Oklahoma City had a kayaking star long before the Boathouse District's arrival

Jones Smoke, who now lives in Michigan, is a 1959 graduate of Casady High School. In 1964, the 23-year-old Marcia Jones (she married in 1965) won the bronze medal in the K1 500 meters at the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan.

Two other women from the United States won a silver medal in a doubles race in Tokyo that year, but no American woman since has won an Olympic medal in kayaking.

“The consensus among Olympic people was, we weren't going to do any good over in Tokyo,” Jones Smoke said. “We fooled them.”

Growing up in Oklahoma City, Marcia Jones dreamed of making the Olympics as a swimmer as did her older sister, Sperry.

Their father, Ingram Jones, was an electrical engineer working in Caracas, Venezuela, when his daughters started swimming competitively.

On summer trips to Venezuela to see their dad, they joined a local country club for something to do. The club had a swim team that the girls joined.

They were good swimmers, so their mother, Mary Francis, formed a swim team in Oklahoma City when they returned. The Jones girls competed in AAU swim meets across Oklahoma and Texas

“I became a good swimmer, but not good enough to make the Olympic team,” Jones Smoke said.

Both Marcia and Sperry traveled to Detroit to compete in the Olympic swimming trials, but failed to make the team.

As a gift, their mother decided to take them to Rome for the Olympics anyway.

“We watched the swimming, but we had tickets also to the sport of canoeing, not knowing what it was,” Jones Smoke said. “We went out to the lake and we saw the American women do very poorly, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, maybe that is my sport.'”

Jones Smoke was a student at the University of Michigan at the time. Her mother had attended law school there, and the Ann Arbor Swim Club was one of the strongest in the country.

Her mother remembered a Sports Illustrated article about a man living in Niles, Mich., who imported the Danish boats, the ones used in kayak racing.

“My mother called him in the fall of 1960 and told him, ‘I have two daughters that want to go to the next Olympics,” Jones Smoke said. “He got us started.”

The Jones sisters would train on Lake Hiwassee near Oklahoma City when they were home from college during the summer. Their mother had bought a lot on the lake and built a shack to store their kayaks.