Even at her young age, her prose reveals that she was a pro, seriously and carefully laying out the news of every event, even if it was low in the sports pecking order. Within the limits of The Times’s strict rules and sometimes stiff house writing style, she managed to impart some flavor to her coverage.

In reporting on an outdoor swim meet in Manhattan Beach in 1935, she wrote, “It was not a water hazard but a mental hazard that Miss Rawls had to face in the medley race. For the sprightly, laughing Southerner is literally ‘frightened to death’ by lightning, and it must have been small comfort to see a telephone pole a block away struck by a bolt and burning merrily away.”

Her bylines almost always appeared over accounts of women’s sports. No one sent Vinson to write about a glamorous event like a bowl game, a prize fight or the World Series (although Carroll says she often attended such events with her male colleagues). Instead, she plied her trade at places like the Heights Casino in Brooklyn for squash, the Pelham Country Club for golf and Jones Beach for archery.

Daley acknowledged that while Vinson was “never completely accepted” by The Times’s boys’ club, she was eventually “warily admitted to the gang.”

Amazingly, Vinson juggled full-time sportswriting with full-time athletic pursuits. On Jan. 13, 1936, she reported a squash story from the Cosmopolitan Club in Manhattan. On the 15th, she sailed for Germany and the Winter Olympics on the liner Washington. (It was an era when boat sailings were big news. The Times reported that Sergei Rachmaninoff was also on board; Vinson made the boat by just 10 minutes and forgot her uniform.)

On Feb. 2, her byline appeared again, over a story about the women’s ski team. On the 13th, she finished fifth in her third Olympics. She also placed fifth in the pairs competition alongside George Hill. On March 3, she was back on the squash beat, reporting from London, and before the month was out she was back reporting on badminton from New York.