The explosive popularity of paddle, with the accompanying demand for more courts and for weekend and night play, led to some discussion in the late 1930s and the 1940s about the kind of club Fox Meadow should be.

Some long-term members who were also neighbors complained about the increase in activities and the noise. They urged the Club to remain small and low-key, with membership limited to numbers the existing small clubhouse could accommodate. Yet pressure to expand paddle facilities proved irresistible. The first step was to find a place to put more platforms.

The Club built additional courts on land it leased from the Crane heirs in 1938 for $150 a year. The site was a 40′ x 250′ strip of land running along the Club’s southern boundary. Although the Cranes had begun to sell parts of the estate, efforts to buy the property outright stalled.

This situation finally changed in 1943.

Source: Diana Reische, Fox Meadow Tennis Club – The First Hundred Years, 1983

For inexplicable reasons, the list of winners in women’s tournaments begins twenty-nine years after the list of those in men’s matches. There seems to have been no official record of a Club championship in women’s tennis until after World War II.

Between 1923 and 1931 The Scarsdale Inquirer mentions four women who won tournaments: Muriel Bray (1923), Mrs. Stuart Cowan (1926), Mrs. J.T. Hall (1929), and Caroline Atkinson (1931). They may have been winners in the traditional Women’s Invitational, a week-long event held annually for at least two decades.

Astonishing as it may seem, the first documented Women’s Singles and Doubles Club championships were not played until 1948, or sixty years into the Club’s history

Allied troops were advancing in Italy, but the Nazis still held the Apennine Mountains, and suspected Allied sympathizers faced execution by the Germans. In hopes of rescuing a priest and a family who were in jeopardy, two young American paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines in March of 1945.

One was a teenager from Scarsdale, John Parker Compton. As he neared the priest’s church, a sniper shot and killed him. Later the Nazis killed the priest and burned his church.

After the war, the Compton family had the church rebuilt and a memorial plaque installed.

At home, John’s parents Randolph and Dorothy,created a living memorial to the boy who had played so much tennis at Fox Meadow Tennis Club, a tennis tournament for boys eighteen and under.

Paul Sullivan and his pal John Compton played many a game together. “Then John went off to Exeter,” Sullivan recalls, “and a year at Princeton before enlisting. My father, Paul Sullivan, Sr., and Randolph Compton jointly proposed to FMTC and the Scarsdale Recreation Department that such a tournament be established. It was quickly approved, and Randolph and Dorothy Compton established a trust fund to provide the funds necessary.”

Kitty Fuller chaired the first John Parker Compton Memorial Tournament, held at Fox Meadow on June 24, 1946. Sanctioned from the start by the Eastern Lawn Tennis Association, the tournament was open to ELTA registered Juniors from Westchester and nearby counties. The first winner lived in Brooklyn. As the entries grew, the Compton tournament had to be limited to Westchester boys under eighteen.

“This tournament thus became the first and only privately endowed USTA-sanctioned tournament in the country,” says Paul Sullivan, the permanent chairman.

Doubles matches were added to the competition in its fifth year, and a total of sixty singles competitors and twenty-one doubles teams entered. The competition has grown virtually every year and in 1976 broke all previous records, with ninety-eight singles entrants and fifty-three doubles teams. Over the years it has included such players as Bailey Brown, Buddy Gallagher, and Andrew Kohlberg, who is currently a tennis professional ranked in the top one hundred in the world. This event is Fox Meadow’s major contribution to Junior tennis development.

The June 1983 Compton tournament will be the thirty-eighth held. As it has each year, the program will carry these words:

“A Memorial Tournament in Memory of John Parker Compton, Pfc, 88th Regiment, 10th Mountain Division. A boy who loved tennis ..”

Source: Diana Reische, Fox Meadow Tennis Club – The First Hundred Years, 1983

Five California tennis stars took over the exhibition court and gave expert performances before an enthusiastic gallery.

The Village recreational department was instrumental in bringing Edward Moylan, Clarence Carter, Helen Pastall, Louise Snow and Beverly Baker, all of whom held honored places in the tennis world, to the club.

George King (1894-1930), a long-time resident of Scarsdale, was instrumental in arranging this event and although he now live in New York City he had maintained strong ties with the club.

King was ranked tenth in the nation in 1927 and was given an honorary membership in FMTC in 1928 which he graciously accepted :

” Your club was the first tennis club I ever belonged to; it was the first club at which I ever played a tournament and the first club I ever won a prize at”

Scarsdale Inquirer October 16, 1931