Turners & Twisters

In an atmosphere redolent of honest sweat 180 palm-powdered athletes, clothed in bathing trunks, tennis flannels, track shorts and acrobats' tights, flipped around the gymnasium of Manhattan's West Side Y.M.C.A. like desperate fish. They were top-rung U.S. gymnasts competing in one of the oldest and least publicized of national tournaments: the 58th annual amateur U.S. gymnastic championships.

Modern apparatus gymnastics was founded in the early 19th Century by Germany's Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. To this day the world's gymnasts follow the etiquette as well as the exercises established on his Turnplatz. They approach their specialties with exaggerated posturings and goose-step tread, perform with Teutonic precision. Besides the apparatus events (horizontal bar, parallel bars, side horse, long horse, flying rings and balance beam), championship tournaments include rope-climbing, Indian clubs, calisthenics, tumbling.

Gymnastics is the baseball of transplanted Czecho-Slovakian, Swiss and German Americans. Largest of these groups is the 100,000 U.S. Bohemians who be long to the worldwide Sokol organization (1,000,000 members), started in 1862 by Dr. Miroslav Tyrs of Prague. Next largest group is the American Turners, a confederation of German-descended Turner Societies.

At last week's meet, the Sokols and Turners outnumbered all other entries. For the fourth year, the Philadelphia Turners' chunky, bespectacled Pearl Nightingale flew off with the women's all-round championship. Only on the balance beam, where contestants go through nerve-racking slow-motion acrobatics, was Champion Nightingale bested by any rival. The men's all-round title went to stocky little Arthur Pitt of the Swiss Gymnastic Society of Union City, N.J.

Apparatus events are the backbone of gymnastics. But far more exciting to galleries are the tumbling events. For the sheer fun of it, contestants perform the same stunts that once kept Japanese tumblers in big-time vaudeville. The tumbler who brought down the house last week was a 15-year-old schoolgirl, dimpled, curly-headed Bonnie Nebelong. Into her minute-and-a-half performance, she packed so many spine-tingling contortions and body twists that the judges had eyes for no one else.

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