March 17, 2021 • 34 mins
Part 2 of our coverage of Duke Kahanamoku's life delves into about what happened to Duke after that sudden onslaught of Olympic fame, and how it wasn’t really what Duke expected.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So in
part one of this two parter, we talked about Duke
Kahanamoku's early life and how he went from being an
(00:23):
unknown Hawaiian kid to finding himself the star of the
Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, or at least one of the stars.
There were a few others. Today we are going to
talk about what happened to Duke after that sudden onslaught
of fame and how it really wasn't quite what Duke expected.
We're going to pick up right where we left off,
so if you skipped part one, you might feel a
(00:45):
little lost here. Duke Kahanamoku's love of outdoor sports helped
popularize beach volleyball in Hawaii and beyond, as well as
aqua plaining a riding aboard being towed by a motor boat.
He was invited to join the outrigger club that had
once forbidden his membership, and he did accept that. He
(01:06):
knew that it would help further all of the sports
that he loved so much. If he joined. Yeah, he
really had a big sense of like all eyes being
on Hawaii and spreading Hawaiian culture in ways he could
do that, and he seemed to be willing to let
bygones be bygones in a variety of instances if it
would help any of that and help Hawaii in his eyes.
(01:28):
Um But one of his most famous surfing feats, which
continued to put Hawaii on the world stage, happened in
nineteen seventeen, and the story is that he surfed a
wave for a mile or more. That distance has shifted
over the years. There is no exact way to measure
it at the time because he was out in the
(01:50):
water catching waves. It wasn't like he was on a course.
And as Kahanamoku's legend grew over the years, so did
the length of this ride in various accounts. But it
was really quite impressive. It probably was at least a mile,
possibly more, and this event is nicknamed Kahanamoku's quote long ride,
and Kahanamoku later said of it quote, I never caught
(02:10):
another wave of anything like that one. It is a
golden one that I treasure and I'm grateful that God
gave it to me. There were two significant deaths that
happened not long after that famous moment. In August nine seventeen,
Duke's father had a heart attack and died almost instantly
at the age of just forty, and of course this
(02:31):
was emotionally harrowing, but it also put Duke in a
position of being responsible for the rest of the family.
Three months after that, Queen Liliu Kalani died after a stroke,
and Duke, who was perhaps Hawaii's most famous resident at
that time, was asked to be a pallbearer at her funeral.
(02:51):
And of course, if you are paying attention to the timeline,
we're in World War One time. And during World War One,
Duke contributed to the war effort in his own unique way.
He toured the US doing swimming exhibitions to raise money
uh and these exhibitions also included instructions in life saving,
which to me is kind of the neatest part. The Olympics,
(03:12):
of course, had been canceled, and that was a huge
blow to an athlete who was celebrated by the world,
but who was also struggling financially just to maintain amateur
status for games that were no longer happening. He did
move into a job eventually as an underwater inspector for
the Public Works Department. While he was in Washington, D C.
During this tour and also awaiting orders to be called
(03:35):
up for service, Duke Kanamoku became ill with the flu
that was rapidly spreading around the world at that time.
He was actually in really bad shape when a former
girlfriend intervened and got him some medical attention. When he
got home as the war was ending, Duke had lost
more than twenty pounds and he looked, in his own words,
(03:56):
like a ghost. When we've talked about that pandemic being
really hard on otherwise young, healthy people a lot of
the time. I took him a long time to recover fully,
and once he did recover, he continued to compete as
a swimmer, but his performance, even after he had trained
and regained his strength, was not what it once was.
(04:19):
Duke spoke about how cross training, specifically in rowing, had
not really been the right thing for his swimming muscles,
and the press was kind of unkind. There were articles
skewering Duke and accusing him of basically being a big baby.
One was so unkind calling out Duke dropping out of
a competition as a matter of laziness. The Duke actually
(04:39):
filed a libel suit. In the spring of nine, Prince Edward,
who would later become King Edward eight, and his cousin
Louis Mountain Batton arrived in Hawaii and they wanted to
learn how to surf. Everyone knew that Duke was the
person to teach them, and he did. He took them
to ride waves in canoes and on his surfboard. Prince
(05:00):
Edward found the whole thing thrilling and quote jolly good fun.
He also told Duke it was the first time he
had been able to get away from all the news
cameras and security. Just as quickly as the Hawaiian press
had turned on Duke for not winning races, it lauded
him for making this connection with the Prince and representing
(05:21):
Hawaii so well. Also in nineteen twenty, Duke, who had
refocused and really started retraining and started winning races again,
was once again chosen for the US Olympic team that
traveled to Antwerp, Belgium. This trip actually had kind of
a harrowing moment early on, when the athletes were boarding
their ship in New Jersey, and they saw on the
(05:42):
docks dozens of coffins carrying the bodies of US soldiers
who had been killed during the war. The ship they took,
the Princess Matoika, was dirty. It was in poor repair.
Uh there were a lot of issues around it that
got reported to the Olympic Committee. It was that bad.
There were rats other problems, but Khanamoku helped keep the
(06:03):
team spirits aloft by playing his ukulele and singing in
the evenings. And when they arrived in Antwerp, there were
more reminders though, of just how much the war had
impacted everything. One of the biggest ones for Duke was
that Cecil Healy, who had been a competitor and a friend,
had been killed in action. Kahanamoku once again meddled in
the same two events as he had in nineteen twelve.
(06:26):
Those were the hundred meter freestyle and the freestyle relay.
This time he took home gold medals in both. The
conditions that he was swimming in were not favorable for
him at all. The water was very cold, estimated to
be below sixty degrees fahrenheit or fifteen point six degrees celsius,
and that makes it even more impressive that Duke not
(06:47):
only won the hundred meter finals, he also broke his
own world record. He came in at one minute for
tenths of a second. And remember this is meters, not
yards If you're thinking about that hundred yard record that
we talked about earlier starting his swimming career. That race
actually didn't stand though there was controversy about whether another
(07:09):
swimmer had interfered with a third competitor and it had
to be restaged. Duke still won, but not as fast
as that first time, and then he immediately took a
nap under the stands and once again almost missed the
final for the two relay. I love the naps. If
there were an Olympic napping competition, Duke Kahanamoku would win gold, silver,
(07:32):
and bronze every time. He was so so good at
naps um. Duke may have also played for the US
water polo team at those Olympics as a substitute. There
is no evidence one way or another, and there are
different versions of the story. Duke said on a few
occasions that he jumped into the water because a couple
of the US players had turned blue in that very
(07:55):
cold water. We mentioned and had to be removed. Another
member of the a swim team, Helen Meany, gave a
different account that the swimmers basically formed an ad hoc
team when the polo team refused to play in the
Chili conditions, and that they were such a mess because
they didn't even know the rules of the game that
the referee quote was laughing so hard he nearly fell
(08:16):
off the high chair he was sitting on. The rosters
for this particular match are incomplete, so we will never
know what really happened. Was also the year that Duke
introduced the idea of surfing as an Olympic sport, so
it would seem that things were going beautifully. Duke was thirty.
He had solidified his standing as a champion. He had
(08:38):
continued to really do Hawaii proud, but he didn't have
any real career plans or training. He took a couple
of jobs. He fell back on the tourist trade, but
he just wasn't financially comfortable in the nineteen twenties, even
though he was still swimming competitively, Duke, trying to figure
out a way to make his way in the world,
(08:58):
shifted gears to start an acting career starting in ninety two.
He lived primarily in Los Angeles for this new job,
and over the eight years between n and nineteen thirty
he acted in more than two dozen movies. He had
actually had a bit part well before this, in the
nineteen fifteen Hobart Bosworth film The Beach Comber, playing a
(09:21):
Native Hawaiian who saves the main character from drowning. So
this was a way he could earn money that wouldn't
compromise his amateur athletics status. But the move to California
was also emotionally really heavy. He had to leave behind
his close knit family. It was just a hard decision.
There had been so many ups and downs for him
(09:42):
and the press and regarding his financial standing. The whole
thing was just complicated and had a whole lot of layered,
conflicting feelings. Yeah, multiple people have commented in various places
about how uncomfortable he was talking about money. So the
(10:03):
fact that he was struggling was like this double layer
of of just problematic stuff. Um, but we're going to
talk about how things played out for him in Hollywood,
and we're gonna do that after we first paused for
a sponsor break. So Kahata Moogu had envisioned being a
(10:25):
film star, but it pretty quickly became a parent that
Hollywood was not ready for a non white lead in movies,
so he was relegated to small parts. He didn't stay
in California, though, because he really appreciated all of the
outdoor sporting opportunities it offered. He started working at the
Santa Monica Beach Club as a lifeguard to make ends meet,
and as a side effect, he helped popularize beach volleyball there.
(10:49):
He also gave swimming and surfing lessons to actors to
make extra money, and he joined the Los Angeles Athletic
Club so he could use their facilities to train because
he really wanted one more Olympics in nwour Duke, who
at this point was thirty four, participated in the Olympics
in Paris. His younger brother Sam had also qualified in
(11:11):
the same event, and the Kahanamoku brothers swam the hundred
meter freestyle. This time, Duke won a silver. His competitor,
Johnny wise Miller took on the gold and yes, that's
the same one who went on to play Tarzan in films.
The press had played up this rivalry between the two swimmers,
and Duke had wanted to beat him, but he was
(11:32):
also really gracious about it. Sam Kahanamoku won the bronze,
and incidentally, Duke and Sam's brother David was also on
the US swim team that year. Yeah, that was all
uh all Kahanamoku year for the Olympic swim team. There
is a story that came up later on there. Like
(11:53):
I said, the press tried to play this up as
like this big rivalry and they ended up really to
be pretty good friends. And there had been stories that
Duke and Sam were trying to like intimidate weiss Miller
on the deck, which doesn't sound quite right, But then
weiss Miller later said, no, Duke just told me, like,
let's get the top three for the US. However, it
(12:14):
plays out just as long as we all get there together,
which seems a little more in line with what we
know about him. But after the Olympics, Duke returned to
Los Angeles and, in another crossover with a previous show topic,
he signed an acting contract with Adolph Zooker's Famous Players
Last Kie Corporation, which of course became more well known
(12:35):
once its name was Paramount studios, and we mentioned earlier
that he appeared in more than two dozen films, but
the actual number is unknown due to the fact that
many films from that era were not preserved and have
been lost to time, and because Duke sometimes appeared in
parts that were so small they did not merit a credit,
there is no way to get an accurate number. Uh.
(12:57):
There are people who have gone through films have been like,
I think that's Duke Conomoco in the background, but I'm
not positive. That's how like uncertain it is. But he
did become lifelong friends with famous director John Ford during
this time, after appearing in some small parts in a
couple of Fords movies. One of the surprising ways that
Duke made headlines was an event that took place in nine.
(13:21):
The fishing yacht Thelma, helmed by cigar store owner Myron Bland,
had ventured out despite danger flags flying in the harbor
off Corona del Mar. Duke and his friends happened to
be camping on the beach that weekend, and Kahanamoku saw
the yacht get slammed by a huge wave and capsize.
(13:41):
He immediately grabbed his surfboard and paddled out to the boat,
where passengers were just tangled up in the ropes and equipment.
He managed to get three people onto the board and
started paddling back to shore. His friends met him in
the water and then relayed these rescued boaters to safety.
Duke made two more trips, rescuing a total of eight
people himself. Two other bystanders, seeing what Duke was doing,
(14:06):
had also made rescue runs. In a total of thirteen
people were saved, but five drowned that day, and while
the people rescued spoke of Duke as this wizard and
a savior who had plucked them from the clutches of death.
When he was questioned about how he managed to rescue
so many people, the Hawaiian athlete really did not say much.
True to form. His only response was, I do not know.
(14:28):
It was done, that's the main thing, by a few tricks. Perhaps.
Later that same day, when the warning light on the
jetty was knocked out, it was once again Duke and
his friends who sacrificed their own safety to restore it
rather than risk other boats meeting the same fate as
the Thelma. It was thanks to the events at Corona
del Mar that day that paddle boards became standard equipment
(14:52):
for lifeguard stations. While commenting on this outcome, Duke noted
that quote some good sometimes comes from the word list
of tragedies, and that was a huge story. But throughout
his life, Duke actually rescued a lot of people from drowning.
As part of his surf club that we mentioned uh,
he and his friends routinely helped people who had gone
(15:14):
out too far and found themselves struggling, and while he
was preparing for his first Olympics, he had rescued a
man in Atlantic City who had passed out from intoxication
and fallen into a pool. He had also saved another
surfer on that same beach at Corona del Mar, but
that fishing boat made huge news. It was in the
papers all over the world. So finally Duke realized he
(15:35):
was just not going to make it big in l
a and he also missed home desperately. He was heading
into his forties, and he went back to the Islands
in early nineteen thirty. He rekindled his love of surfing
and spent time with his family, and he once again
assumed the role of tour guide and beach companion to
any famous people who visited. He found work as the
(15:59):
superintend in of Honolulu Holle, where the city's government was housed.
This job was touted as a sort of honorary greeter position,
but the reality was that he was doing labor to
maintain the grounds in the building, like literally mopping floors,
mowing lawns, painting things general upkeep. Duke later called this
job official toilet cleaner. Duke tried out for the nineteen
(16:21):
thirty two Olympics, but he didn't make the team. He
was forty one during the trials, his legs just didn't
have the stamina for the hundred meter race anymore. He
would start strong, but then finish in a more disappointing way.
He helped out with the running of the games in
Los Angeles, and it sometimes reported that he was an
alternate on the water polo team, but there's really no
(16:44):
official record to substantiate that. When Duke got back to
Oahu after those Olympics, his superintendent job was eliminated. At
that point, they offered him the position of janitor, and
he turned that down. He took a job instead as
the manager of two gas nations for Union Oil, saying
to the offer heck, yes, I'm not too proud to
pump gas. Duke had another job change in four that year,
(17:09):
he was elected sheriff of the City and County of Honolulu.
He served in that role for twenty five years. He
was reelected thirteen times. And this may seem like kind
of a strange move, but when he was still young,
Duke's father had moved into a job on the police force,
but there was an element of family continuity in this
(17:29):
dedication to serve. Additionally, in the years leading up to
Duke's first election, there had been a lot of ongoing
racist tension between Native Hawaiians and the white population that
had moved to the island, including a lot of the
military men that were stationed there. This most famously manifested
in the tragic Thalium Massey case, when Massey, who was
(17:51):
a Navy wife, falsely accused five men uh, some of
whom were Native Hawaiian, of beating and sexually assaulting her. Uh.
That case maybe an episode when I'm feeling mentally strong
enough for it. It is very ugly. Um. While Duke
was not a particularly ambitious or power hungry man, though
he had a way of putting people at ease and
(18:13):
getting along with everyone. So as the sheriff's race was
coming up, he kind of offered a choice for someone
that might help ease the tensions in Honolulu, and after
he was elected for the first time, he took out
an ad space in all of the papers, thanking the
people for his win and promising to try to live
up to their trust. He may not have been ambitious,
(18:33):
but Duke was also not afraid of hard work, and
this sheriff position was a really good match for him.
He worked to improve the local jail. He made it
a point to visit jails and police stations and other
cities when he traveled to kind of gauge areas where
Honolulu could improve, and one of his ongoing projects that
just he could not get support for it was that
(18:56):
he was like, we need a new jail. This one
is really not good enough, in part because when he
first started, everybody escaped from it, like it was apparently
just easy to walk out of it, and he was like,
why even have it. Um took a very long time
to get support for that move. In nineteen thirty six,
Duke's mother, Julia died, and this was of course very
difficult for Duke and all of his siblings who just
(19:17):
adored her, and when she was laid to rest, it
is said that the family had two full truckloads of
flowers brought to her grave. We are about to get
to the time in Duke's life when he met and
befriended Airis Doris Duke. Before we get into that, we
will hear from some of our sponsors. In the mid
(19:41):
nineteen thirties, Duke became friends with a woman who was
unlike anyone he had ever met, even though he had
at that point spent time with Royalty and innumerable icons.
He had had dinner at one point with Amelia earhart Um,
but this was Doris Duke. And Doris had first traveled
to Hawaii when she was twenty two on her honeymoon.
(20:02):
She was a tobacco heiress who had come into millions
at the age of twelve. She also had like kind
of staggered payouts throughout her life as she matured, and
she lived her life seemingly without any restrictions. And Doris
and the Kahanamoku family became very very close, and she
soon purchased land on Owahu near them, where she built
(20:22):
the first million dollar home there that was designed by
Marion Simms Wyath and it was named shankar Law. Duke's brother,
Sam taught Doris to surf, but she was linked romantically
to both Sam and Duke. Rumors really swirled that while
her husband, diplomat James HR. Cromwell, was staying in the
Continental US attend to his career, Doris and Duke were
(20:45):
essentially living as a couple in Hawaii. Doris became pregnant
at the end of nineteen thirty nine or early nineteen forty,
and the paternity of that child, who died not long
after she was born, has been debated ever since. But
Duke was in a in a relationship with dance instructor
Nadine Alexander in ninety and the couple married in August
(21:07):
of that year. This has led some people to speculate
that Doris Duke was more likely to have been involved
with Sam Kahanamoku. Doris later loaned Duke and Nadine money
for the purchase of a home. Yeah, she was really
very close with the entire family, and Duke and Nadine
were genuinely deeply in love. Uh Nadine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio,
(21:31):
and had actually swooned over photos of Duke in the
papers as a teenager. She was fifteen years younger than
he was, and she ended up in Honolulu when she
took a job teaching ballroom dance at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.
It said that the two of them just loved almost
more than anything else, to just dance together, which is
so sweet. But this marriage was perceived by some as
(21:52):
a betrayal on Duke's part of his Hawaiian heritage. It
was even used against him in the nineteen forty election,
insinuating the he was now anti Hawaiian. That was a
criticism he was actually getting from both sides of the
political divide. He still won that election, but he also
switched political parties from Democrat to Republican after the Democratic
(22:14):
party representatives spoke about being disillusioned about Duke following his marriage.
Duke was generally, I mean, we keep talking about how
beloved he was, and he was well supported by voters
from both parties. That's which really did not change much.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December seven nine, Duke
and Nadine were eating breakfast at the Outrigger Canoe Club
(22:38):
Duke called an acquaintance to make sure it was a
real attack and not the local military base running some
kind of a training maneuver. When he confirmed what was happening,
he and Nadine made a run for the safer shelter
of city Hall. Because of his position as sheriff, Duke
Kahanamoku had to oversee the really inadequate city morgue and
(22:58):
inspect potential dig sites in case a mass burial plot
was needed. Duke went on to set up a citywide
alert system in case additional attacks followed that one. Following
the war, he became a supporter of statehood for Hawaii.
This obviously was not something everyone wanted. Um. He also
signed a deal for his name to be used in
(23:19):
marketing for a Loha shirts made by clothing company Cisco Casuals.
This was not the first such deal he signed, but
it was one that had him touring the continental US
to promote the product with Nadine at his side. In
nineteen fifty five, Duke had a heart attack and spent
ten days in an oxygen tent. He recovered and was
sent back home with instructions to follow a limited diet,
(23:42):
but according to Nadine, he didn't always follow that. From
that point on, Duke had a number of health issues,
including asthma and ulcers, which Nadine believed were the result
of his keeping his emotions bottled up. Yeah, she definitely
made clear that she thought him being nice to everyone
and all the time, no matter what they did to him,
was part of the source of his health issues. In
(24:05):
nine fifty six, he went to the Olympics again, this
time not as an athlete he was sixty six at
that point, but as a representative of the United States,
and he watched as many of the swimming events as
he could. He was apparently really blown away by the swimmers,
one that their their bathing costumes had gotten sleeker and
allowed them to be faster in the water, but also
he said to have been really really wowed by their
(24:27):
training regimens. And when the games were over, Duke and
Nadine toured Asia together. On August twenty one, nineteen fifty nine,
Hawaii gained statehood, and while this was something that Duke
had supported. Afterwards he watched throngs of people moved to
the islands. Waikiki quickly grew into a tourism village. He
(24:48):
might have started wondering if that had really been the
right move. Things took an even more troubling turn when
the sheriff's office was eliminated in a city reorganization That
meant that Kahanamoku was out of a job. He was
eventually given a job as the city's official greeter, but
that paid less than nine thousand dollars a year. That pay,
(25:10):
or lack of it, was recognized as wrong by a
lot of people. There was no lack of awareness regarding
just how much Duke had done on the world stage
to promote Hawaii and represent it in the best possible light,
and at that point he had been doing that for
almost fifty years, and yet he was taking home just
a little over five hundred dollars a month after taxes
(25:31):
as he approached his seventieth birthday. And it was the
need for a more substantial income than that that led Duke,
with the help of talent manager Chemo Wilder McVeigh, to
open a restaurant and nightclub called Duke Kahanamoku's, of Course,
that was in Waikiki. To get in on a tourist
trade and to help drum up business, McVeigh hired don
(25:53):
Hoe to play things picked up. McVeigh also organized surfing
contests branded with Duke's aim to keep public interest in
Kahanamoka growing. In March nineteen sixty two, Duke spent a
week and a half in the hospital for his stomach ulcers.
Two months later, after he took a hit to the
head on his catamaran, he found he was unable to stand,
(26:16):
and he was rushed to the hospital with a diagnosis
of a blood clot that necessitated emergency brain surgery. Duke
was inducted into the Swimming and Surfing Halls of Fame
in the second half of the nineteen sixties. This was
an honor, but it was also one he really didn't
have much time to enjoy. In nineteen sixty seven, his
(26:36):
ulcers had gotten so bad that he needed several blood
transfusions and he had to have an operation that removed
almost half of his stomach. He recovered, but on January
twenty second night, Duke had a heart attack while he
was working on his boat, and he died in Honolulu
at the age of seventy seven. His ashes, were, of
course sent into the ocean in a ceremony where they
(26:59):
were escort on a surfboard atop an outrigger canoe that
was flanked by several more canoes. It said that hundreds
of surfers paddled out with them. When his family and
friends got to a point where they couldn't go any further,
Nadine dropped the box containing his ashes into the water.
Duke was inducted into the U S Olympic Hall of
(27:19):
Fame in four Six years later, a statue of Duke
was dedicated at Waikiki on his one birthday. There had
been efforts to erect a statue of him when he
was alive, but that whole thing made Duke really uncomfortable
and he was pretty relieved when the plan fell apart.
At the dedication ceremony for the statue, Nadine told the
(27:39):
crowd quote, I hope you will all come to the
beach and visit him, because he doesn't want to be lonely.
Another statue of Duke went up in Australia in also
with Nadine to champion the project. Duke received numerous other
posthumous honors, including having his image on a US Postal
(28:01):
Service stamp, which happened in two thousand two. Before Nadine
died in She set up a nonprofit, the Outrigger Duke
Kahanamogu Foundation, which funds the preservation of Hawaiian water sports
and grants scholarships to students from the islands. In a
move that remains controversial among Duke's family, she bequeathed trademark
(28:22):
rights to his name and likeness to the foundation. Visiting Oahu,
it's easy to see how important Duke Kahanamoku was and
is to Hawaii, and how he's become the iconic embodiment
of the spirit of Aloha. But when you think about
the entire culture and subcultures that have been born of
Duke's influence in Hawaiian beyond, it's really staggering. His casual
(28:47):
fun approach to surfing really defined the sport, and in turn,
that same vibe defined the skateboarding culture that sprang off
from it. Entire companies that manufacture are bore words, clothing, footwear,
et cetera. All of that intended to capture that feeling
have been launched, and a lot of them to great success,
(29:08):
because of course, everyone wants to have that cool and
relaxed style and feel, and you can draw a line
straight back through history to that laid back beach culture.
In Duke Kahanamoku he impacted Hawaii and other more concrete
ways as well. If you have ever visited the Pearl
Harbor National Memorial in Honolulu, which is quite a thing,
(29:29):
you have benefited from the work of Duke Hohanamoku. He
raised money for that permanent tribute to the USS Arizona.
Part of what made Dukehanamoku so winsome was just his
endless modesty. When he competed with a club or its team,
he always wanted to celebrate the group rather than himself,
even though he was easily the strongest swimmer among them.
(29:50):
And after his first famous wins and his first official
races in nineteen eleven, he said that it was the
waters of Olahu that were really to be credited. Quote.
Our water is so full of life. It's the fastest
in the world. That's all there is to it. I
love that he gives the water credit for it. It's like, oh,
(30:11):
it's the water. It's great. I really love him. Yeah,
me too, me too. Um, we'll talk about how much
we love him in our Friday episode. But yeah, there's
there are more fun stories about him that didn't quite
fit into this, uh these two episodes, So on Friday
(30:32):
I'll try to pepper a couple of more of those in.
But for now I have too um emails about Grand
Central Station. The first is from our listener Caitlin. You're right, Hi,
Hollie and Tracy. I just finished your episode on Grand
Central Station, and I agree I missed traveling so much.
(30:52):
This will come up in our other one, but it
really is Grand Central Terminal charts. In college, I spent
a semester in New York working at a Broadway theater
about two hundred yards from Times Square. There were two
possible routes from the subway from my student housing. Take
two trains and walk from the north, avoiding Times Square,
or take only one train and cut directly through the square. Naturally,
(31:14):
I did the latter. This horrified my boss, who was
a born in brand New Yorker, but I told him
a minute for the stories Josh. Later that day, a
pigeon flew directly into my face and nearly got tangled
in my hat. So grain of salt on the practicality
of my advice. She got a story out of it.
I hope you enjoyed my Avian encounter. Caitlin I do
(31:35):
It's fantastic also makes a recommendation. And then we also
got a note from our listener, Christopher, who writes Deer
Holly and Tracy. My husband and I are long time
listeners and first time emailers to your show. We started
listening to your show during weekend trips we took to
visit family while we were both in grad school in
(31:56):
and we've been hooked ever since. We literally can't find
any more episode. It's in the archives that we haven't heard,
so now we await each episode quite eagerly. We just
finished your episode on the history of Grand Central and
loved every second of it. We are huge fans of
the Grand Central complex in its history. We both grew
up along the Metro North commuter lines. I grew up
on the Hudson Line and Dobb's Ferry and he grew
(32:17):
up in the New Haven Line in Larchmont. When I
was a child, it was a big deal whenever I
got to take a train into the city and enter
Grand Central, usually to see a Broadway show. Your podcast
alluded to the structures Bozel design, Yet there's really no
way to capture the feeling of grandeur when you step
out of the train platform into that main space with
the vaulted ceiling and astronomical design which fun fact, is
(32:40):
actually accidentally drawn backwards. As a teenager slash college student
slash young adult, the clock in the center was always
the assumed place to meet up with folks, never even
a question. My mom worked in the city and she
is a fellow history buff. She never hesitated to share
stories about the building's history, like the ceiling restoration or
the building was saved from the same fat as Penn Station,
(33:02):
due in large part to the work of Jackie Kennedy.
One piece of info that my mother always reminded me
about the structure is that the building is Grand Central terminal,
not station. The reason for this is that no trains
go through the station. Every train either originates or terminates there.
I wouldn't be a dutiful son if I didn't mention that,
as I believe you switched between terminal and station at
(33:23):
several points during the podcast. I thought it was an
interesting point about why the building is actually a terminal.
I think we switched it over when it transitioned to terminal,
but I could be wrong. I'm not above messing those up,
that's for sure. Um, thank you so much for the
work you are doing. Your podcast was a vital part
of getting my husband and me through a PhD in
law school, respectively. Boy, congratulations to both of you. You
(33:45):
shine a light on formally marginalized stories are those that
are often framed as ancillary to big history, and it's
such important work. U war misregards Christopher, Christopher and Jordan's Uh.
This is such a sweet email, and I love it
and I love hearing about people that our native new workers,
that love New York as much as I do, probably
more so. Thank you so much for sharing all of that.
(34:06):
I hope I didn't mess up those those stations and terminals,
but I probably did. If you would like to write,
do as you could do so. That email is history
podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find
us on social media at missed in History and if
you would like to subscribe to the podcast, it's easy
as pie. You can do it on the iHeart Radio app,
at Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(34:33):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So in
part one of this two parter, we talked about Duke
Kahanamoku's early life and how he went from being an
(00:23):
unknown Hawaiian kid to finding himself the star of the
Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, or at least one of the stars.
There were a few others. Today we are going to
talk about what happened to Duke after that sudden onslaught
of fame and how it really wasn't quite what Duke expected.
We're going to pick up right where we left off,
so if you skipped part one, you might feel a
(00:45):
little lost here. Duke Kahanamoku's love of outdoor sports helped
popularize beach volleyball in Hawaii and beyond, as well as
aqua plaining a riding aboard being towed by a motor boat.
He was invited to join the outrigger club that had
once forbidden his membership, and he did accept that. He
(01:06):
knew that it would help further all of the sports
that he loved so much. If he joined. Yeah, he
really had a big sense of like all eyes being
on Hawaii and spreading Hawaiian culture in ways he could
do that, and he seemed to be willing to let
bygones be bygones in a variety of instances if it
would help any of that and help Hawaii in his eyes.
(01:28):
Um But one of his most famous surfing feats, which
continued to put Hawaii on the world stage, happened in
nineteen seventeen, and the story is that he surfed a
wave for a mile or more. That distance has shifted
over the years. There is no exact way to measure
it at the time because he was out in the
(01:50):
water catching waves. It wasn't like he was on a course.
And as Kahanamoku's legend grew over the years, so did
the length of this ride in various accounts. But it
was really quite impressive. It probably was at least a mile,
possibly more, and this event is nicknamed Kahanamoku's quote long ride,
and Kahanamoku later said of it quote, I never caught
(02:10):
another wave of anything like that one. It is a
golden one that I treasure and I'm grateful that God
gave it to me. There were two significant deaths that
happened not long after that famous moment. In August nine seventeen,
Duke's father had a heart attack and died almost instantly
at the age of just forty, and of course this
(02:31):
was emotionally harrowing, but it also put Duke in a
position of being responsible for the rest of the family.
Three months after that, Queen Liliu Kalani died after a stroke,
and Duke, who was perhaps Hawaii's most famous resident at
that time, was asked to be a pallbearer at her funeral.
(02:51):
And of course, if you are paying attention to the timeline,
we're in World War One time. And during World War One,
Duke contributed to the war effort in his own unique way.
He toured the US doing swimming exhibitions to raise money
uh and these exhibitions also included instructions in life saving,
which to me is kind of the neatest part. The Olympics,
(03:12):
of course, had been canceled, and that was a huge
blow to an athlete who was celebrated by the world,
but who was also struggling financially just to maintain amateur
status for games that were no longer happening. He did
move into a job eventually as an underwater inspector for
the Public Works Department. While he was in Washington, D C.
During this tour and also awaiting orders to be called
(03:35):
up for service, Duke Kanamoku became ill with the flu
that was rapidly spreading around the world at that time.
He was actually in really bad shape when a former
girlfriend intervened and got him some medical attention. When he
got home as the war was ending, Duke had lost
more than twenty pounds and he looked, in his own words,
(03:56):
like a ghost. When we've talked about that pandemic being
really hard on otherwise young, healthy people a lot of
the time. I took him a long time to recover fully,
and once he did recover, he continued to compete as
a swimmer, but his performance, even after he had trained
and regained his strength, was not what it once was.
(04:19):
Duke spoke about how cross training, specifically in rowing, had
not really been the right thing for his swimming muscles,
and the press was kind of unkind. There were articles
skewering Duke and accusing him of basically being a big baby.
One was so unkind calling out Duke dropping out of
a competition as a matter of laziness. The Duke actually
(04:39):
filed a libel suit. In the spring of nine, Prince Edward,
who would later become King Edward eight, and his cousin
Louis Mountain Batton arrived in Hawaii and they wanted to
learn how to surf. Everyone knew that Duke was the
person to teach them, and he did. He took them
to ride waves in canoes and on his surfboard. Prince
(05:00):
Edward found the whole thing thrilling and quote jolly good fun.
He also told Duke it was the first time he
had been able to get away from all the news
cameras and security. Just as quickly as the Hawaiian press
had turned on Duke for not winning races, it lauded
him for making this connection with the Prince and representing
(05:21):
Hawaii so well. Also in nineteen twenty, Duke, who had
refocused and really started retraining and started winning races again,
was once again chosen for the US Olympic team that
traveled to Antwerp, Belgium. This trip actually had kind of
a harrowing moment early on, when the athletes were boarding
their ship in New Jersey, and they saw on the
(05:42):
docks dozens of coffins carrying the bodies of US soldiers
who had been killed during the war. The ship they took,
the Princess Matoika, was dirty. It was in poor repair.
Uh there were a lot of issues around it that
got reported to the Olympic Committee. It was that bad.
There were rats other problems, but Khanamoku helped keep the
(06:03):
team spirits aloft by playing his ukulele and singing in
the evenings. And when they arrived in Antwerp, there were
more reminders though, of just how much the war had
impacted everything. One of the biggest ones for Duke was
that Cecil Healy, who had been a competitor and a friend,
had been killed in action. Kahanamoku once again meddled in
the same two events as he had in nineteen twelve.
(06:26):
Those were the hundred meter freestyle and the freestyle relay.
This time he took home gold medals in both. The
conditions that he was swimming in were not favorable for
him at all. The water was very cold, estimated to
be below sixty degrees fahrenheit or fifteen point six degrees celsius,
and that makes it even more impressive that Duke not
(06:47):
only won the hundred meter finals, he also broke his
own world record. He came in at one minute for
tenths of a second. And remember this is meters, not
yards If you're thinking about that hundred yard record that
we talked about earlier starting his swimming career. That race
actually didn't stand though there was controversy about whether another
(07:09):
swimmer had interfered with a third competitor and it had
to be restaged. Duke still won, but not as fast
as that first time, and then he immediately took a
nap under the stands and once again almost missed the
final for the two relay. I love the naps. If
there were an Olympic napping competition, Duke Kahanamoku would win gold, silver,
(07:32):
and bronze every time. He was so so good at
naps um. Duke may have also played for the US
water polo team at those Olympics as a substitute. There
is no evidence one way or another, and there are
different versions of the story. Duke said on a few
occasions that he jumped into the water because a couple
of the US players had turned blue in that very
(07:55):
cold water. We mentioned and had to be removed. Another
member of the a swim team, Helen Meany, gave a
different account that the swimmers basically formed an ad hoc
team when the polo team refused to play in the
Chili conditions, and that they were such a mess because
they didn't even know the rules of the game that
the referee quote was laughing so hard he nearly fell
(08:16):
off the high chair he was sitting on. The rosters
for this particular match are incomplete, so we will never
know what really happened. Was also the year that Duke
introduced the idea of surfing as an Olympic sport, so
it would seem that things were going beautifully. Duke was thirty.
He had solidified his standing as a champion. He had
(08:38):
continued to really do Hawaii proud, but he didn't have
any real career plans or training. He took a couple
of jobs. He fell back on the tourist trade, but
he just wasn't financially comfortable in the nineteen twenties, even
though he was still swimming competitively, Duke, trying to figure
out a way to make his way in the world,
(08:58):
shifted gears to start an acting career starting in ninety two.
He lived primarily in Los Angeles for this new job,
and over the eight years between n and nineteen thirty
he acted in more than two dozen movies. He had
actually had a bit part well before this, in the
nineteen fifteen Hobart Bosworth film The Beach Comber, playing a
(09:21):
Native Hawaiian who saves the main character from drowning. So
this was a way he could earn money that wouldn't
compromise his amateur athletics status. But the move to California
was also emotionally really heavy. He had to leave behind
his close knit family. It was just a hard decision.
There had been so many ups and downs for him
(09:42):
and the press and regarding his financial standing. The whole
thing was just complicated and had a whole lot of layered,
conflicting feelings. Yeah, multiple people have commented in various places
about how uncomfortable he was talking about money. So the
(10:03):
fact that he was struggling was like this double layer
of of just problematic stuff. Um, but we're going to
talk about how things played out for him in Hollywood,
and we're gonna do that after we first paused for
a sponsor break. So Kahata Moogu had envisioned being a
(10:25):
film star, but it pretty quickly became a parent that
Hollywood was not ready for a non white lead in movies,
so he was relegated to small parts. He didn't stay
in California, though, because he really appreciated all of the
outdoor sporting opportunities it offered. He started working at the
Santa Monica Beach Club as a lifeguard to make ends meet,
and as a side effect, he helped popularize beach volleyball there.
(10:49):
He also gave swimming and surfing lessons to actors to
make extra money, and he joined the Los Angeles Athletic
Club so he could use their facilities to train because
he really wanted one more Olympics in nwour Duke, who
at this point was thirty four, participated in the Olympics
in Paris. His younger brother Sam had also qualified in
(11:11):
the same event, and the Kahanamoku brothers swam the hundred
meter freestyle. This time, Duke won a silver. His competitor,
Johnny wise Miller took on the gold and yes, that's
the same one who went on to play Tarzan in films.
The press had played up this rivalry between the two swimmers,
and Duke had wanted to beat him, but he was
(11:32):
also really gracious about it. Sam Kahanamoku won the bronze,
and incidentally, Duke and Sam's brother David was also on
the US swim team that year. Yeah, that was all
uh all Kahanamoku year for the Olympic swim team. There
is a story that came up later on there. Like
(11:53):
I said, the press tried to play this up as
like this big rivalry and they ended up really to
be pretty good friends. And there had been stories that
Duke and Sam were trying to like intimidate weiss Miller
on the deck, which doesn't sound quite right, But then
weiss Miller later said, no, Duke just told me, like,
let's get the top three for the US. However, it
(12:14):
plays out just as long as we all get there together,
which seems a little more in line with what we
know about him. But after the Olympics, Duke returned to
Los Angeles and, in another crossover with a previous show topic,
he signed an acting contract with Adolph Zooker's Famous Players
Last Kie Corporation, which of course became more well known
(12:35):
once its name was Paramount studios, and we mentioned earlier
that he appeared in more than two dozen films, but
the actual number is unknown due to the fact that
many films from that era were not preserved and have
been lost to time, and because Duke sometimes appeared in
parts that were so small they did not merit a credit,
there is no way to get an accurate number. Uh.
(12:57):
There are people who have gone through films have been like,
I think that's Duke Conomoco in the background, but I'm
not positive. That's how like uncertain it is. But he
did become lifelong friends with famous director John Ford during
this time, after appearing in some small parts in a
couple of Fords movies. One of the surprising ways that
Duke made headlines was an event that took place in nine.
(13:21):
The fishing yacht Thelma, helmed by cigar store owner Myron Bland,
had ventured out despite danger flags flying in the harbor
off Corona del Mar. Duke and his friends happened to
be camping on the beach that weekend, and Kahanamoku saw
the yacht get slammed by a huge wave and capsize.
(13:41):
He immediately grabbed his surfboard and paddled out to the boat,
where passengers were just tangled up in the ropes and equipment.
He managed to get three people onto the board and
started paddling back to shore. His friends met him in
the water and then relayed these rescued boaters to safety.
Duke made two more trips, rescuing a total of eight
people himself. Two other bystanders, seeing what Duke was doing,
(14:06):
had also made rescue runs. In a total of thirteen
people were saved, but five drowned that day, and while
the people rescued spoke of Duke as this wizard and
a savior who had plucked them from the clutches of death.
When he was questioned about how he managed to rescue
so many people, the Hawaiian athlete really did not say much.
True to form. His only response was, I do not know.
(14:28):
It was done, that's the main thing, by a few tricks. Perhaps.
Later that same day, when the warning light on the
jetty was knocked out, it was once again Duke and
his friends who sacrificed their own safety to restore it
rather than risk other boats meeting the same fate as
the Thelma. It was thanks to the events at Corona
del Mar that day that paddle boards became standard equipment
(14:52):
for lifeguard stations. While commenting on this outcome, Duke noted
that quote some good sometimes comes from the word list
of tragedies, and that was a huge story. But throughout
his life, Duke actually rescued a lot of people from drowning.
As part of his surf club that we mentioned uh,
he and his friends routinely helped people who had gone
(15:14):
out too far and found themselves struggling, and while he
was preparing for his first Olympics, he had rescued a
man in Atlantic City who had passed out from intoxication
and fallen into a pool. He had also saved another
surfer on that same beach at Corona del Mar, but
that fishing boat made huge news. It was in the
papers all over the world. So finally Duke realized he
(15:35):
was just not going to make it big in l
a and he also missed home desperately. He was heading
into his forties, and he went back to the Islands
in early nineteen thirty. He rekindled his love of surfing
and spent time with his family, and he once again
assumed the role of tour guide and beach companion to
any famous people who visited. He found work as the
(15:59):
superintend in of Honolulu Holle, where the city's government was housed.
This job was touted as a sort of honorary greeter position,
but the reality was that he was doing labor to
maintain the grounds in the building, like literally mopping floors,
mowing lawns, painting things general upkeep. Duke later called this
job official toilet cleaner. Duke tried out for the nineteen
(16:21):
thirty two Olympics, but he didn't make the team. He
was forty one during the trials, his legs just didn't
have the stamina for the hundred meter race anymore. He
would start strong, but then finish in a more disappointing way.
He helped out with the running of the games in
Los Angeles, and it sometimes reported that he was an
alternate on the water polo team, but there's really no
(16:44):
official record to substantiate that. When Duke got back to
Oahu after those Olympics, his superintendent job was eliminated. At
that point, they offered him the position of janitor, and
he turned that down. He took a job instead as
the manager of two gas nations for Union Oil, saying
to the offer heck, yes, I'm not too proud to
pump gas. Duke had another job change in four that year,
(17:09):
he was elected sheriff of the City and County of Honolulu.
He served in that role for twenty five years. He
was reelected thirteen times. And this may seem like kind
of a strange move, but when he was still young,
Duke's father had moved into a job on the police force,
but there was an element of family continuity in this
(17:29):
dedication to serve. Additionally, in the years leading up to
Duke's first election, there had been a lot of ongoing
racist tension between Native Hawaiians and the white population that
had moved to the island, including a lot of the
military men that were stationed there. This most famously manifested
in the tragic Thalium Massey case, when Massey, who was
(17:51):
a Navy wife, falsely accused five men uh, some of
whom were Native Hawaiian, of beating and sexually assaulting her. Uh.
That case maybe an episode when I'm feeling mentally strong
enough for it. It is very ugly. Um. While Duke
was not a particularly ambitious or power hungry man, though
he had a way of putting people at ease and
(18:13):
getting along with everyone. So as the sheriff's race was
coming up, he kind of offered a choice for someone
that might help ease the tensions in Honolulu, and after
he was elected for the first time, he took out
an ad space in all of the papers, thanking the
people for his win and promising to try to live
up to their trust. He may not have been ambitious,
(18:33):
but Duke was also not afraid of hard work, and
this sheriff position was a really good match for him.
He worked to improve the local jail. He made it
a point to visit jails and police stations and other
cities when he traveled to kind of gauge areas where
Honolulu could improve, and one of his ongoing projects that
just he could not get support for it was that
(18:56):
he was like, we need a new jail. This one
is really not good enough, in part because when he
first started, everybody escaped from it, like it was apparently
just easy to walk out of it, and he was like,
why even have it. Um took a very long time
to get support for that move. In nineteen thirty six,
Duke's mother, Julia died, and this was of course very
difficult for Duke and all of his siblings who just
(19:17):
adored her, and when she was laid to rest, it
is said that the family had two full truckloads of
flowers brought to her grave. We are about to get
to the time in Duke's life when he met and
befriended Airis Doris Duke. Before we get into that, we
will hear from some of our sponsors. In the mid
(19:41):
nineteen thirties, Duke became friends with a woman who was
unlike anyone he had ever met, even though he had
at that point spent time with Royalty and innumerable icons.
He had had dinner at one point with Amelia earhart Um,
but this was Doris Duke. And Doris had first traveled
to Hawaii when she was twenty two on her honeymoon.
(20:02):
She was a tobacco heiress who had come into millions
at the age of twelve. She also had like kind
of staggered payouts throughout her life as she matured, and
she lived her life seemingly without any restrictions. And Doris
and the Kahanamoku family became very very close, and she
soon purchased land on Owahu near them, where she built
(20:22):
the first million dollar home there that was designed by
Marion Simms Wyath and it was named shankar Law. Duke's brother,
Sam taught Doris to surf, but she was linked romantically
to both Sam and Duke. Rumors really swirled that while
her husband, diplomat James HR. Cromwell, was staying in the
Continental US attend to his career, Doris and Duke were
(20:45):
essentially living as a couple in Hawaii. Doris became pregnant
at the end of nineteen thirty nine or early nineteen forty,
and the paternity of that child, who died not long
after she was born, has been debated ever since. But
Duke was in a in a relationship with dance instructor
Nadine Alexander in ninety and the couple married in August
(21:07):
of that year. This has led some people to speculate
that Doris Duke was more likely to have been involved
with Sam Kahanamoku. Doris later loaned Duke and Nadine money
for the purchase of a home. Yeah, she was really
very close with the entire family, and Duke and Nadine
were genuinely deeply in love. Uh Nadine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio,
(21:31):
and had actually swooned over photos of Duke in the
papers as a teenager. She was fifteen years younger than
he was, and she ended up in Honolulu when she
took a job teaching ballroom dance at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel.
It said that the two of them just loved almost
more than anything else, to just dance together, which is
so sweet. But this marriage was perceived by some as
(21:52):
a betrayal on Duke's part of his Hawaiian heritage. It
was even used against him in the nineteen forty election,
insinuating the he was now anti Hawaiian. That was a
criticism he was actually getting from both sides of the
political divide. He still won that election, but he also
switched political parties from Democrat to Republican after the Democratic
(22:14):
party representatives spoke about being disillusioned about Duke following his marriage.
Duke was generally, I mean, we keep talking about how
beloved he was, and he was well supported by voters
from both parties. That's which really did not change much.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed on December seven nine, Duke
and Nadine were eating breakfast at the Outrigger Canoe Club
(22:38):
Duke called an acquaintance to make sure it was a
real attack and not the local military base running some
kind of a training maneuver. When he confirmed what was happening,
he and Nadine made a run for the safer shelter
of city Hall. Because of his position as sheriff, Duke
Kahanamoku had to oversee the really inadequate city morgue and
(22:58):
inspect potential dig sites in case a mass burial plot
was needed. Duke went on to set up a citywide
alert system in case additional attacks followed that one. Following
the war, he became a supporter of statehood for Hawaii.
This obviously was not something everyone wanted. Um. He also
signed a deal for his name to be used in
(23:19):
marketing for a Loha shirts made by clothing company Cisco Casuals.
This was not the first such deal he signed, but
it was one that had him touring the continental US
to promote the product with Nadine at his side. In
nineteen fifty five, Duke had a heart attack and spent
ten days in an oxygen tent. He recovered and was
sent back home with instructions to follow a limited diet,
(23:42):
but according to Nadine, he didn't always follow that. From
that point on, Duke had a number of health issues,
including asthma and ulcers, which Nadine believed were the result
of his keeping his emotions bottled up. Yeah, she definitely
made clear that she thought him being nice to everyone
and all the time, no matter what they did to him,
was part of the source of his health issues. In
(24:05):
nine fifty six, he went to the Olympics again, this
time not as an athlete he was sixty six at
that point, but as a representative of the United States,
and he watched as many of the swimming events as
he could. He was apparently really blown away by the swimmers,
one that their their bathing costumes had gotten sleeker and
allowed them to be faster in the water, but also
he said to have been really really wowed by their
(24:27):
training regimens. And when the games were over, Duke and
Nadine toured Asia together. On August twenty one, nineteen fifty nine,
Hawaii gained statehood, and while this was something that Duke
had supported. Afterwards he watched throngs of people moved to
the islands. Waikiki quickly grew into a tourism village. He
(24:48):
might have started wondering if that had really been the
right move. Things took an even more troubling turn when
the sheriff's office was eliminated in a city reorganization That
meant that Kahanamoku was out of a job. He was
eventually given a job as the city's official greeter, but
that paid less than nine thousand dollars a year. That pay,
(25:10):
or lack of it, was recognized as wrong by a
lot of people. There was no lack of awareness regarding
just how much Duke had done on the world stage
to promote Hawaii and represent it in the best possible light,
and at that point he had been doing that for
almost fifty years, and yet he was taking home just
a little over five hundred dollars a month after taxes
(25:31):
as he approached his seventieth birthday. And it was the
need for a more substantial income than that that led Duke,
with the help of talent manager Chemo Wilder McVeigh, to
open a restaurant and nightclub called Duke Kahanamoku's, of Course,
that was in Waikiki. To get in on a tourist
trade and to help drum up business, McVeigh hired don
(25:53):
Hoe to play things picked up. McVeigh also organized surfing
contests branded with Duke's aim to keep public interest in
Kahanamoka growing. In March nineteen sixty two, Duke spent a
week and a half in the hospital for his stomach ulcers.
Two months later, after he took a hit to the
head on his catamaran, he found he was unable to stand,
(26:16):
and he was rushed to the hospital with a diagnosis
of a blood clot that necessitated emergency brain surgery. Duke
was inducted into the Swimming and Surfing Halls of Fame
in the second half of the nineteen sixties. This was
an honor, but it was also one he really didn't
have much time to enjoy. In nineteen sixty seven, his
(26:36):
ulcers had gotten so bad that he needed several blood
transfusions and he had to have an operation that removed
almost half of his stomach. He recovered, but on January
twenty second night, Duke had a heart attack while he
was working on his boat, and he died in Honolulu
at the age of seventy seven. His ashes, were, of
course sent into the ocean in a ceremony where they
(26:59):
were escort on a surfboard atop an outrigger canoe that
was flanked by several more canoes. It said that hundreds
of surfers paddled out with them. When his family and
friends got to a point where they couldn't go any further,
Nadine dropped the box containing his ashes into the water.
Duke was inducted into the U S Olympic Hall of
(27:19):
Fame in four Six years later, a statue of Duke
was dedicated at Waikiki on his one birthday. There had
been efforts to erect a statue of him when he
was alive, but that whole thing made Duke really uncomfortable
and he was pretty relieved when the plan fell apart.
At the dedication ceremony for the statue, Nadine told the
(27:39):
crowd quote, I hope you will all come to the
beach and visit him, because he doesn't want to be lonely.
Another statue of Duke went up in Australia in also
with Nadine to champion the project. Duke received numerous other
posthumous honors, including having his image on a US Postal
(28:01):
Service stamp, which happened in two thousand two. Before Nadine
died in She set up a nonprofit, the Outrigger Duke
Kahanamogu Foundation, which funds the preservation of Hawaiian water sports
and grants scholarships to students from the islands. In a
move that remains controversial among Duke's family, she bequeathed trademark
(28:22):
rights to his name and likeness to the foundation. Visiting Oahu,
it's easy to see how important Duke Kahanamoku was and
is to Hawaii, and how he's become the iconic embodiment
of the spirit of Aloha. But when you think about
the entire culture and subcultures that have been born of
Duke's influence in Hawaiian beyond, it's really staggering. His casual
(28:47):
fun approach to surfing really defined the sport, and in turn,
that same vibe defined the skateboarding culture that sprang off
from it. Entire companies that manufacture are bore words, clothing, footwear,
et cetera. All of that intended to capture that feeling
have been launched, and a lot of them to great success,
(29:08):
because of course, everyone wants to have that cool and
relaxed style and feel, and you can draw a line
straight back through history to that laid back beach culture.
In Duke Kahanamoku he impacted Hawaii and other more concrete
ways as well. If you have ever visited the Pearl
Harbor National Memorial in Honolulu, which is quite a thing,
(29:29):
you have benefited from the work of Duke Hohanamoku. He
raised money for that permanent tribute to the USS Arizona.
Part of what made Dukehanamoku so winsome was just his
endless modesty. When he competed with a club or its team,
he always wanted to celebrate the group rather than himself,
even though he was easily the strongest swimmer among them.
(29:50):
And after his first famous wins and his first official
races in nineteen eleven, he said that it was the
waters of Olahu that were really to be credited. Quote.
Our water is so full of life. It's the fastest
in the world. That's all there is to it. I
love that he gives the water credit for it. It's like, oh,
(30:11):
it's the water. It's great. I really love him. Yeah,
me too, me too. Um, we'll talk about how much
we love him in our Friday episode. But yeah, there's
there are more fun stories about him that didn't quite
fit into this, uh these two episodes, So on Friday
(30:32):
I'll try to pepper a couple of more of those in.
But for now I have too um emails about Grand
Central Station. The first is from our listener Caitlin. You're right, Hi,
Hollie and Tracy. I just finished your episode on Grand
Central Station, and I agree I missed traveling so much.
(30:52):
This will come up in our other one, but it
really is Grand Central Terminal charts. In college, I spent
a semester in New York working at a Broadway theater
about two hundred yards from Times Square. There were two
possible routes from the subway from my student housing. Take
two trains and walk from the north, avoiding Times Square,
or take only one train and cut directly through the square. Naturally,
(31:14):
I did the latter. This horrified my boss, who was
a born in brand New Yorker, but I told him
a minute for the stories Josh. Later that day, a
pigeon flew directly into my face and nearly got tangled
in my hat. So grain of salt on the practicality
of my advice. She got a story out of it.
I hope you enjoyed my Avian encounter. Caitlin I do
(31:35):
It's fantastic also makes a recommendation. And then we also
got a note from our listener, Christopher, who writes Deer
Holly and Tracy. My husband and I are long time
listeners and first time emailers to your show. We started
listening to your show during weekend trips we took to
visit family while we were both in grad school in
(31:56):
and we've been hooked ever since. We literally can't find
any more episode. It's in the archives that we haven't heard,
so now we await each episode quite eagerly. We just
finished your episode on the history of Grand Central and
loved every second of it. We are huge fans of
the Grand Central complex in its history. We both grew
up along the Metro North commuter lines. I grew up
on the Hudson Line and Dobb's Ferry and he grew
(32:17):
up in the New Haven Line in Larchmont. When I
was a child, it was a big deal whenever I
got to take a train into the city and enter
Grand Central, usually to see a Broadway show. Your podcast
alluded to the structures Bozel design, Yet there's really no
way to capture the feeling of grandeur when you step
out of the train platform into that main space with
the vaulted ceiling and astronomical design which fun fact, is
(32:40):
actually accidentally drawn backwards. As a teenager slash college student
slash young adult, the clock in the center was always
the assumed place to meet up with folks, never even
a question. My mom worked in the city and she
is a fellow history buff. She never hesitated to share
stories about the building's history, like the ceiling restoration or
the building was saved from the same fat as Penn Station,
(33:02):
due in large part to the work of Jackie Kennedy.
One piece of info that my mother always reminded me
about the structure is that the building is Grand Central terminal,
not station. The reason for this is that no trains
go through the station. Every train either originates or terminates there.
I wouldn't be a dutiful son if I didn't mention that,
as I believe you switched between terminal and station at
(33:23):
several points during the podcast. I thought it was an
interesting point about why the building is actually a terminal.
I think we switched it over when it transitioned to terminal,
but I could be wrong. I'm not above messing those up,
that's for sure. Um, thank you so much for the
work you are doing. Your podcast was a vital part
of getting my husband and me through a PhD in
law school, respectively. Boy, congratulations to both of you. You
(33:45):
shine a light on formally marginalized stories are those that
are often framed as ancillary to big history, and it's
such important work. U war misregards Christopher, Christopher and Jordan's Uh.
This is such a sweet email, and I love it
and I love hearing about people that our native new workers,
that love New York as much as I do, probably
more so. Thank you so much for sharing all of that.
(34:06):
I hope I didn't mess up those those stations and terminals,
but I probably did. If you would like to write,
do as you could do so. That email is history
podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find
us on social media at missed in History and if
you would like to subscribe to the podcast, it's easy
as pie. You can do it on the iHeart Radio app,
at Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(34:33):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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