Marble Alice

American tennis champion who won Wimbledon in 1938 and 1939 and the U.S. singles four times. She played sports from childhood, becoming primarily interested in tennis when her parents thought that baseball was too rough for a girl to play and bought her a tennis racket instead. By age 17, she had won the California Junior Championship and was the third ranking champ by age 19. After retiring from tennis, she began to design tennis clothes, did commercials and sang on the radio and in clubs; in 1949 she became a professional radio sports announcer. Marble wrote an autobiography entitled "Courting Danger" which detailed her career as a spy for the army during WW II. During her escapade as a spy, she was shot in the back and recovered in Switzerland. She also suffered TB when she was young and was told she would never play tennis again, they were wrong. The TB was later actually diagnosed as secondary anemia and treated. Marble later became a secretary to a doctor in Tarzana, California. Weakened by pernicious anaemia, Marble died at a hospital in Palm Springs, California on 13 December 1990, aged 77. Link to Wikipedia biography Read less