Ballroom Tennists

Residents of Philadelphia's swank Bellevue-Stratford Hotel were agitated last week by what was going on in the ballroom. Some 200 young people, clad in sweat shirts and flannel slacks, kept popping in & out of it at odd hours. They carried funny-looking little paddles. From the ballroom came the sounds of what seemed to be some sort of scuffle.

Investigation revealed that the doings in the Bellevue-Stratford ballroom were nothing at which Philadelphians need take alarm. In progress was the National Table Tennis Tournament on twelve tables, under green-shaded lamps, surrounded by the flags of the four nations represented by contestants. After three days of agitation in the ballroom, the tournament.ended as table-tennis experts had predicted: Viktor Barna of Budapest, five times world champion, won the men's title. Ruth Hughes Aarons won the women's. Together they took the mixed doubles title and, to make her performance perfect, Rath Aarons also shared the women's doubles championship. If sleek little Viktor Barna is the Tilden of table tennis, Ruth Hughes Aarons, daughter of a Manhattan theatre manager, shows signs of becoming its Helen Wills Moody. She started to play three years ago when she was 14. Last week brought her her third U. S. championship. She had just returned from a tour of Europe on which she won the world's champion ship for women at Prague. A lissome, blue-eyed blonde, she resembles Cinemactress Ginger Rogers, who is also a table-tennis expert, No. 4 in Pacific Coast ranking.

In the U. S., table tennists are enraged when people call their pastime "Ping Pong," a trade name against which the U. S. Table Tennis Association, currently headed by Cartoonist Carl Zeisberg of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, revolted three years ago. Table Tennis Topics, official magazine of the Association, will not print the words ping pong, uses the scorn ful abbreviation ''P.P." when forced to refer to it. In Europe the game has more prestige than it enjoys in the U. S. Five thousand spectators watched Miss Aarons win the world's championship. Crowds almost as large cheered her in London. Vienna, Budapest. Although the best Philadelphia could muster was a picayune 500 for the final, Champion Aarons thinks the game has a future in the U. S., set out, after last week's tournament, on a barnstorming tour to prove it.

Before he became world's lawn-tennis champion, Fred Perry held the world's table-tennis title. Champion Aarons hopes to follow his example, expects to give up table for lawn tennis next year.

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