Featurey column 2: The Legend Of Jesse's Trees

Thank you so much, halfmiler, jgmacg, Jones and the rest who have given their critiques to myself and others so far.

Again, I wrote this for Buckeye Sports Bulletin, a magazine that covers Ohio State athletics. It's a shorty, but one I don't think a lot of people knew about.

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The Legend Of Jesse’s Trees
All Olympiads are historic for their own reasons, but in many respects the 1936 Berlin Games stand alone.

Just about all of you know the Adolf Hitler/Jesse Owens angle with Owens, an African-American Buckeye, stealing the show at the Aryan-touting dictator’s Olympics to the tune of four gold medals.

Some of you may have even seen German photographer Leni Riefenstahl’s epic documentary about the games, “Olympia.” Beautifully shot but controversial nonetheless, it paved the way for Bud Greenspan’s Olympic film work years later.

But one thing that even many of the most ardent Olympics fans may not realize is that each gold medalist in Berlin received an oak sapling from the Black Forest in the Baden-Württemberg state of Germany.

It is here where this story begins.

The saplings represent the rarest of Olympic artifacts. Uniforms and other clothing worn during the Games are bought and sold all the time. As unfathomable as it may seem, medals have been auctioned to the highest bidder. But the oaks aren’t to be transferred. Sometimes, they’re not even to be found.

In ’36, the United States won 24 gold medals, second to the host Germans. Based on my findings, though, it looks like as few as just four of the accompanying oaks are still standing nearly 70 years later.

The tree John Woodruff planted to commemorate his win in the 800-meter dash is alive and well in Connellsville, Pa.; high jump gold medalist Cornelius Johnson’s oak is in the back yard of a house in Los Angeles’ Koreatown; discus winner Ken Carpenter’s is in Associates Park on the USC campus.

And then there’s Jesse’s.

Tree No. 1 (for winning the long jump) was planted at his mother’s house in the Glenville neighborhood of Cleveland and has died, according to Columbus resident Jeff Nagy, who has researched the Owens trees for nearly 30 years.

Tree No. 2 (for winning the 4x100-meter dash) was given to a pair of USC teammates — Foy Draper and Frank Wykoff — on behalf of Owens and Ralph Metcalfe. It died of root rot in 2002 and a replacement was planted at Associates Park soon after. (A rededication ceremony for the two trees in that location was held as part of the USC-UCLA track meet last month.)

Tree No. 3 (for winning the 200-meter dash) stands proud near the football stadium at Cleveland Rhodes High School. Owens practiced and ran meets there because his alma mater, Cleveland East Tech, did not have a track.

Tree No. 4 (for winning the 100-meter dash) is where things get interesting.

Though a number of local and national media outlets reported, shortly after the Olympic flame was extinguished, that Owens was planning to plant a tree on the Ohio State campus, no photos of him doing so are believed to exist.

“I talked to a friend of his and he said that it wouldn’t have been unusual for him to not tell the papers when he was going to do it,” Nagy said. “I was also talking to someone who said, ‘Well, he could have just showed up on campus one night with a shovel and a tree.’ ”

Over time, various teammates and classmates of Owens have opined that a tree just south of Ohio State’s main library is the one that came back with him from Germany.

During a trip to the library grounds with Nagy, he points out the tree believed to be the Olympic oak. It is the one that urban forester Steven R. Cothrel (now with the city of Upper Arlington, Ohio) wrote about in a report he filed in 1988. Deeming the tree was 52 or 53 years old, “this would indicate it was planted in about 1936,” he wrote. “Coincidence?”

For her part, Owens’ daughter, Marlene Owens-Rankin, told me, “The question of whether the oak tree on campus, is it the oak tree? I don’t know. I guess it just depends on if you want it to be it or not. If it can be traced back to 1936, then that’s good enough for me.”

To find the tree, stand facing the Oval from the library’s middle set of main doors, take 21 paces and turn right. Then walk 60 paces, turn right again and walk another 60 strides. You’ll be standing near the southwest corner of Oval Drive and Neil Avenue and if you look to your right, you’ll see a beautiful oak that is roughly 50 feet tall and well over 100 inches in diameter at its base.

There is no plaque or marker to identify what could be — just maybe — a great part of this nation’s athletic history.

 

(CONT.)

Tree No. 2 (for winning the 4x100-meter dash) was given to a pair of USC teammates — Foy Draper and Frank Wykoff — on behalf of Owens and Ralph Metcalfe. It died of root rot in 2002 and a replacement was planted at Associates Park soon after. (A rededication ceremony for the two trees in that location was held as part of the USC-UCLA track meet last month.)

Tree No. 3 (for winning the 200-meter dash) stands proud near the football stadium at Cleveland Rhodes High School. Owens practiced and ran meets there because his alma mater, Cleveland East Tech, did not have a track.

Tree No. 4 (for winning the 100-meter dash) is where things get interesting.
[I don't like this because it's like telling the reader that things haven't been interesting so far.]
Though a number of local and national media outlets reported [at the time], shortly after the Olympic flame was extinguished, that Owens was planning to plant a tree on the Ohio State campus, no photos of him doing so are believed to exist. [Compound/complex sent. - break up]

“I talked to a friend of his and he said that it wouldn’t have been unusual for him to not tell the papers when he was going to do it,” Nagy said. “I was also talking to someone who said, ‘Well, he could have just showed up on campus one night with a shovel and a tree.’ ”

Over time, various teammates and classmates of Owens have opined [word choice - unless you're punning on "opine tree", which would be even worse] that a tree just south of Ohio State’s main library is the one that came back with him from Germany.

During a trip to the library grounds with Nagy, he points out the tree believed to be the Olympic oak. It is the one that urban forester Steven R. Cothrel (now with the city of Upper Arlington, Ohio) wrote about in a report he filed in 1988. Deeming [w.c.] the tree was [to be] 52 or 53 years old, “this would indicate it was planted in about 1936,” he wrote. “Coincidence?”

For her part, Owens’ daughter, Marlene Owens-Rankin, told me, “The question of whether the oak tree on campus, is it the oak tree? I don’t know. I guess it just depends on if you want it to be it or not. If it can be traced back to 1936, then that’s good enough for me.”

To find the tree, stand facing the Oval from the library’s middle set of main doors, take 21 paces and turn right. Then walk 60 paces, turn right again and walk another 60 strides. You’ll be standing near the southwest corner of Oval Drive and Neil Avenue and if you look to your right, you’ll see a beautiful oak that is roughly 50 feet tall and well over 100 inches in diameter at its base. [This is your lede.....]

There is no plaque or marker to identify what could be — just maybe [weak] — a great part of this nation’s athletic history.



DD -

See line edit above. This is a good story reasonably well told.

Since it's a kind of "buried treasure" story, though, it needs a little adventure, or at least a little mystery, in the telling. I'd try opening with your excellent directions to the tree. That's your "X marks the spot" moment. Then take the reader back through the history of how the treasure may (or may not) have come to be there. Land the piece on his daughter's quote, which will then have some historical and dramatic resonance.

You can afford to put a bit of writing into a piece like this too (i.e., some little lyric moment about the tree itself or the shade it casts or the students sitting oblivious beneath it, etc.), as long as it doesn't come at the expense of the content of the story or the pace of the telling.

As an experiment, next time you do something like this, write the story straight through, as you have. Then cut it up into narrative chunks and see if you can reorder the telling, the chronology, the history to make it more interesting.

And take as much time as you can in the planning process to think of what really lies at the heart of the story. In this case, I'd say that, weirdly, the tree represents a gift to OSU from Hitler, via Owens. "Hitler's Gift" is a strange story slug , certainly, but one that I'd read immediately.


Thanks again for posting.

 

Mr Dawson,

Many good points and nice line edit made by the previous poster. I stress but one suggestion and it might do a lot of healing.

A long wind-up stands in the way of the story.

It's about a tree. Show the tree in the lede. Sentence 1. Not sentence 4.

One other:

Can we show (portray) Owens receiving it, carrying it in his lap on the trip home, going through customs, at the planting, passing by?

It's a tree. We need something active at the risk of the story being a still life. Okay, a landscape.

Great idea all the same. (I was just in C-bus, I woulda looked you up if I'd known you're down that way.)

YHS, etc

 

Thanks for all of the suggestions!

Former miler: I hope you had a great time in my beloved city. It's not Halifax, Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Montreal, Quebec or Calgary but I bet it can hold its own with Regina or London.

 

Mr Dawson,

Trust me, it's better than Ottawa. Even Regina is.

YHS, etc