Sarah Hart, longtime South Jersey teacher and onetime rider of Steel Pier’s high-diving horses, has died at 90
She met her husband, longtime Flyers broadcaster Gene Hart, at Steel Pier, and they lived in Cherry Hill until he died in 1999.
Sarah Hart was 21 when she met Gamal and the other horses that high dived into a 10-foot pool of water several times a day at Steel Pier in Atlantic City.
Gamal, she told the Courier-Post in 1998, liked to leap off the 40-foot high platform without a second thought. Other horses, she said, “would take five minutes before they’d jump.”
It was 1957, and Mrs. Hart, already a skilled diver and college swimmer, knew about the horse-diving grand finale at Steel Pier’s water circus. “It was a little bit spectacular to see this huge horse flying through the air,” she told the Courier-Post. “The motion was beautiful. A young girl brave enough to ride the horse added to it.”
That summer, Mrs. Hart became one of those brave girls. She outperformed 100 other applicants and, until 1962, rode Gamal and his counterparts off the platform and into the water below.
“What you have to do is just simply get on the horse and hang on tight, and go along for the ride,” she told the Courier-Post in 1993. In 1998, she said: “It was the easiest thing I ever did.”
On Tuesday, Oct. 13, Mrs. Hart, also a longtime South Jersey teacher, environmentalist, and wife of Gene Hart, the longtime Flyers broadcaster, died of heart failure at her home in Gladwyne. She was 90.
“She was a free spirit,” her daughter Lauren said. “She did a little bit of everything.”
Born in Chester, Mrs. Hart grew up on and around the boardwalk in Atlantic City. She went to schools in Pleasantville and worked at boardwalk carnival games as a teenager. For years, she told a story about beating future Hall of Famer Wilt Chamberlain in the old shoot-the-basketball game.
She performed with synchronized swimming teams at the University of Florida after high school and at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, Belgium. She met the Flying Wallendas, singer Tony Bennett, and other entertainers at Steel Pier, and swam with the dolphins at the old Aquarama Aquarium Theater of the Sea in South Philadelphia in the 1960s.
She met her husband, Gene, at Steel Pier, and they married in 1963. His mother had ridden the high-diving horses at Steel Pier in the 1930s, and he was a comic diver and announcer for the water circus.
They had daughters Lauren and Sharon, and a son, Brian, and lived in Cherry Hill. Her husband died in 1999, and she moved to Gladwyne during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mrs. Hart taught English as a second language for decades at schools in the Lenape Regional High School District and later as a general substitute. She ran unsuccessfully for Cherry Hill Township Council in 1981 and was active with the Cherry Hill Environmental Board and the Pinelands Preservation Alliance. She was a longtime election worker at voting polls in South Jersey.
She graduated from high school in Florida, returned to South Jersey after two years of premed classes at the University of Florida, and earned a bachelor’s degree in English with honors at what is now Rowan University.
“A more kind and generous spirit you will never find,” a former teaching colleague said in a Facebook tribute, “and what a great advocate for students and their needs.” A longtime friend said: “There was no sweeter, more considerate, or kinder soul on the face of the Earth.”
Sarah Gregg Detwiler was born Aug. 2, 1936. She enjoyed dancing, nature, and animals as a girl, and even flew small airplanes out of the Atlantic City airport. Her family moved to Apopka, Fla., 20 miles northwest of Orlando, before her senior year of high school.
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Later, she and her husband traveled the world together, sharing fine art, classical music, opera, and the theater. For years, Monday night was date night at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.
She stabled her own horse near their home for a time and landscaped the entire property, in-ground pool and all, when they moved to Tampa Avenue in Cherry Hill in 1971. “There wasn’t a tree in the yard when we moved in,” Gene Hart told The Inquirer in 1981.
Mrs. Hart especially liked roses and said: “I’m an outdoor person, and we all love the water.” Of course, she was a lifelong Flyers fan.
“She was known above all for her warmheartedness and egalitarian spirit,” her family said in a tribute. Her daughter Lauren said: “She was kind and always working in the service of others. She was a giver.”
In addition to her children, Mrs. Hart is survived by five grandchildren, two sisters, and other relatives. A sister and three brothers died earlier.
Private services are to be held later.
Donations in her name may be made to the Gene Hart Scholarship Fund at Temple University, 115 Mifflin St., Philadelphia, Pa. 19148.
