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Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more. Is that Shakespeare? No, it's Geico. Oh yeah. Yeah, that's Shakespeare from one of his unpublished works. Oh. Which B, not for Awakening. And they give a Tharthar batteries for fifteen minutes.

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Could save you fifteen percent or more.

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No, it's from Geico because they help save people money.

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Well I hate to break it to you, but Geico got it from Shakespeare.

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Geico fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more.

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Learning from mistakes is important, but then you prefer to learn from the painful mistakes of others. I'm Tim Harford, host of Cautionary Tales, the podcast that looks for valuable lessons from great crimes and disasters of the past. You'll fly on a doomed airliner hijacked by idiots, witnessed the world's worst bank robbery, and uncover the deeds of a doctor who paid friendly house calls to his patients while really planning their murders. To subscribe, head to the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you like to listen.

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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 Wilson. Oh, Tracy, I've had Doris Duke on my list for a topic forever.

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I know I've mentioned her to you a million times, and she is very, very interesting. But I was starting to do some prelim reading about her, wondering if it was finally time. And then there's a point in her story where it intersects with Duke Kahanamoku. And then I just kind of took a side street and started reading more about him. And this, you know, who is a famous Hawaiian swimmer, as we will all learn, and, you know, a surfer.

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And his story really got more interesting to me than the often very salacious story of Doris Duke's biography, which has its own complications which reach right into the modern era. She might still get an episode at some point, but I don't know. But as I researched Duke Kahanamoku, I kept realizing that it was also going to be hard. Really, really, really quite difficult to cut enough things to keep his story down to a normal episode length because his life is full of entertaining stories, even after you sort out the entertaining stories that kind of grew from him being a legendary figure that are not really verifiable, even if you cut down to the ones where there's a lot of substantiation and documentation is still too much for one episode.

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And his life also intersected not just with wealthy heiresses, but also just a whole lot of topics that we have covered on the show before, as well as a whole lot of other important historical moment. So this one has turned into a two parter on Duke Kahanamoku. And I I apologize in advance because I can't imagine hearing all of this and not wanting to immediately go to Oahu. So I'm sorry that I will put that that craving into people's minds.

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Unless you already are in Hawaii, in which case. Feel my jealousy. I'm glad you picked this up, because you and I were talking earlier. I have had Duke Kahanamoku on my list also, and I would sort of start something and then get pulled into some other direction. So finally, he is here.

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Finally, he gets his time. He is also a good one. I think we can spoiler alert this. There are certainly twists and turns to his story, but he does not ever turn into a monster, which is just refreshing and nice.

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Yes, yes. So Duke Kahanamoku was born on August 24th, 1890 in Honolulu, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. His father was also named Duke and his mother was Julia Pokorney. Lonoke, Makini Power. His paternal grandparents are often noted as having been related to King Kamehameha the first. But this is actually not the case. Strictly speaking, part of the confusion here is that family is not strictly conferred through bloodline and Hawaiian culture. And there is a link between the Kahanamoku family and the royal family.

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And if you're wondering how the name Duke as a proper name became part of a Hawaiian family, it is related to that link. So the story goes that when Duke Senior was born, his parents, who worked in the home of Princess Burness pouvoir he Pocky Bishop asked for the princess to give input on their child's name.

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It was their connection through their work that gave them an association as what one biographer kind of very poetically called adjunct members of the royal family.

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Princess Berniece had an affinity for England and for English culture. She had been educated in England and because Queen Victoria's son, Prince Alfred Ernest Albert, Duke of Edinburgh, was visiting Hawaii around the time of the elder Duke's birth, she suggested that they name him Duke to honor that visitor. So the baby was named Duke Collapse. Who? Kind of Moku. He grew up and started his own family and passed his name down to his son, who was the subject of today's episode.

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There is also an additional link to Kamehameha through Duke's mother's family, which is that one of their relatives was a regent to the Kamehameha line. And Duke was not the first child born to his parents. They had had a daughter before him who died in infancy. They would go on to have nine children that survived to adulthood, including Duke and another two who did not. Duke Senior, when Duke was born, worked for the United Carriage Company as a driver and a clerk.

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And when Duke was three, he and his mother actually moved to land near Waikiki to be closer to her family while his father was in Chicago working as part of the Hawaii exhibit at the World's Fair. So to be clear, this was not a wealthy family, not at all, but because of the ample fishing that was available to them, which the whole family participated in, including their extended family who all live nearby, they stayed really well fed.

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The kids would also dive for coins in the harbor after tourists tossed them overboard from ships. And Duke had, of course, been born in Hawaii when it was still an independent nation. But that would all change when he was still very young. If you listen to our older episode on the last monarch of Hawaii, Queen Lelio Colony, you know that the monarchy of Hawaii was overthrown by U.S. business interests in 1893, and the events in the years following that overthrow led to Hawaii being annexed by the US, which happened with a joint resolution that passed on July 12th, 1898.

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There is, of course, a whole lot to that story, but we mention it here just to primarily contextualize the life of Duke Kahanamoku, because as he grew up, he became very much a public figure as a representative of the U.S. and Hawaii on the global stage. So according to the family's story, Duke learned to swim at the age of four being taught and what his sister Bernice described as the old fashioned method. And that meant that he got tossed over the side of an outrigger canoe and then had to save himself by figuring out how to stay afloat and how to move through the water, which he did.

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Yeah, they joke about this all the time that we teach kids in our family was a joke about learning to swim when I was a kid to that. I don't know that anyone in my family actually did, but it was a throw down and let them learn kind of. Yeah, it's still pretty common. There are lots of people who still do that with their kids, I hope, with plenty of supervision. And I imagine in a family as close as Dukes like they were watching him.

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But it does sound a little bit terrifying to toss a tiny child over the side of a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. They weren't in the middle, obviously, but still. So as a kid, Duke attended First Waikiki school and then starting in fourth grade, Queen Cumani Elementary School. He was not really what you would categorize as an excellent student, although he was also not a troublemaker. He was just kind of quiet and he seemed to be daydreaming a lot of the time.

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He was also pretty quiet at home and really just seemed more than anything to want to be outside as much as possible.

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When he was 14, Duke went to the Kamehameha School for boys with the intent that he would learn a trade. That school comes with tons of baggage that would be its own episode if we chose to do it. It was organized with the same idea that schools in the continental US, like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which we've talked about on the show before, worked on.

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So as we mentioned, Carlyle, which is associated with the famed athlete Jim Thorpe. There are also some strong parallels between Thorpe's experience at school and Kahanamoku. Kamehameha School for Boys was a boarding school, went to Americanise the students, so Hawaiian language was banned and there were lessons and things like tailoring and carpentry. It was really an industrial school. And there was also a significant focus on sports. And Duke excelled in sports of all kinds. And at school he ran track as well as playing football.

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That's American football, soccer, baseball and basketball. In nineteen eighty eight, his performance as a halfback on the school's soccer team helped them win a championship when they beat a private school team from O'ahu College. But Duke did not stay at the school. Very long after that, he transferred to William McKinley High School, although the reason for that change is unknown. That school, incidentally, had been Honolulu High School until just before Duke started attending. Its name was changed as kind of part of of Hawaii's transition into being part of the U.S. But he did not stay enrolled there either.

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He dropped out before graduation.

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After leaving school behind, Kahanamoku split his time between taking odd jobs to help support his family and also spending time on the water. Sometimes these two things overlapped. He would take tourists out in a canoe or out on his surfboard. After Hawaii's annexation, the tourist industry really boomed. So he had plenty of work. Yeah, there's like a whole group of people who started at this roughly around this point. It was going on before, but really just like locals who were like, OK, here's what we will do.

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And that's how they were making money. And Duke had started out surfing just on flattened kerosene cans, according to his account. But eventually he started using the carpentry skills that he had learned at school to start making himself longboards. The style of surfing that he was doing was very relaxed rate. His boards did not even have fins to steer, which is pretty common at the time. And he and his friends who had similar boards were just kind of you get out, catch a wave and stand in a pose while they rode the wave out.

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This was not a serious business for him. It was not even considered like a sport. It was just something you did. He described surfing as the thing you did when there were waves. And if there weren't waves, people just swim or play some other sport. So coming up, we're going to talk about Duke facing racism as Hawaii became more and more populated by white newcomers. First, though, we will have a quick sponsor break. Support for stuff you missed in history class comes from Lord Jones, makers of the world's finest CBD products.

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So before the break, we talked about how there was a lot more tourism going on in Hawaii and, you know, the Duke and his friends were largely making money just by teaching those people how to surf or canoe. But Duke Kahanamoku and his fellow native Hawaiian surfers and swimmers experienced a unique instance of racism when the Outrigger Canoe Club was established on the beach at Waikiki between two popular hotels. That had started to be a kind of a central area for the tourist trade.

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And the club claimed that it was about preserving surfing and canoeing culture, but it was actually founded by a white man, Alexander Hume Ford, who had recently moved to Hawaii. And it limited its membership to whites only excluding the native Hawaiians who had developed surfing and all of that water sport culture in the first place.

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So as if that were not enough, there's a whole added layer of travesty here to some degree is white business interest started claiming Hawaii's land, much of which had really not been owned in the sense that we were talking about owning property today. The ocean was a respite from all of that for the locals because no one owned the water. So swimming and surfing had remained to at least some degree outside of that whole conflict until it was also appropriated. Additionally, and so add another horrifying aspect forward in promoting surfing and various publications, even used photos of Duke and wrote as though he were Duke.

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He used the name he used the name Duke Power and wrote about surfing from the, quote, native perspective, which he was not.

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Yeah, that has caused some confusion over the years where people are like, no, I think Duke wrote those articles and people are like, if you read this sentence structure, this is not how that man spoke. It is super stilted and weird. It is clearly someone trying to sound like a native Hawaiian or what they perceive a native Hawaiian would write like it's pretty gross. In response to being excluded from Ford's club, though, Duke and two of his friends, William Cottrell, who went by Newt and Kenneth Winter, started their own club, though there was not a clubhouse here.

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The Malana Hotel let them have a little space in their locker room for changing, but really they just tended to meet under a tree on the beach. The dunes were a dollar a year and the club met just about every day. It was named who? Innaloo, who he means to get together. And Nalu means SIRF who Innaloo excluded No one. And as a consequence, even though it was started as what Duke and his friends called a poor man's club, it actually had a really wide ranging mix of members.

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So men and women, wealthy people, poor people, Hawaiian people, white people, people from all walks of life joined and swam and served together. And they had parties on the beach at night. And they also it was kind of part of their club's mandate to rescue swimmers when they needed help. Duke also set up rules of surf etiquette that were all intended to keep everyone safe, many of which still exist today. And he and the other adult members kind of looked out for the younger members and just taught them how to handle waves.

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It was really kind of this nice community. Swimming was where Duke really gained attention on a wider stage, although if you'd asked him what he really wanted to compete in was rowing and sculling specifically, but the barrier to entry, there had really been money. He couldn't afford a skull of his own.

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He had always effortlessly been a really strong swimmer. And at the age of 21, he decided to enter a swimming contest that was being held in Honolulu Harbor. This was actually at the urging of Hawaii's assistant district attorney, William Rollins, who was helping to establish Hawaii's amateur athletic union. He had timed Duke Kahanamoku swimming and he thought he should start competing. And so he also helped get to Innaloo, registered with the EU so that its members could enter official competitions.

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And so WHO Innaloo members signed up for the ASU sponsored contest, do competed in the 220 yard race that opened up the competition and he won that race. His sixth man, three hundred yard relay team also won. But most famously, Duke competed in the hundred yard freestyle race and he won pretty easily. Duke would always say throughout his life and other people would say of him that he didn't swim as hard as he could necessarily in competition.

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He just swam hard enough to beat the people in the water with him. But he easily outpaced his main competition in this race. On August 12, 1911, his time was fifty five point four seconds. The world record at the time was a minute flat.

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He also broke the U.S. record in the 50 yard swim, even though he had been slow hitting the water. He came in at twenty four point two seconds and that beat the existing record. By one point six seconds. All of this garnered a great deal of attention when Duke was asked by reporters in the days that followed what it felt like to be the fastest swimmer alive, he said, I don't notice anything different. But though he was being lauded as the world's speediest swimmer, there were doubts about those times.

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William Rollins reported the Times from the competition to the head offices of the Amateur Athletic Union. And then officials there thought that the reporting had to be erroneous or that there was some other explanation for Duke's extraordinary time in the 100 yard.

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They just found it too hard to believe that this unknown swimmer had beaten the world record by four point six seconds. Officials at the Honolulu event were chastised for what was assumed to be poor timing protocols. There were comments made by EU officials that the course must have been improperly measured. Additionally, officials who had never been to Hawaii presumed the tides must have helped Kahanamoku to his record breaking time in some way. The times submitted by William Rawlins were not accepted as official.

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And it seems that all of Hawaii was pretty insulted by this snub. There was a huge effort to raise money to send Duke to compete in the national swimming championship. The Hawaii just kind of wanted to prove, no, he's legit. That was something he and his family could never have afforded to do on their own, which is why the fundraising and just as Duke Surf Club had accepted anyone and everyone, it seemed that anyone and everyone did what they could to help do get to the Nationals and all of the steps that had to happen along the way.

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Money was also raised to send another member of the WHO Innaloo team, Vincent Genovese, who went by the nickname Zen. The thinking was that Zen, who was a very solid swimmer in his own right, would compete. But he was essentially intended as an escort, someone who could handle all of the various administrative needs that might come up regarding Duke's participation in the competition. Duke and then along with tour manager Lou Henderson and trainer Edward Dood Miller, left for California on February 8th, 1912 on the USS Honolulu, and they traveled by boat to San Francisco and then by train to Chicago, then on to Pittsburgh for the first of many races that would determine whether or not he would make the Olympic team for a young man from Hawaii who'd only brought minimal clothes and swim trunks, the winter cold was really a surprise and a challenge.

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He needed a coat and that was purchased for him by members of the AWU in Chicago. Yeah, apparently they caught him like stuffing cardboard in his clothes to try to insulate himself. And they were like, let's just go to a store. Yeah, we can fix this. Cold weather, obviously, a very new experience, but even more challenging was swimming in an indoor freshwater pool, which was something Duke had never done in his life. So with very little time to prepare, he found himself competing in a 220 yard race.

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He did not do well at all. He found his legs cramping in his lungs, kind of gasping for air. And because of this, the press was really quick to write stories about how the guy from Hawaii that everyone had been talking about was just not all that he was cracked up to be. But once he loosened up, Duke easily won the 50 and 100 yard sprint races. Duke was introduced to University of Pennsylvania swim coach George Kessler, who agreed to train him for free.

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And up until this point, all of Duke's swimming success was the result of his natural talent and instinct. Probably also just getting to do it all the time because he lived in Hawaii, he had not had any formal training. So Kessler taught him how to start, breathe and turn properly in an actual pool setting. Yeah, when you think about, like somebody who is always dead, 100 as a straight away and now you go, oh no, you got to hit the wall and bounce back to for the second half.

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Right. It'll be terrifying. But here's the thing. He got a lot stronger as a consequence of this training. In one trial, Duke swam in a 200 meter freestyle and he won and he broke the world record doing it. This was a surprise because he had actually been kind of slow at the start. He hit the water several seconds late because he still needed some work on jumping into the water from the deck throughout his time in the U.S. for trials and then in Europe for the games.

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Duke Kahanamoku got a lot of attention from the press and some of it was just unveiled fascination at a brown man in this sport. But some of it was because Duke was really unconventional. He would ask if he could get in the water before races started and just kind of easily float around there while his opponents were like on the pool deck being nervous he would play his ukulele at poolside. He would find a place to curl up and sleep. The number of Knapp's underthings we're going to talk about Epiphone delights me, oh, what he seem just completely unflappable, even though he very much felt like he had to live up to the hopes and expectations of all of the people who had helped him along the way.

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He also generated some confusion for reporters who couldn't figure out if his first name was actually a title, so he kind of had to forever tell press like, no, I'm not actually a duke. They would call him the Duke. And you'd be like, no, no. Although that was one of his nicknames that his teammates used. He was also often asked how to pronounce his name and he would say the B was silent, as in uranium, just to play with them.

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And although he faced racism in a variety of ways from having his athleticism written off as the result of his Hawaiian genes, to being refused service in restaurants, to being assumed to be Native American or Mexican, Duke didn't publicly ever talk about his feelings regarding any of these incidents. He just maintained a demeanor of real gentleness and calm and grace and also kept winning. He was officially announced as a member of the U.S. Olympic team on June 11th, 1912.

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This was particularly significant because he was the first Hawaiian U.S. Olympic athlete. And June 11th is also a Hawaiian holiday. Kamehameha Day celebrating the unification of the islands under the holidays. Namesake. Throughout all of his travels, Duke wrote letters home to his family all the time. And a lot of these letters were published in Hawaiian papers in their entirety. Some of those are so sweet because they're mostly to his dad, who he called daddy the whole time.

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And it's like, Daddy, these freshwater pools are weird. Like it's just it's really, really sweet. And he's very honest and open and frank about his feelings. It's they're just they're very, very charming. And coming up, we're going to talk about Duke's performance at the 1912 Olympic Games right after we have a word from the sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history class going. This episode is brought to you by Clorox, listen at our house, we've been, you know, hanging out inside a lot, maybe getting a little bit stir crazy now and again.

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So one of the things I've started to do is just go out for a little walk now and again through our neighborhood. And that means that, like, I love it and I get some fresh air and I get to see the world, although it's pretty quiet out there for us. But it also means that when I come home, I'm trailing in whatever I have traipse through in the great out of doors and on the sidewalks where I live. And I don't want any germs to, you know, get tracked into our house.

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And I certainly don't want them to be tracked onto our floors were our pets can have access to them. And so to combat these things, I have been counting on Clorox disinfecting mopping floors. These mopping floors kill ninety nine point nine percent of germs. That includes the covid-19 virus. And they're easy and they're safe to use on multiple floor types. I don't have to worry about damaging anything. And moreover, I don't have to worry about germs. The clots work when used as directed on hard non-porous surfaces, kills sars-cov-2 covid-19 virus.

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At the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, Duke competed in the 100 meter freestyle and won the gold medal. Keep in mind, that is a little bit different than the 100 yard which he had been racing. We are switching because we're there in Europe at this point. He also competed with his team in the freestyle relay and earned a silver medal doing so. Incidentally, previous podcast, Subject to Decubitus was still presiding over the Olympics, the 1912 Games.

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He actually presided over several Olympics while while Duke was competing, the setup for the swimming competitions at the Games in Sweden was actually perfect for Duke Kahanamoku. After all of that concern over learning to swim indoors and jump into the water from the deck and make turns at the end of the lane.

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The Stockholm races were held outdoors on a course that was 100 meters long, and there had been a moment when it looked like Kahanamoku and his teammates who were competing in the 100 meter might have been disqualified. There had been confusion over the schedule on the part of the U.S. organizers and the swimmers had actually missed the semifinals as the Olympic jury deliberated over how to handle the U.S. swimmers. Australian swimmer Cecil Healey, who was one of the few swimmers who could compete at Kahanamoku level, made the case that it would really be unsportsmanlike to not allow them to compete over a scheduling mix up.

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So a new semi-final heat was added to the roster and then Duke easily moved on to the finals. But Duke was once again nowhere to be found as the finals approached until his teammate Terk McDermott found him asleep under the bleachers. Duke barely made it to the start before the race began and took home the gold. Having been sound asleep just moments before at the closing ceremonies, Duke was celebrated loudly by the crowd, but he was edged out in a crowded ASRM by previous podcast subject Jim Thorpe, who had taken the gold in the decathlon and pentathlon.

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I don't think we mentioned Duke at all in the in the podcast and Jim Thorpe because we were really focused on the track sports, not the other sports.

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You know, after Duke's Olympic success, his father was interviewed for the papers. And it's easy to see where the famed swimmer and surfer got his really humble and relaxed attitude. His father said, quote, He's the same young boy today that he was last week. He's still our young power. He's a pretty good boy.

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So sweet, after the Olympics, Duke was invited to give swimming exhibitions all over the place and he extended his stay in Europe to accept some of those invitations before returning to the US. When he got to the Atlantic coast to the US, two of his surfboards had been shipped to meet him by his brother, who knew that Duke was missing surfing as much as home at this point. He had been away from Hawaii for months and it was his first trip away.

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Duke actually had to get a permit to surf off the boardwalk in Atlantic City, which he did, and that allowed him to surf for two hours each day. Duke was probably not the first person to surf in Atlantic City, but he certainly elicited a level of enthusiasm for it from spectators that had not happened there before.

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Not long after Duke got home to Hawaii, news broke of the whole deal with Jim Thorpe's amateur status, which we talked about in that three parter. And that news really put Kahanamoku in a strange position. The people of Hawaii had raised money to reward him when he returned home to help set him up with a house, among other things. But if he took that, he would then be considered a paid professional athlete. He would be ineligible for a future Olympic competition.

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And so, as a workaround, a committee was formed to set up a house near Kahanamoku family in the name of a trust company. But I mean, in practice, it was still Duke Kahanamoku house. This did enable him to maintain his amateur status, though he still needed to make a living. So he took a job in public works as a draftsman. This position was definitely and intentionally more flexible than your average office job. So he still had the time he needed to train.

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And Kahanamoku still hung out with all his cool Innaloo pals on the beach, picking up tourist girls under the guise of teaching them to swim or surf. This got him into some hot water. His name came up in at least one divorce suit, claiming that the wife had had an affair with the now famous swimmer. Duke, for his part, seemed entirely unconcerned by such potential scandals and many other whispers of various romantic associations. And he just always maintained that he was just a swim instructor.

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By 1914, he was sharing surfing with even more of the world. You'll often see claims that no one outside of Hawaii knew about surfing until Deuteronomy brought it to the shores beyond Hawaii. That's not entirely true, though. A friend of Duke's named George Freeth, for example, had left Hawaii to try to make surfing a thing on the shores of the continental U.S. in 1987. That was after writer Jack London had written about him. And there was some interest, but not the response that would come when Kahanamoku surfed in front of spectators.

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Freeth did gain acclaim for rescuing seven fishermen off the coast of Venice Beach in 1998 when they were caught in a storm. Swell, though, but Duke, as an Olympic champion on tour, got a lot more attention than surfers who had taken their pastime to new shores before him, whether he was competing or giving swim exhibitions to show people how to use his KIC technique, which came to be known as the Kahanamoku kick. He would also, naturally, and in his very relaxed way, look for opportunities to entertain himself.

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And when he could surf, he served the towering, handsome six foot one Hawaiian riding waves blissfully got a lot of notice. Everyone wanted to emulate that natural cool that he exuded, and surfing was part of that emulation as a lot of the races that he participated in were along the California coast, the pastime very quickly caught on there. Incidentally, the Kahanamoku kick was unique in its speed was the natural method of swimming on Duke's part. Like we said earlier, he didn't have formal lessons growing up and he had just kind of fallen into this rhythm through his own practice.

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His arms moved the way most swimmers did. They cycled overhead and into the water. But while his long arms were taking that cycle at a pretty leisurely pace, his size 13 feet were moving up and down really quickly. They did that six times for each arm stroke. And that was what gave him this incredible speed. That footwork had actually come from steering his heavy homemade surfboards as he paddled out to catch waves. Nowadays, this is generally just called a flutter kick.

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And at the time, the scissor kick where the legs are separated really widely and then brought together more forcefully for propulsion. That was more of the standard.

[00:34:32]

Yeah. Oh, it's just talked about, like I just said, to get my surfboards out. So that's how I started kicking people. There has been speculation about whether swim fins were inspired by his feet, but that is completely unsubstantiated. In December of 1914, the first official surfing exhibition was hosted at Freshwater Beach in Sydney, Australia. Duke was the main attraction, and Duke also left his pine surfboard that he had made while he was there in Australia at Freshwater Beach.

[00:35:02]

It weighs eighty pounds, so it's quite substantial. If you've done any surfing yourself, you've probably had a board much lighter than that. It was eight and a half feet long and two feet wide, and it remains there as part of the collection of the Freshwater Surf Club. Do that at this point become an icon of water, sport, culture. And for almost 20 years, until the 1930s, he was sharing his love of swimming and surfing all around the world.

[00:35:27]

And this spread interest in the sports around. But it also was a significant part of the growing tourism draw for the Hawaiian Islands.

[00:35:35]

And that's where we'll end today's episode. Next time, we will pick right back up with Duke being an ambassador of water, sports and Hawaiian culture.

[00:35:45]

We'll do a little gearshifts for listener mail. OK, we'll talk about Isadora Duncan, but only a little. This is from our listener, Eric, who writes, Thank you for your great podcasts.

[00:35:56]

I'm Isadora Duncan. Since I had only dipped into her autobiography and had grabbed bits and pieces of her life from many other sources, including two film biographies, she'd always come off as a rather eccentric figure, certainly, and a bit shallow not you certainly aided me in clarifying her life. Thanks for also shining a new light on Paris singer who usually comes off as a bit of a cad. And there was that aspect to him with a father like Isaac Singer.

[00:36:21]

It was probably unavoidable, but he was also remarkably generous. Man If a cause took his fancy, quite a few of the singers could be subjects of podcasts. And then Eric mentions winner at a singer who was swirled with scandal. Really, really happy that he mentioned pricing or we didn't talk about him a ton in Isidore's episode, but he he also is a very interesting, uh, and in some ways conflicted figure because he really was a plus it being a total jerk, but he was also a plus and not and he seemed to that pendulum was on the swing, which is always fascinating to me.

[00:37:05]

Someone else wrote in to to ask about and I'm sorry I didn't pull that one up, but I it just now came to me to ask how long that scarf had been in her unfortunate death. It was long, but part of the other problem was that the axle in the car that she was in when she died was also the back axle.

[00:37:24]

The rear axle was much closer up to the seating area than you might think on, say, an American car or even a foreign made modern car.

[00:37:35]

So that's that's part of what that was as well. Just in case you were wondering and doing some geometry, math of how that tragedy could have occurred, now that I've landed us in a really bummer place, if you would like to write to as you can absolutely do that. Our address is history podcast. It I heart radio dotcom. You can also find us on social media as missed in history. And if you'd like to subscribe and haven't gotten to that yet, I promise you it's so easy.

[00:38:00]

You could do that on the radio app at Apple podcasts or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

[00:38:11]

Stuff you missed in history class is the production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts from My Heart radio visit by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey there, it's Mango, just a part time genius, co-founder of Mental Floss and now host of the award winning podcast Humans Growing Stuff. A collaboration with I Heart Radio and your friends at Miracle-Gro.

[00:38:36]

I am so excited to tell you that our little show about plants and people is back.

[00:38:40]

We'll have brand new episodes featuring plant experts, master gardeners, community gardeners, new gardeners and plenty of new ideas. Be sure to listen to humans growing stuff on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

[00:38:55]

Do you ever wish there was a podcast that had real conversations like the ones you have with your friends? Well, you're in luck. Hi, I'm Erin Andrews. And I'm Charissa Thompson. And we wanted to call it Everyone Hates US, but the suits didn't like that. So meet our new podcast, Calm Down with Aaron and Carissa. Just two chicks talking about all this stuff. Others won't like this current breakout I'm having or Will is getting kicked out of dog daycare for peeing on other dogs.

[00:39:17]

It's the good, the bad, even the ugly and everything in between. Listen and follow. Calm down with Aaron and Chris out on the radio Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcast.