The Three-Year Swim Club Quotes

“Still, who, I wondered, owns the disappearing story that, in, part, they tell? The story of the teacher and the children lives now in so few places: on that weather-beaten wall, in scrapbooks filled with photographs. History isn't a sculptured cup; it's more like a sieve through which so many stories pass and disappear.”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

“She appreciated life, it seemed, appreciated being alive, as if it were some extra gift she hadn't ever expected to receive, as if, perhaps, she wasn't quite worthy of the magnitude of it; and because she appreciated life, he began to do so, too.”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

“in 1937, a schoolteacher in Pu‘unene taught impoverished Japanese-American camp kids how to swim in the plantation’s filthy irrigation ditches, and he challenged them to transform themselves into Olympians. That”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

“But the water, that was the army Bill Smith wanted to join and Smith got his wish. He did his basic training at the Great Lakes naval center in northern Chicago and after getting certified at Bainbridge Island, Maryland, he headed back up to Chicago to serve his country for the rest of the war with other Great Lakes instructors who trained more than 1,000,000 sailors during the course of the war, including the first African Americans to serve.”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

“It was well known and much discussed back then that at least 50% of the sailors killed at Pearl Harbor had died from drowning. 50% of the Navy couldn't swim. The statistics had made the news and it had been Chicago’s backstroker Adolf Kiefer who would come forward to head the navy's effort to teach his sailors how to swim.”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory

“that”
― Julie Checkoway, The Three-Year Swim Club: The Untold Story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and Their Quest for Olympic Glory