a handful of super-elite performers: The superstars whose achievements are so profound that their records are unassailable. Fencing has its fair share, of course. On the international side, you can choose amongst the likes of Valentina Vezzali or Aladár Gerevich. In the U.S., we have our own: Peter Westbrook and Mariel Zagunis. Joseph Levis and Norman Armitage. There are more who could be mentioned, but today I’d like to call your attention to the incomparable Janice-Lee (York) Romary. Jan, for short. 

Janice-Lee (York) Romary

With an Olympic career spanning 20 years, it’s difficult to know where to start. Her first Olympics was London in 1948, and her sixth and last was Mexico in 1968, where she was the flag-bearer for the USA delegation at the opening ceremonies. It’s worth noting she was the first woman ever chosen as flag-bearer for the USA Olympic delegation. When being interviewed around the time of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, she was asked how it felt to be the first woman to carry the flag for the U.S.. She responded, “Every time I look at the pictures of me carrying that flag, it looks like I was on the ground. But I felt like I was eight feet above. It was quite a thrill.” She then added, “Damn thing was heavy, too.”

Born in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1927, she was raised in Hollywood and began fencing at the Max Reinhardt School of Theater located on Sunset Boulevard, which her father managed. (Reinhardt is his own story and worth a Google search).  Likely, as there isn’t any definitive evidence, Jan transferred to Ralph Faulkner’s Falcon Fencers in the early ’40s, around the time of Reinhardt passing away. Faulkner’s program was also situated in Hollywood and was a dual program; Ralph taught fencing and his wife, Edith Jane, ran a dance studio, both halves serving the needs of the many aspiring star-hopefuls in Hollywood. The earliest photos of Jan as a fencer are at the Faulkner studios when she was around age 13. Faulkner was a master of self-promotion, with two Olympic team selections to his name, and there are a number of surviving photos of Faulkner with dozens of his fencers in dramatic formations and poses. The young future Olympian Jan York is featured prominently, alongside two other Falcon Fencers who would go on to reach Olympic heights, Sewall Shurtz and Polly Craus.

The initial challenge in researching Romary’s earliest successes leading to her selection on the 1948 Olympic team at the age of 21 is the dearth of a national fencing magazine between the years of 1942 and 1949. World War II brought the publication of The Riposte magazine to an end, and American Fencing started in November of 1949. Fortunately (for my purposes) a couple of young and enterprising fencers on the West Coast began distributing a newsletter with articles and results titled The California Fencer in March of 1946. As their distribution grew, it became an actual magazine, and the name was shorted to just The Fencer. The final issue, in September of 1948, featured a write-up about fencing at the London Olympics. Fortunately for this author, the second-to-last issue included a detailed account of the 1948 U.S. National Championships, where Janice-Lee York finished second in the individual event and, along with fellow Falcons Polly Craus and Dierdre Gale, took the gold medal in the women’s team foil, wresting the crown from the defending champions in a 5-4 fence-off against the New York Fencers Club team that included Maria Cerra and Helena Dow (who would then join Jan in London as the U.S. representatives for the women’s foil event. What the three may have accomplished as a team on the world stage we’ll never know. The first women’s Olympic foil team event wasn’t held until Rome, 1960.

Janice Lee York in 1948

Another area where there is a dearth of information surrounds participation, or lack of it, in the World Championships. This wasn’t unique to Jan, however. The U.S. spent most of the 1950s on the sidelines of international competition, apart from the Olympics. Teams were not fielded to participate in events on the international stage, with one exception. In 1958, the world came to us. The World Championships that year were held in Philadelphia, creating a forcing function for the AFLA (the predecessor to USA Fencing) to – dare I say “finally” – field a full squad of competitors. Romary (she married in 1953), along with two other US fencers, Maxine Mitchell and Judy Goodrich, made it as far as the semifinals, but none was able to pull-off enough victories to advance from either of the two semifinal round-robin pools of eight fencers to the final of eight.

Interestingly, only two women from Romary’s semifinal pool qualified directly, with six and four victories, respectively. Romary and the other five women in the pool all had records of three victories and four defeats. What do you do? Well, in 1958 you toss all six women into a fence-off pool of six and have them fight it out. The other semifinal pool also had a fence-off for deciding who would be the fourth fencer to advance, but with only three fencers in contention. Apart from how crazy that may sound compared with the infinitely more fair direct elimination (without repechage, thank you) system we have today, I can’t fathom how anyone thought it was at all fair to have these competitors fence – essentially an additional round-robin pool before the finals. Doesn’t it sound crazy?

Wacky tournament organization (hindsight, I realize) aside, it’s incredibly impressive that Romary – and Mitchell, the other U.S. fencer with multiple Olympic experiences at that time – had the ability to fight their way into the semifinals of the World Championships, when their only international experience came once every four years. Romary made the semifinals at her very first international event, the 1948 Olympics, fencing well against the best in the world. With that, and only that, international experience under her belt, she took fourth place, just off the medal stand, in 1952, finishing the final pool (eight, again) in a four-way tie for the bronze medal. That precipitated another fence-off where Jan dropped one bout to the bronze medalist, Karen Lachmann of Denmark, while Maxine Mitchell, the other American finalist who also made the fence-off, dropped all three fence-off bouts to finish sixth.

In 1956, with zero international experience since 1952, Jan once again finished in fourth position. This time, in another round-robin final of eight, she finished alone at 4-3, dropping her bouts to the three medalists. Jan's wins included one touch victories against two-time Olympic medalist and 1954 World Champion Karen Lachmann, and three-time Olympic medalist and three-time World Champion Ellen Müller-Preis who, from 1936 (gold) to 1956, never failed to make the Olympic finals. 

Jan in 1948

The drive and willpower to succeed at the highest level in her sport makes Jan Romary an impressively accomplished athlete. When you combine that with the realization that her entire career was hampered by a lack of consistent international competition, it’s not hard to imagine that she was entirely capable of a great deal more. Imagine her in a supportive elite program like the many available across the U.S. today. There’s no knowing what she might have accomplished.

In addition to her Olympic results, her domestic ones are just as impressive. She won ten U.S. National Championship individual titles, her first in 1950 and last in 1968, as well as six team titles, the highlight of which is, without question, from 1956. At that time, as now, the teams consisted of three competitors. Unlike now, the scores for the round-robin bouts were not counted by cumulative touches, but bout victories. Thus, a close match would be a 5-4 victory. The Southern California division fielded two teams of the eleven that competed in the women’s team foil competition for that year; one from Faulkner’s, and one composite team made up of Maxine Mitchell and Jan Romary. Mitchell was then fencing for the LAAC and Romary was unattached.

You might have noticed I only used two names for the composite team from Southern California who entered the three-women team event for that National Championship. That isn’t an oversight or a mistake. It was just the two of them. For whatever reason, they couldn’t find or didn’t want a third fencer – or perhaps they couldn’t make it to New York at the last minute. Whatever the reason, for every match they fenced, the entry on the scoresheet included three defeats for their phantom teammate, “Madame Zero,” leaving Romary and Mitchell an allowance of only one defeat per match between them. Since I started this description with the outcome, you already know they won. However, they did so without a single defeat. Jan started each match, so she ended up fencing two more bouts than Maxine. In the end, Jan went 15-0, 10 touches against (+50 indicator, because of four-touch bouts — and that’s a whole other story) and Maxine finished 13-0, 9 touches against (+43).

I mean, come on. That’s just ridiculous.

Jan Romary retired from competition after the 1968 Olympic Games but didn’t stray far from the Olympic movement. She was the women’s administrator for the U.S. team in 1976 and the commissioner of fencing for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. She passed away in 2007 at the age of 79.

Jan in 1953

There is one last thing about Romary’s fencing career I find quite fascinating and feel defines her as a true iconoclast. During the years of her competitive career, there was one cardinal rule for fencing in Southern California: never change clubs. You might do it once and get away with it, but as a regular thing, it just wasn’t done. Trying to move clubs (unless yours closed) would get you a world of suspicion from the members of the club you might try to join. Indeed, spending a single evening sparring at another club might get you a notice from your fencing master that you were no longer welcome. As an example, I have a copy of a letter from 1955 that states, “To expect any decency from anyone connected in any way with the motion picture business is to expect the impossible. Of course, you are permanently barred from my Academy.” The letter is signed by Maestro Aldo Nadi and was sent because he’d found out that his (former) student had spent one evening sparring with a friend at another club.

However, Jan Romary changed clubs several times.

She spent her early days fencing with Ralph Faulkner – where she was able to meet and spar her own fencing idol, Helene Mayer – but trained with Aldo Nadi in the mid-1950s. After Faulkner, Romary registered as “unaffiliated” for most of the 50s and early 60s, but according to one person I interviewed, she was able to go back-and-forth between the two clubs when the mood or need struck her. In the early 1960s, she began fencing and taking lessons at Salle Vince with Joseph Vince and continued there with Torao Mori when Mori took over the program upon Vince’s retirement.

I’m in no position to truly understand Romary’s motivation for changing clubs or coaches, but I’d like to believe it was due to her having her own mind about what was best for her as an athlete and/or person. Not best for her coach, their ego, the club in general or the pervasive belief that changing clubs was tantamount to treason. Rather, changing club and coach was the right thing – for her. Iconoclasts make those determinations for themselves. And if they’re successful, they can make it work.

Jan Romary was extremely successful. She made it work.