Sarah Hart, Steel Pier Horse Diver & Married to Flyers Icon, Dies

Sarah Hart, a woman with a long history in South Jersey and the wife of former Flyers broadcaster Gene Hart, died on Oct. 13th at age 90.

Her family remembered that she enjoyed dancing, nature, and animals as a girl, and even flew small airplanes out of Badar Field in Atlantic City.

Her family moved to Florida before her senior year of high school, but she would soon return to South Jersey.

Sarah Hart Went to Pleasantville Schools

Sarah Gregg Detwiler was born Aug. 2, 1936. According to an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mrs. Hart grew up on and around the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

She went to school in Pleasantville and worked at boardwalk carnival games as a teenager.

Riding the Diving Horses At Steel Pier

After graduating from Glassboro State -- now Rowan University--  she returned to the Atlantic City Boardwalk in 1959, where she beat 100 other applicants to win a role as a rider in the horse-diving grand finale at Steel Pier's water circus.

She had been on the synchronized swimming team in college and found the job surprisingly easy.

"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."

Her Daughter, singer Lauren Hart, remembers her mom as a free spirit.  "She did a little bit of everything."

She met her husband, Gene, at Steel Pier, and they married in 1963. Gene Hart was the Philadelphia Flyers play-by-play broadcaster for 28 years.

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.

Sarah Hart Was a Longtime Teacher

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mrs. Hart was a teacher in the Lenape Regional High School District. She was interested in local politics and was active with the Cherry Hill Environmental Board and the Pinelands Preservation Alliance.

Later, she and her husband traveled the world together and enjoyed fine art, classical music, opera, and the theater.

They had daughters Lauren and Sharon, and a son, Brian, and lived in Cherry Hill. Her husband died in 1999, and she moved to the Philly suburbs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

Private services are to be held later.