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4 Oo A Study in Determination As Belle entered her teens, she had two great passions—sailing and horses. By age seventeen, she had already won over fifty sailing trophies and in 1916 became the first woman to win the coveted Queen of the Bay Cup sponsored by the Yacht Racing Association of Great South Bay, Long Island. Skippering her Bellport Bay one-design yacht, Miladi, Belle won the race by a corrected time of twenty-two seconds. Flushed and triumphant, the young teen was heralded as one of the “best women skippers on Great South Bay.” Despite the irksome gender limitation, Belle posed proudly for family and newspaper photos. She was, however, about to learn just how much men hate losing to women. The skipper of the second-place yacht, Invader, protested Miladi’s measurements . The official measurer, R. S. Haight, spent an entire morning measuring Belle’s craft. After he had “gathered enough data to sink a ship,” as the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described it, he announced that Miladi exceeded the accepted measurements by eighteen inches, as did all the Bellport Bay one-design boats. Notified of the decision, Belle showed her mettle, earning the admiration of the press. With a smile and a toss of her head, Belle announced: “I am sorry that I did not win the cup. Now I must go out and win the championship.” Luck was not with her that year, but she came back later to win again. When Belle died in 1964, her childhood friend Langdon Post wrote to her father: When I received your telegram, addressed to Mary [his sister, Mary Post Howe] and carrying the sad news about Belle, I was standing in the living room of our house watching the sailboat races on the Bay [San Francisco Bay]. A Study in Determination 25 Then I was back on the Great South Bay in Miladi and Belle was sitting in the stern sheets, hand on the tiller, eyes glued to the luff of the sail, her face a study in concentration and determination as her sensitive hands responded to the minutest shift of the wind. Then we crossed the finish line and the gun went off. We had won again, and again and again, until, finally, the Queen of the Bay. I had spanned three thousand miles and almost fifty years to what were, perhaps, the happiest summers of my life.1 Unfortunately Belle could not spend all her time sailing and riding or exploring at Hobcaw. She had a quick, intelligent mind, but academics did not interest her greatly. Enrolled at the Rayson School on West Seventy-fifth Street in New York, Belle was a somewhat indifferent scholar, although she scored high marks in her religious studies. Well-liked by her fellow students, she was elected class president in both her sophomore and junior years. Just before her sixteenth birthday, Belle was more thrilled than horrified to be involved in a genuine stagecoach holdup while on holiday in Yellowstone National Park. She and her friend Mary Post were traveling with the Baruch family, and the two girls had wheedled permission to sit up top with the driver, a man named Harris. After considerable coaxing and encouragement from the two girls, Harris was regaling them with tales of the West when the subject of bandits and holdups arose. As Belle later described it: We were thrilled with Harris’ stories of previous holdups and we longed to have just such an incident happen to us. . . . It was about twenty minutes to ten in the morning, and the sky was still gray and clouded. . . . We were winding our way up a narrow and long road. As we reached the top of a small hill and had turned the corner, we noticed a coach and surrey ahead of us were stopped. . . . A man with a piece of blue flannel covering his face was standing on the side of the road. He had a Winchester repeater in his hand.2 Mary Post shouted a warning to those inside the coach, a warning they first thought of as a joke. A glance out the window assured Bernard Baruch that it was no joke. A quick thinker, he tossed most of his money under the front seat, his wife adding her pearls to the cache. The robber’s meager booty was a thick roll of mostly small bills. To Belle’s great delight, a detachment of U.S. cavalrymen soon appeared in...

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