By John Johnston
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Everyone has a story worth telling. At least, that's the theory. To test it, Tempo is throwing darts at the phone book. When a dart hits a name, a reporter dials the phone number and asks if someone in the home will be interviewed.

In her youth, she didn't play organized sports.

"When I went to high school, all they had was a boys basketball team," Gayle Hart says. "See, that's been a long, long time ago."

It was before the Great Depression. Before Charles Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris.

Hart grew up on a farm near the tiny town of Shoals, in southern Indiana. "I went to a small school in the country," she says. Pickup baseball was popular. "The girls had to play with the boys, because our school wasn't that big. They didn't furnish us stuff. We used to make our own balls. We just used any kind of board, cut it out and made it look like a bat."

Gayle Hart, 96, still works out at the Wellness Center in Springdale five times a week. She began competing in Senior Olympics events in her 70s after moving to Maple Knoll Village. The Cincinnati Enquirer/STEVEN M. HERPPICH

Light from a nearby window brightens her face, with curls of gray hair framing brown eyes. She's sitting in the nursing home hallway. It's where she prefers to talk, rather than the room she shares with another woman.

Hart married a World War I veteran and raised three children. Later in life, she parlayed her love of cooking into catering jobs at parties and wedding receptions.

She also kept active by gardening and mowing her lawn. She painted the trim on her home before she sold it. "I wasn't a person to sit around and do nothing."

She was in her early 70s when she moved to Maple Knoll Village, a retirement community in Springdale. While volunteering for its senior center, she met a participant in Senior Olympics, which promotes physical activity and provides athletic competition for older people.

Hart decided to give it a try. Just a few events at first. Before long she was regularly competing in basketball, bowling, golf chipping, horseshoes, softball, and various track and field events, including shot put.

"I'd never thrown one," she says, chuckling. She honed her technique with help from students at nearby Princeton High.

Over a span of about 18 years, competing at the local and state level, she collected her share of medals. And then some.

"I've got a hundred," she says. Ninety-five are gold.

"I was just lucky. You (compete) according to age, you know.

"You had to want to do it. You had to put your whole heart and soul into it. It was fun."

She especially enjoyed bowling. She claims she wasn't so good, although she once rolled a 300 game. She bowled as long as her knees and legs would allow.

"It's maybe been six years. Oh yeah, I miss bowling."

In March, she turned 96. She uses a walker, and takes medication for the always-present pain in her knee. She broke her right hip three years ago. After injuring her left hip last August, she moved into Maple Knoll's nursing home.

There wasn't much room for possessions, including her medals.

"I was just going to throw them away," she says.

Instead, she gave them to her son. Larry Hart, 64, of Northside, keeps them in a shoebox.

Growing up, he says, he never thought of his mother as an athlete. But he's not surprised that this "Hoosier farm girl," who never wanted to be coddled, had so much success in Senior Olympics.

"Mom always was exceptional," he says.

E-mail jjohnston@enquirer.com