2005 Mark Matthews Lifetime Achievement Award Winners:
Leah Thall Neubeerger and Thelma "Tybie" Thall Sommer

By USATT Historian Tim Boggan

Leah Thall’s younger sister, Thelma “Tybie” Thall, made her first recorded table tennis appearance at Cincinnati’s Feb. 8, 1942 Jewish Center Midwest Closed. She was a straight-A student and the “first girl in the history of [Columbus, Ohio’s] East High to win a varsity letter in [tennis].”

The sisters honed their table tennis games in the early to mid 1940’s while working as bookkeepers. They had three sports-minded brothers, Abe, Lou, and Bennie, who in “basketball, handball, and golf…made quite a name for themselves in Buckeye circles.” I don’t know who gave Thelma the nickname “Tybie”—it comes from two Hebrew words meaning “dove” and “devil”—but I do know that Tybie’s brother Abe encouraged her to box and play tackle football. Leah in her youth wasn’t so gutsy. She started to play ping-pong at her local Y because she was fearful of diving into the pool there.

While the brothers served in the War, “the girls helped to entertain the wounded soldiers by giving table tennis exhibitions throughout Ohio’s many hospitals.” Leah, it turns out, likes fudge cake and so as not to risk putting on extra poundage bowls in a Columbus league, where she has a 160 average and a high triple of 606. Tybie enjoys cheese blintzes with sour cream, and might be seen, rain or shine, riding about on her red and white Roadmaster bicycle, holding up an umbrella if need be.

The1947 National’s, in which Leah would finally have her breakthrough Singles win, may have seen Tybie snap her bra-strap and, a bit frantic, go hunting for a safety pin. But the Thalls in their 5-game Women’s Doubles final got it together to exact sweet revenge over Mae Clouther and Millie Shahian who’d beaten them deuce in the 5^th the previous year.

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