Duke Kahanamoku, Part 1

Kahanamoku became world-famous as an Olympic swimmer, and his love for sports of all kinds started from his childhood on Oahu. Part one covers his early life, up through his first Olympics and the start of becoming a global surfing icon.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

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

(00:21):
I know, I've mentioned her to you a million times,
and she is very very interesting. Um, but I was
starting to do some pre limb reading about her, wondering
if it was finally time. And then there's a point
in her story where it intersects with Duke Humoku, and
then I just kind of took a side street and
started reading more about him. And this, you know who

(00:44):
is a famous Hawaiian swimmer, as we will all learn,
and uh, you know, a surfer, 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.

(01:04):
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. Um, even after you sort out

(01:25):
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. Um.
And his life also intersected not just with wealthy heiresses,
but also just a whole lot of topics that we

(01:46):
have covered on the show before, as well as a
whole lot of other important historical moments. 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

(02:06):
into people's night, unless you already are in Hawaii, in
which case, UH feel my jealousy. UM, I'm glad you
picked this one up because you and I were talking earlier. UM.
I have had Duke who on my list also, and
I would sort of start something and then get pulled

(02:28):
into some other directions. So finally he is here, 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 a
nice yes. Yes, so. Dukehanamoku was born on August and Honolulu, Hawaii,

(02:55):
on the island of Huaihu. His father was also named Duke,
and his mother was Julia Paunia Lono Kahikini Powa. His
paternal grandparents are often noted as having been related to
King Kamami at the first, but this is actually not
the case strictly speaking. Part of the confusion here is

(03:15):
that family is not strictly conferred through bloodline and Hawaiian culture,
and there is a link between the Kahanamoku family and
the royal family. 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 Sr. Was born, his parents, who worked

(03:38):
in the home of Princess Berniceawai Packy Bishop, asked for
the princess to give input on their child's name. 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. Princess Bernice had an
affinity for England and for English culture. She had been

(04:00):
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 Lapu Kanamoku. He grew up and started
his own family and passed his name down to his son,

(04:23):
who was the subject of today's episode. There is also
an additional link to Kamama through Duke's mother's family, which
is that one of their relatives was a regent to
the Kamail 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

(04:43):
nine children that survived to adulthood, including Duke and another
two who did not. Duke sr. When Duke was born,
worked for the United Carriage Company as a driver and
a clerk, 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.

(05:05):
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 lived nearby, they stayed
really well fed. The kids would also dive for coins
in the harbor after tourists tossed them overboard from ships,

(05:26):
and dou Cad 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 Liliukolani, you know that the monarchy of Hawaii was
overthrown by US business interests in and the events in

(05:47):
the years following that overthrow led to Hawaii being annexed
by the US, which happened with a joint resolution that
passed on July. There is, of course, a whole lot
to that story, but mentioned 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

(06:09):
representative of the US and Hawaii on the global stage. So,
according to the family 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,

(06:31):
which he did. Yeah, they joke about this all the
time 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 him in and let him 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

(06:52):
of supervision, and I imagine in a family as close
as Dukes like they were watching him. 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 were in the middle, obviously, but
still um so. As a kid, Duke attended first Waikiki
School and then starting in fourth grade Queen Kahumanu Elementary School.

(07:16):
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. He was also pretty
quiet at home and really just seemed more than anything
to want to be outside as much as possible. When
he was fourteen, Duke went to the Kamama School for

(07:37):
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 um.
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. So
as we mentioned Carlisle, which is associated with the famed

(07:58):
athlete Jim Worp, there are also some strong parallels between
Thorpe's experience at school and kahanamokus Coma as school for
boys was a boarding school want to Americanize the students,
so Hawaiian language was banned and there were lessons and
things like tailoring and carpentry. It was really an industrial school,

(08:19):
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 that's American football, soccer, baseball,
and basketball. In nineteen o eight, his performance as a
halfback on the school soccer team helped them win a

(08:40):
championship when they beat a private school team from Oahu 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 just kind of part of of

(09:01):
Hawaii's transition into being part of the US. But he
did not stay enrolled there either. He dropped out before graduation.
After leaving school behind Kahanamok, who 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

(09:22):
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, Okay, here's what we will do, uh,

(09:43):
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 carpentery skills
that he had learned at school to start making himself longboards.
The style of surfing that he was do was very relaxed, right.
His boards did not even have fins to steer, which

(10:04):
is pretty common at the time, and he and his
friends who had similar boards would just kind of you
get out, catch a wave and stand and opposed while
they rode the wave out. This was not 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, if he would just swim or play

(10:26):
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, So before the break, we talked about

(10:49):
how there was a lot more tourism going on in Hawaii,
and uh, 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

(11:10):
at Waikiki between two popular hotels that had started to
be a kind of a central area for the tourist trade.
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

(11:33):
Native Hawaiians who had developed surfing and all of that
water sport culture in the first place. So as if
that were not enough, there's a whole added layer of
travesty here to some degree, as white business interests started
claiming Hawaii's land, much of which had really not been
owned in the sense that we were talking about owning

(11:54):
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 to add another horrifying aspect forward in promoting surfing

(12:15):
in various publications, even used photos of Duke and wrote
as though he were Duke he used. Then he used
the name Duke Power and wrote about surfing from the
quote native perspective, which he was not. Yeah. That has
caused some confusion over the years where people are like, no,
I think do wrote those articles? And people are like,

(12:37):
if you read this sentence structure, this is not how
that man spoke. It is super stilted and weird. Um
is clearly someone trying to sound like a native Hawaiian
or what they perceive a native Hawaiian would write like
it's pretty gross. Uh. In response to being excluded from
Ford's club, though, Duke and two of his friends, William
Catrell who went by Newt and Kenneth Winter, started of

(13:00):
their own club. There was not a clubhouse here. Uh.
The Mowana 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 dues
were a dollar a year, and the club met just
about every day. It was named Hui Nalu, who he
means to get together and nalu means surf. Hui Nalu

(13:21):
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. So men and women, wealthy people, poor people,
Hawaiian people, white people, people from all walks of life
joined and swam and surf together, and they had parties
on the beach at night. And they also it was

(13:43):
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 exists today. Uh and he and
the other adult members kind of looked out for the
younger members and just taught them how to handle waves.
It was really kind of this nice community. Swimming was

(14:03):
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. He had always effortlessly been a
really strong swimmer, and at the age of twenty one,

(14:23):
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 Rawlins, who was helping
to establish Hawaii's Amateur Athletic Union. He had timed Duke
Kahanamoko swimming and he thought he should start competing, and
so he also helped get Hui Nalu registered with the

(14:45):
a a U so that its members could enter official competitions,
and so Whoi Nalu members signed up for the a
a U sponsored contest. Uh Duke competed in the two
twenty yard race that opened up the competition, and he
won that race. His six man three yard relay team
also won. But most famously, Duke competed in the hundred

(15:08):
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. 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 twelfth,
nineteen eleven. His time was fifty five point four seconds.

(15:32):
The world record at the time was a minute flat.
He also broke the US record in the fifty yards swam,
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

(15:54):
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 speedy at swimmer, there were doubts
about those times. William Rawlins 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

(16:16):
be erroneous, or that there was some other explanation for
Duke's extraordinary time in the one yard. 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

(16:39):
a U officials that the course must have been improperly measured. Additionally,
officials who had never been to Hawaii presumed that the
tides must have helped Khanamoku to his record breaking time
in some way. The times submitted by William Rawlins were
not accepted as official and it seems that all of

(17:00):
y He was pretty insulted by this snub. There was
a huge effort to raise money to send Duke to
compete in the National Swimming Championship. Hawaii just kind of
wanted to prove no He's legit. Uh. That was something
he and his family could never have afforded to do
on their own, which is why the fundraising. And just
as Dukes Surf Club had accepted anyone and everyone, it

(17:22):
seemed that anyone and everyone did what they could to
help Duke get to the Nationals and all of the
steps that had to happen along the way. Money was
also raised to send another member of the Hui Nalu team,
Vincent Genevise, 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

(17:44):
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 Zen, along with tour manager
Lou Henderson and trainer Edward Dude Miller, left for California
on February eighth, nineteen twelve on the s S Honolulin.

(18:04):
They traveled by boat to San Francisco and then by
training to Chicago, then onto 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 had only brought minimal clothes and swim trunks, the
winter cold was really a surprise and a challenge. He
needed a coat and that was purchased for him by

(18:26):
members of the A a U in Chicago. Yeah, apparently
they caught him like stuffing cardboard and his clothes to
try to insulate himself, and they were like, let's just
go to a store. Yeah, we can fix this. Um
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

(18:49):
very little time to prepare, he found himself competing in
a two twenty yard race. He did not do well
at all. He found his legs cramping and his lungs
kind of gas being 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.

(19:11):
But once he loosened up, Duke easily won the fifty
and one yards sprint races. Duke was introduced to University
of Pennsylvania swim coach George Kissler, who agreed to train
him for free. 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

(19:32):
the time. Because he lived in Hawaii, he had not
had any formal training, so Kissler taught him how to start, breathe,
and turn properly in an actual pool setting. Yeah, when
you think about like somebody who has always done a
hundred as a straightaway and now you go, oh no,
you gotta hit the wall and bounce back to for
the second half would be terrifying. Um. But here's the thing.

(19:56):
He got a lot stronger as a consequence of this training.
In one trial, Duke swam in a two 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

(20:18):
the US for trials and then in Europe for the Games,
Dukehanamoku 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 leisurely float around there while his opponents were like

(20:41):
on the pool deck being nervous. He would play his ukulele.
At pool side, he would find a place to curl
up and sleep. The number of naps under things we're
going to talk about this episode delights me a lot.
He seemed 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

(21:04):
him along the way. 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 he'd be like, no, no.
Although that was one of his nicknames and his teammates used,
he was also often asked how to pronounce his name,

(21:26):
and he would say the bee was silent as in geranium,
just to play with them. And although he faced racism
in a variety of ways, from having his athleticism written
off as the result of his Hawaiian jeans to being
refused service and restaurants to being assumed to be Native
American or Mexican, Duke didn't publicly ever talk about his

(21:48):
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 US Olympic team on June eleventh, nineteen twelve. This
was particularly significant because he was the first Hawaiian US
Olympic athlete, and June eleventh is also a Hawaiian holiday,

(22:11):
a day celebrating the unification of the islands under the
holiday's 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, and
it's like, Daddy, these freshwater pools are weird, Like it's

(22:34):
just it's really really sweet, and he's very honest and
open and frank about his feelings. Um, it's they're just
they're very very charming. And coming up, we're going to
talk about Duke's performance at the nineteen twelve Olympic Games.
Right after we have a word from the sponsors who
keeps stuff you missed in history class going. At the

(23:00):
nineteen twelve Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, Duke competed in the
one hundred meter freestyle and won the gold medal. Keep
in mind that is a little bit different than the
one hundred yard which he had been racing. We aren't
switching because 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 Pierre

(23:20):
to Kuberta was still presiding over the Olympics of the
nineteen twelve Games. 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. The Stockholm

(23:42):
races were held outdoors on a course that was one
hundred meters long. There had been a moment when it
looked like Hanamoku and his teammates, who were competing in
the hundred meter might have been disqualified. There had been
confusion over the schedule on the part of the U
s a AU organizers, and the swimmers had actually missed
the semifinals. As the Olympic Jury deliberated over how to

(24:06):
handle the US swimmers. Australian swimmer Cecil Healy, who was
one of the few swimmers who could compete at Kahanamoku's level,
made the case that it would really be unsportsmanlike to
not allow them to compete over a scheduling mix up,
so a new semifinal heat was added to the roster,
and then Duke easily moved on to the finals. But

(24:27):
Duke was once again nowhere to be found as the
finals approached, until his teammate Turk 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,

(24:48):
Duke was celebrated loudly by the crowd, but he was
edged out in crowd enthusiasm by previous podcast subject Jim Thorpe,
who had taken the gold in the decathlon and pentathlon.
Don't think we mentioned Duke at all in the in
the podcast on Jim Thorpe because we were really focused
on the track sports, not the other sports. YEP. After

(25:09):
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,
so sweet. After the Olympics, Duke was invited to give

(25:31):
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

(25:52):
was his first trip away. 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 serve in Atlantic City, but he certainly elicited
a level of enthusiasm for it from spectators that had
not happened there before. Not long after Duke got home

(26:13):
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

(26:36):
he would then be considered a paid professional athlete. He
would be ineligible for future Olympic competition, and so as
a workaround, a committee was formed to set up a
house near Kahanamoku's family in the name of a trust company,
but I mean in practice it was still Duke Kahanamoku's house.
This did enable him to maintain his amateur status, though

(27:00):
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.
And Kahanamoku still hung out with all his kuinalou pals
on the beach, picking up tourist girls under the guys

(27:21):
of teaching them to swim or surf. This got him
into some hot water. His name came up and 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

(27:42):
that he was just a swim instructor. By nine fourteen,
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 Duke Kahanamoku brought it to the
shores beyond Hawaii. That's not entirely true, though. A friend
of Duke's named George Freed, for example, had left Hawaii

(28:03):
to try to make surfing a thing on the shores
of the continental US and seven I was after writer
Jack London had written about him, and there was some interest,
but not the response that would come when Kahanamoku surved
in front of spectators. Freath did gain acclaim for rescuing
seven fishermen off the coast of Venice Beach in eight

(28:24):
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 kick technique,
which came to be known as the Kahanamoku kick. He
would also naturally and in his very relaxed way, look

(28:46):
for opportunities to entertain himself, and when he could serve,
he served. The towering, handsome six ft 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

(29:07):
that he participated in or along the California coast, the
pastime very quickly caught on there. Incidentally, the Kahanamoku kick
was unique in its speed. Was a 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. His

(29:28):
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
thirteen 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

(29:49):
actually come from steering his heavy homemade surfboards as he
paddled out to catch waves. Nowadays this is generally just
called a flutter kick, 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. Yeah,
it's just talked about like I just had to get

(30:11):
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 nineteen fourteen, the first official Surfing exhibition was hosted
at Freshwater Beach in Sydney, Australia. Duke was the main attraction,

(30:31):
and Duke also left his pine surfboard that he had
made while he was there in Australia at Freshwater Beach.
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. Duke

(30:52):
had at this point become an icon of water sport culture,
and for almost twenty years until the nineteen thirties, he
was sharing his love of swimming and surfing all around
the world, and this spread interests in the sports around
but it also was a significant part of the growing
tourism draw for the Hawaiian Islands. And that's where we'll
end today's episode. Next time we will pick right back

(31:15):
up with Duke being an ambassador of water sports and
Hawaiian culture. We'll do a little gear shift for listener mail.
We'll talk about is a Door Duncan, but only a
little um. This is from our listener, Eric right. Thank
you for your great podcast on Isadora Duncan. Since I
had only dipped into her autobiography and had grabbed bits

(31:36):
and pieces of her life from many other sources, including
to film biographies, she'd always come off as a rather
eccentric figure, certainly and a bit shallow not uh. 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,

(31:56):
it was probably unavoidable. But he was also a remarkably
generous man. If a cause took his fancy. Quite a
few of the singers could be subjects of podcasts. Uh.
And then Eric mentions, uh win I retta singer who
was swirled with scandal. Um. I'm really really happy that
he mentioned Paris Singer. We didn't talk about him a

(32:17):
ton in Isadora's episode. But he he also is a
very interesting uh and in some ways conflicted figure, because
he really was a plus at being a total jerk,
but he was also a plus at not Uh. And
he seemed to that pendulum was on the swing, which

(32:38):
is always fascinating to me. Someone else rode into um
to ask about and I'm sorry I didn't pull that
one up, um, but I it just now came to
me to ask how long that scarf had been in
her unfortunate death. Uh. 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

(32:59):
back axle. 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. So
that's that's part of what that was as well. Um,
just in case you were wondering and doing some geometry
math of how that tragedy could have occurred. Uh, now

(33:19):
that I've landed us in a really bummer place, but
if you would like to write to us, you can
absolutely do that. Our address is History Podcast at i
heeart radio dot com. 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. You can do that on the
I heart radio app, at Apple podcasts, or anywhere you
listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History

(33:47):
Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more
podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.