 brought to you by Think Tech Hawaii. My name is Elaine Gallant and I am your host. Here is where we talk about reading books, writing books, and everything in between and beyond. Today we have Julie Checkaway, author of The Three-Year Swim Club, the untold story of Maui Sugar Ditch Kids and their quest for Olympic gold. We also have Susie Lewis, a West Maui Book Club member, where we discussed this book only a few weeks ago with Julie in attendance. And I'm thrilled to have you both back to talk about this amazing story that's from starting to finish, Julie. It just keeps achieving success. Wow. I can't say enough about the rise that occurs in this book. So let's get started. Julie, you've been carrying the Olympic torch for this book. Would you like to give us a short synopsis of The Three-Year Swim Club and that you've mentioned will become a movie that we promise to talk about before we end the show? Certainly. Thank you and Aloha to you, Elaine, and to Susie, who I know is here as well. Thank you for having me. I am thrilled to be here, thrilled always to talk about The Three-Year Swim Club because it's a quintessentially Hawaiian story. It's a quintessentially Maui story, but it's also a story of international and global proportion. It's the story of a group of kids who on Maui starting in the 1930s were coached by a sixth grade science teacher named Sawichi Sakamoto. He challenged the children in 1937 to swim in the irrigation ditches, which were the only, they were the only place that the kids had to swim. There was no swimming pool for them to swim in the irrigation ditch, to follow a certain training method and strategy that he had and to train themselves to become Olympic swimmers and represent the United States of America in 1940 on the US swim team in Tokyo at the Olympics. That's so amazing and Sawichi had no formal training, is that correct? Coach Sakamoto was trained as a swimmer only in so far that as he passed his Eagle Scout swim test, which from what I've read and the people I've interviewed over the years, it was, he barely passed it. So it was said that he could do, he said of himself that he could do a passable side stroke, and I think that's true. There are some myths about him that he couldn't swim at all, but that is not true. We actually have pictures of him in swimming pools. He's standing in swimming pools, but he wasn't fond of swimming, but he was an intuitive and smart coach of swimming for reasons that we can talk about. So tell us about how this book came about because, you know, other than the people on Maui at the time that knew about it or the competitors that they faced around the world in the national and international meets that they went to, it really hasn't come to light until you brought it to light. So how did it develop? I know, Susie, you have some interest in the conditions about the way that children lived and everything, so you can talk about that. But how did the story develop from your perspective? Why you? Well, the story was known orally on Maui. It was known and somewhat in writing. It was chronicled extensively in all of the Hawaii papers. It was chronicled in international papers and national papers from the New York Times to the Washington Post, to the LA Times, LA papers, and people all over the world knew the three-year swim club swimmers. Those people were sportswriters, the general public, and these were the most famous swimmers in the entire world in the 1940s and the late 30s and 1940s. They went on to become national champs and to travel all over the world to Australia throughout Europe and ultimately in 1948 to win two golds in the 1948 London austerity games. So they were the most famous swimmers in the world and they were declared by a New York Times sportswriter to be the greatest swimmers in the world. So how did their story get forgotten? It really didn't exactly get forgotten. It got suppressed. It was suppressed in part because of the coming of World War II. With the coming of World War II, the story that eclipsed all other stories about many Japanese American folks was the story of the 442nd 100th and the story of internment, which are both incredibly important stories. But this sports story, in part because the 1940 games were canceled, this story is a little bit, it was eclipsed to some degree, but people in Maui mostly knew the story and there is a swimming pool, the Coach Sakamoto swimming pool on Maui, and there are people in the sports world at the International Swimming Hall of Fame who knew this story. All I did was, there's a guy named Rich Nauchi who's from Oahu who had done a children's play in the early 2000s, early to mid 2000s. So he had locally done this play. He'd also done it on the West Coast with a group called the East West Players. So there was some prominence this story. There were local people who were bringing this story to the fore. What happened was that somebody who wanted to make a movie years ago approached me and told me about the story my literary agent had heard about it in New York City because it was actually a huge national story. And I took it up. I was working as a newspaper journalist at the time and I just took it up and started looking into it. But my purpose really was just to return the story to its proper stature internationally or nationally. Just the people on the mainland didn't know it as well as people in Hawaii. Yeah. Well, I'm glad I found New Life and I'm glad you're the torchbearer for it because it really needs to be told. Susie, you brought up an interesting question during Book Club about the conditions that these children lived in. Do you want to bring that up again? Yeah. First of all, Julie, thank you so much for writing this amazing book. And I'm glad to know that a lot of people know this story because I did not know it. And I've lived on Maui for 20 years and I've never heard about the swim club. So that and, you know, I've driven over past through the cane fields and over past the mill. And, you know, I never knew the history of the workers. And I think that that's one of the main things that I got from the book is just the kind of suppression of the immigrant worker. It could be anywhere in the world, you know, but here it was on our island. And these people came over and were living in horrendous conditions. And really, basically, it was a form of slavery. And, you know, these things need to be known. And we need to not repeat that. And also just the idea of this coach giving these kids the opportunity. And, you know, that was the other thing is just the importance of the teachers and the coaches. You know, I hope this comes out in the movie because it's the best part of the book to me is just enlightening, you know, how these kids, if given the opportunity, what they were able to do and having the coach and every, you know, every coach and every teacher, it's this amazing, just I hope they just really reveal that to everybody. And you should, we should mention too that these children are Filipino, Japanese American, Chinese American. Is that correct? And yeah, they were some were Portuguese. Yeah, they were there were kids from all different backgrounds living in, you know, segregated camps, largely segregated camps. And this is in Konone Maui. But this was true of sugar plantations all across Hawaii. And, you know, from the late 19th century up till really the labor movement in the 50s and ultimately the closing of sugar plantations not too long ago. I do want to say something that Susie said. The first thing is that interesting that on Maui you you've lived there but you didn't have a sense of what plantation life was like. And I think that's fascinating. I do want to clarify that I'm careful in the book, I think. And I think it's good for us to be careful to not equate the plantation system with literal slavery. Literal slavery slavery in the American South was a very specific system. So was the sugar plantation system and the pineapple system on the various islands. But in the beginning, people were under contract labor, it was like indentured servitude. Later, around the time that Sakamoto was coaching the kids in the 1930s, 20s, 30s, 40s, we're headed into a very different kind of structure, which was incredibly paternalistic. But it wasn't literal slavery. And I think that's important. The conditions were challenging. But people took great pride in their homes, however limited their resources were. The challenge for people on plantations at that time was that they were paid by the plantations for their work. And yet they largely had to shop in plantation stores. And they were using using credit. And so people would often get debt. They had no largely no means of social mobility upwards. And so what that meant was when Sakamoto came along, he was looking at the kids, the Nisei kids, and saying, look, I want a little bit more for them. And I don't know how to give it to them exactly, except possibly through sports. And the little more that was going to get them really further ahead was a college education. It was unheard of for most kids to go on to college from Kunae Maui. Sakamoto had gone to college, he'd gone to Normal Teachers University, Teachers College on Oahu. And he'd traveled a bit, he'd been to Japan. But it was rare for kids, he was a middle class kid, the child of a shopkeeper in Waikapu. And so he was from a very different social class than the kids. When you look at the kids, and he saw an opportunity for them to become athletes, specifically not to, their end goal wasn't to go to the Olympics. The end goal was to get college scholarships, be able to get up and out of the circumstances in which they were living, and to be socially mobile and try to move into the middle class. And to do that, they had to get off the island because there was no place to go to college on the island. And there was no place really at the time prior to Sakamoto's becoming a coach at UH, University of Hawaii. University of Hawaii wasn't a place to swim at that time. The place to go would have been Ohio University, Yale University, Indiana University, and it is two, at least two of those that he sent many of the kids. I'm glad you brought that up, but I also want to bring up something else. That is the book itself. Can you see it? I don't know if you can. Maybe we need to bring it up. It's kind of fading it out. If we can see it from the internet, there we go. The three years from now, that's the cover. And that's the Natatorium on Owampu, right? That's right in Waikiki. Yes. And the other picture is the Putunene sugar plantation itself. I can't see it. It looks like it's a group of the kids who are there at the Baldwin pool in Putunene, which was the pool that was built for them after they had, in 1936, started to beat white kids in the white kids pool. Yes. Okay. So Sakamoto had a lot against him in trying to achieve what he wanted to with these children. So what were the odds of him having any kind of success at all? Can you shine a light on that? Well, he had certain privilege, and that was that he was middle class. He had access to some personal money. He had an amazing spouse named Mary who was incredibly supportive, but he was facing the entire plantation system. Number one, the kids weren't allowed to swim in the ditches, even though that's where he wanted them to swim. The ditches were verboten because they were dangerous. They were mucky. They included, because as you know about the East Maui irrigation system, EMI was this vast network. It still is today, a vast network of irrigation ditches that snake down from high in the rainforest, essentially in the mountains. They bring down with them in rain cows, machetes, all sorts of implements, the tritus, feces, whatever. And many kids on the plantations would drown in these ditches because they didn't know how to swim. People are under the illusion that kids in Hawaii know how to swim, but kids who lived in the dry part of the Valley Isle, which is Maui, had no access to the ocean, and the only place they could even cool off was the ditches. So the kids were not allowed to swim in the ditches. So Sakamoto, one of the odds was just getting the plantation powers at B to allow the kids to swim. And the way he got that privilege was to say, I'll babysit them. This was in 1932, well before he established the three-year swim club. The other thing was really to have the resources to get the kids to go to meets, but they didn't have bathing suits. They didn't have much nutrition that was suitable for really bulking up muscles. And Sakamoto had to really build the kids up from scratch, which is what he did with his wife. He fed them, and he was working with kids who he really shaped and molded into these incredible elite athletes, but much against the plantation system. But at the plantation system, there was a pretty robust athletic system, but that was run by something called Alexander Settlement House. And it was a very benevolent Christian organization. The guy who was the head of that at the time was a guy named E.L. Damkroger, who wasn't a bad guy, but he was a functionary of the plantation. He was a mainland guy who came in to the islands with good intentions to try through muscular Christianity to build athletes out of the kids, but also to keep them and keep their parents from organizing in terms of labor. If he could organize a Damkroger and the plantation could organize kids and their parents around sports, then they wouldn't have free time to get into trouble, i.e., to form labor union or other kinds of trouble that the plantation would have seen. So Sakamoto was up against people like Damkroger and other folks who really wanted to control athletics. And then the children themselves. Susie, we talked about K.O. Nakamoto. Nakamoto, no, K.O. Nakamoto. K.O. Nakama. Oh my gosh. 14 years old, weighs nothing. He gets one meal a day. What did he eat? He ate like a banana and... No, no, no. He didn't get one meal a day. He was very thin. He was by nature very, very thin. You know, I think people ate meagerly in large families. I had a wonderful experience with this guy, Pachi Tsukano, who was one of the original members of the team. He was a little tiny kid and he had a couple of brothers, Shangy and his brother, John, who were also in the three-year swim club in the early days. The pictures of them, when you see them, they're pretty rad tag kids. They're pretty dirty. But Pachi, I saw him before he died in Honolulu. We got together with a bunch of the old swimmers from the original days and he pulled out a can of Vienna sausages and he said, look at these sausages. You see a can of Vienna sausages in the store, like yeah. So he goes, you know, we used to fight over these sausages. I don't know how many kids were exactly in his family, but yeah, there was struggle for sure. So Kio was super thin and Sakamoto had to build him up, which he did with all the kids through food, but also through, you know, other property nutrition, having a nutty candy or drink, soda pop, making sure they got good sleep. He built machines for them to lift weights. He was a real innovator in terms of how he would build the human body and he was a really generous soul in that way. I thought it was interesting. He came up with the method of them kind of swimming against the current, like resistant training. Yes, it's called flume training. Flume training, as we know it today, you know those, the Michael Phelps and the endless pools that you see? Sakamoto invented those. Nobody gives him credit for it. He invented the notion of swimming against the current. It did not exist except on the plantation where the kids were, you know, swimming for their lives and then he harnessed the power of the downward stream. He would open the gate. There was a kind of crank that he could open and close with the commission of the plantation and let the rushing water come in and he'd have the kids swim up against the current, which is flume training. And then on the way back down, he would have them rest and float and that created interval training as well. So what we know today as interval training, what we know today as the endless pool was the original ditch. And what other achievements are still happening today? I would like to know what other achievements came out of these boys and girls and Sakamoto and, you know, everyone involved because there really was a tremendous amount of peripheral achievements that happened. They went on to serve in the war. Exactly. Exactly. Those who could serve did. The men, women were obviously left behind but served on the home front clearly and suffered as well in many ways in terms of racism and anti-Japanese sentiment at the time. A lot of the guys went on and served in the 442nd and 100th. The bloodiest and most heroic regiments and infantry in the history of war at the time in a segregated unit in Europe throughout Europe. Coming back because of the GI Bill, many of them were able to go to college. Some still swam. Some went on to continue to break records. Others came back from college and they became coaches and teachers like Sakamoto. Sakamoto himself left Maui in about 1945, I believe, and went to UH. I may have the exact date wrong, but he began, he became the head coach at UH where he coached hundreds and hundreds of collegiate swimmers and people from all over the world came to swim with him well into the 1980s. Specifically in the 50s and 60s, people came from all over the mainland, came from Australia to learn how to swim with Sui P. Sakamoto who never was made the head Olympic coach but who had tens of Olympic champions that were his kids. He also went on to found something called the Hawaii Swim Club which is in existence today headed by an amazing guy named Keith Arakaki who on Wahu in Honolulu still works with kids and carries on the tradition of Sui P. Sakamoto. And we should mention that some other names swam, sort of, swam in and out with these children. Dukahonimoku, Bill Smith. Dukahonimoku did not swim with the team but he traveled with the team. He was an influence with them. That's what I should have said. Yes. And then Weissmiller I think was another name. No? No. They met with Mike Weissmiller when they were traveling on the mainland. They would meet up with him because at that point Johnny Weissmiller was Tarzan and he was, you know, he had been Tarzan for many, many years and so they'd meet up with him in Hollywood. They'd meet up with John Wayne but Weissmiller at that time had already left for Hollywood. Yes. And Weissmiller went on to be in Billy, Billy Rose's Aquacade in New York in 1939 when the kids were traveling on the mainland so they saw him in things like the Aquacade. It's wonderful that they got to meet such influential people. Now we have just under five minutes left so we do want to talk about the legacy of the three-year swim club. What do you see happening? Well I think there are a lot of things. The biggest thing to me about the three-year swim club, you know, it's a remarkable story but it's a story about representation. I've been working with the Smithsonian for the past couple of years. The Smithsonian got in touch with me but specifically to get in touch with the Sakamoto family to make sure that a photo of Suichi Sakamoto is now in the National Portrait Gallery and to me that's also about representation. What you have here are working class sugar plantation kids of all different backgrounds but specifically Japanese American Filipino and you didn't at that time and you still don't exactly see heroic figures and so it's a writing of history. It's getting history right that these were great chants, great heroes and they belong in the Pantheon next to the Weissmiller's next to the Buster crabs and even next to Abduk Hanamoku who's a great swimmer and surfer but is often seen as the only sort of Hawaiian representative of sport. But I thought you were saying that it and this kind of surprised me that they were very well known and everybody knew about him and so they did have that notoriety but I don't see it now in today. That's because Maui has changed. Maui, who lives on Maui now, white people. Maui has been taken over not entirely but the original plantation system has been dismantled. It's ended and so you have multi generations of families who their parents lived in Pune and they talk to each other but I'm not sure they're talking to the new people who live on Maui. It's a different Maui but the stories are still there and the stories of the 442nd and 100th are still there. You have the Nisei Veterans Memorial Center. It would be really nice if more people who moved to Maui had a sense of the history because it's right there for the finder. Well this brings me to the question about you know you've got this movie. Now there you go. That's going to put us on the map. That's going to put the swim team on the map, right? Because it's going to be an amazing story for people. I think it'll be a great movie. What kind of hopes do you have and what's your involvement in the movie that's going to be coming up? Well a couple years ago it looked like things were pretty fast-tracked for the movie and we came the group of people who the producers who were working on it and I came to Maui and we had this great you know location scout you know they were walking around getting ready to film but these things take a lot longer than it can be up to 10 to 15 years from the time people say they want to make a movie to the time they can do it so I don't I don't know if it's going to come in the near future. I'm just happy that the book is out and hopefully if there's a film which there should be at some point if it's in it's in development if you look on you know imdb.com it'll say in development but they often take a long long time so so much for our talent scout our location scout visit but you know we found where they will film eventually. Well maybe our book club can start getting it out there getting the world I know it opened my eyes to it and made me so curious about that and also the Olympics and just that whole process you know what it would take to to qualify for the Olympics and then just how random it is when you know certain these wars come up and your year that you would have been perfect you know had the best scores and everything you don't get to perform and um you know and the countries that host and then the people that boy got and I was looking at the whole timeline of the Olympics it really there were so many avenues of interest that this book created for me I really thank you so much for writing it and I thank you too I enjoyed this book I've read it three times for various reasons one for first for pleasure of course and then the second time for reviewing and also the show so I don't know it as well as you do but I love this book and I wish it much success I wish you much success we're closing right now I would like to thank both of you for joining me I'd like to thank our technicians jaffa delar producer and of course our underwriters where would we be without you many mahalos aloha everyone books books books will return in two weeks with read a foresight thank you thank you so much for watching think tech hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in and donate to us at think.kawaii.com mahalo