Joan Spillane

Early life

Joan Spillane came into the world on January 31, 1943, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, as the second child and only girl in a family of three brothers. When her father’s job with Prudential Insurance moved the family to Texas in 1951, they settled in Houston. She graduated from Spring Branch High School in June 1960, where she captained the Bruin Brigade Drill Squad. Her brother Jim also swam in high school and later earned an All-American honor on a swimming scholarship at the University of Texas.

Joan started swimming at age twelve in 1955 for Houston’s Dad’s Club under coach E. A. Snapp, then in 1957 began training with Melvin “Pat” Patterson, a former University of Texas swimmer who was the first from that school to break 50 seconds in the 100-yard freestyle. Spillane credited Patterson for most of her growth as a swimmer. At the Texas Amateur Athletic Association Championships in Tyler during the summer of 1959, she set a new National AAU Record in the women’s 100-meter butterfly.

Her best events were short freestyle races. At the 1959 Pan American Games, she earned a bronze in the 100-meter freestyle, a gold in the 4×100-meter freestyle relay with teammates Molly Botkin, Shirley Stobs, and Chris von Saltza, and another bronze in the 200-meter freestyle. She also placed second in two freestyle events at the indoor AAU Nationals in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

1960 Rome Olympics

Joan Spillane’s path to the 1960 Olympics began with a grueling training regimen: two-hour morning swims and ninety-minute evening sessions, six days a week, with those evening practices eventually stretched to two hours. At the August 2 Olympic trials in Detroit, she placed third in both the 100 and 200 meter freestyle, which earned her a spot on the U.S. women’s relay teams. In Rome that September, she won a gold medal as part of the 4x100-meter freestyle relay squad alongside Shirley Stobs, Carolyn Wood, and Chris von Saltza.

In front of 9,000 spectators, the four women shattered the world record by eight seconds, finishing in 4:08.9. Spillane led off the final with a personal best of 1:02, staying close to Australia’s Dawn Fraser, who swam her leg in a record 1:00.25. On the third leg, Wood overtook Australian Lorraine Crapp, building a 2.7-second lead, and von Saltza extended that advantage to a three-length victory. Spillane also swam the freestyle leg in the preliminary heats of the 4x100-meter medley relay, but because she did not compete in the final, she was not eligible for a medal under the rules in place at the time.

Education, marriage, careers

Joan Spillane entered the University of Michigan in the fall of 1960 on an academic scholarship. When she arrived on campus on September 18, 1960, she made history as the first woman from that university to have earned an Olympic medal. While at Michigan, she took part in a few swimming events, but she never competed for the school itself—there was no women’s team at the time, though plans for one were underway. Her final competition was an American-Canadian dual invitational meet in Chicago in January 1961.

In a 1981 interview, she said she swam competitively for only three months after starting college, then stepped away from the sport. She left Michigan in 1962 and finished her education at the University of Houston, earning a bachelor’s degree in elementary education in 1964. During her college years, she was a member of the Alpha Xi Delta sorority. In 1965, she worked as a summer coach at the Hansel Swim Academy in the greater Houston area.

On August 31, 1962, she married Peter S. Postma at St. Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Houston. Postma had graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he belonged to Delta Phi. Their wedding reception was held at St. Christopher’s Hall, and the couple honeymooned at Padre Island. They later had two children, born in 1967 and 1969, both of whom swam competitively in the Northwest Aquatic Leagues as youngsters.

Educator

After marrying, Joan Spillane Postma spent thirty years as an educator in Texas. One of her early teaching jobs was at a school in Hunter’s Creek Village near Houston; by 1976, she was teaching first grade at Spring Branch School in Houston, close to where she grew up. For 24 of those thirty years, she worked for the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District in Montgomery County, Texas. She taught eighth-grade math and computer classes at Bleyl Junior High in Houston for a decade, then became a district administrator for microcomputer instruction, and later served as a Director in support of Technology.

She retired from education in 2002. In 1986, she wrote the book Using Appleworks in the Classroom: For Use on the Apple, which was published by Addison Wesley Higher Education in 1987.