The conditions were anything but elegant.

Paint and plaster were missing from the walls in several places, peeling and loose in others. Pieces of plywood and 2x4 boards covered the windows for protection.

Heat came from big iron radiators. Air conditioning? Forget it.

The Parkette Gymnastics Club had to begin somewhere, and in the mid-1970s, home was the second and third floors of Allentown's Symphony Hall.

It was hardly the atmosphere in which you would expect to see an Olympian, yet there she was.

Jodi Yocum, a 16-year-old Exeter High School student whose mother drove her to Allentown every day from their home outside Reading, went to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal as the alternate on the United States women's gymnastics team.

The Parkettes, in only their eighth year of existence, were fighting for recognition in 1976, so everyone was surprised when Yocum was in second place after the first two days of a four-round Olympic Trials meet in Anaheim, Calif.

'I don't think they wanted us there,' Parkettes co-founder Bill Strauss said as he remembered how Yocum went slowly, but surely, backward during the second compulsory and optional segments of the Trials. She was tied for sixth with Carrie Lynn Englert going into the final event -- floor exercise.

Tumbling and dance were Yocum's strong suits. She was first up, and she performed a routine that seemed to be better than what she did in the optionals two nights earlier. She received exactly the same score.

Englert, the final competitor on the floor, beat her by five-hundredths of a point.

'I felt like I belonged on the team,' Jodi Yocum Jacobs said recently as she talked about her days with the Parkettes. Both she and Strauss are convinced politics played a role in her scoring.

Yocum Jacobs had a famous fan at that time, too. Arthur Godfrey, who met her through a former dance instructor, was in Anaheim for the trials.

The alternate had an important position a quarter of a century ago. Two days before the actual Olympic competition in Montreal, all the alternates competed in a meet to give the judges an idea of what to expect from the gymnasts of a particular country.

'They expected they would see better routines from the team members than from the alternates,' Yocum Jacobs said. 'As it turned out, my scores were the fourth-best on the American team, but they couldn't count.'

The alternate had to be prepared to compete right up until the time the competition began.

'I warmed up with them and had to be ready,' Yocum Jacobs said. 'Once the meet started, I could take a deep breath and a sigh of relief. I could relax and enjoy the meet.

'I found out afterward that the coaches thought of putting me in because one of the girls had a bad attitude and caused problems. It would have been great, but it never happened.'

Yocum Jacobs began gymnastics in a small gym in Reading, where her first coach was Joe Stallone -- now head coach of the boys program at Parkettes. It wasn't long, however, until it became evident she needed a bigger challenge.

She worked out about four hours a day during the school year and as many as six or seven hours daily during the summers. Her mother was her chauffeur. 'She was always there for me,' Yocum Jacobs said.

Robin Netwall, competing with Parkettes when Yocum Jacobs came into the gym and now an Elite Level coach, calls Yocum Jacobs 'naturally flexible.'

'She had a lot of attributes some of us did not have. She was fearless. And I remember she loved eating those little corn curls -- she could eat them by the bagful because she never had a weight (problem ),' Netwall said.

Yocum Jacobs was at Parkettes for 5 years, and she received full athletic scholarship offers from universities in Michigan and Florida. She turned them down because 'my body said no more. The last two years, I had tendinitis bad in my ankle. I would put on Ben-Gay and wrap it with an Ace bandage so that it would burn so bad I wouldn't feel the pain.'

In retrospect, she regrets not having accepted a scholarship. But her only desire at the time was to coach gymnastics, and she didn't need a college diploma to do that. 'But after 10 years of coaching and teaching, I was tired of living in a gym and I wanted a normal life,' she said.

Yocum Jacobs is now a full-time hairdresser in Reading, but she has never lost her love for gymnastics.

She teaches recreational tumbling in a dance studio, but she also has become a part of the mentoring program established by USA Gymnastics.

'The program just started about a year and a half ago,' Yocum Jacobs said. 'I am a mentor for Stephanie Carter from Philadelphia. We keep in contact with letters, phone calls, e-mail. We are not there to judge, and we let them vent about school, the gym, anything. I love it. It's nice to be able to give back.'

Contact Paul Reinhard

610-820-6783

paul.reinhard@mcall.com

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