Tracking a Tree
Is Jesse Owens' fabled Olympic tree alive and well on campus?

By Jeff Nielsen, Ohio State Alumni Magazine

He found the suspect near the library. A tall fellow with long arms and a rough exterior, an exact match to the mental picture the investigator had created of his quarry. Right height, right age, right . . . everything.
But not enough for a conviction.

There wasn't enough hard evidence. Records had been lost, key witnesses had died, and memories had faded over the years. Modern investigative methods were about all that remained. "I'm really hoping that DNA testing will come up with something," said John Nagy, who has been on the case for 20 years. "Without that, you really can't say for sure. "But considering the facts about the tree, you can't say it's not the one." Nagy's suspect is a rough-trunked, big-leafed English oak on the south side of the Main Library on the Ohio State campus. Nagy sees it as more than just a tree. To him, it is one of Jesse Owens' Olympic trees.

It was back when he was a student at Ohio State that Nagy began searching for the location of the tree the world-famous track star said he had planted at his alma mater. Later, as a horticulturist at the university, Nagy received calls from people wondering about the tree. Two decades later, he is still on the trail. "I've spent hundreds of hours on this," said Nagy, now a graphic designer for Ohio State's biomedical communications media group. "It's kind of a hobby of mine."

Few people have heard of the Olympic trees, but that doesn't lessen their historical value. The trees are forever linked to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, one of the most significant athletic events ever. German leader Adolf Hitler had wanted to use the Games as a showcase for Aryan supremacy, but Owens dashed those plans.

In one of the most dominating performances in Olympic history, Owens won four gold medals, smashed three Olympic records, and altogether embarrassed Hitler's "supermen."

The German people presented each gold medal winner with a potted oak sapling. Owens, because of his performance in the broad jump and the 100- and 200-meter races, received three of the tiny trees. A fourth was awarded to his four-man, 400-meter relay team.

The Germans hoped the trees would grow to create long-lasting tributes to the athletes' performances. A German editorial cartoonist even drew a picture of Owens, with white whiskers and a cane, sitting beneath his mighty oaks 50 years later.

That vision wasn't to be. Of the estimated 24 trees the American team received, as few as four are alive today. Some didn't make it out of Europe, and some didn't survive a Department of Agriculture quarantine imposed after they were brought into the U.S.

Things didn't get much easier for the trees that lived to be planted. The saplings had picked up the nickname of "Hitler trees." Anti-Nazi sentiment caused many recipients to remove the identifying plaques and markers from their trees during World War II so they wouldn't be vandalized.

"That's sad, because the trees were a gift from the German people and something they were proud of," Nagy said. "Hitler didn't even touch the trees."

Without identification, obscurity followed, even for the trees given to the Games' greatest athlete.

It wasn't until the 1964 release of the documentary Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin that people began to seek out the trees again. Two more decades passed before anyone started to document where those trees were. By then, it was too late to make a complete count.

"There may be some or many more trees that haven't been found and chronicled yet," said James Ross Constandt, whose book The 1936 Olympic Oaks: Where Are They Now? details what is known about the trees.

Some say Owens brought home four trees from the Games. Others say he brought three, with the fourth going to an Olympic teammate. And depending on which account you believe, Owens' three or four trees could be planted in any of eight places.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, several Olympic historians tried to account for all the trees. Their efforts came too late to provide an accurate picture of the whereabouts of Jesse Owens' trees. Owens, who attended Ohio State from 1933 to 1936 and received an honorary doctorate in 1972, died Mar. 31, 1980.

One version of what happened to Owens' trees is as follows:

1. The first tree Owens proudly planted in the backyard of his mother's home in Cleveland. He had purchased the house for her with the financial windfall that came with his Olympic performance. After his mother's death in 1940, the house was sold and the tree forgotten. When history buffs sought it out in 1964, they found a tree on death row. The house had fallen into disrepair and needed to be torn down. The tree, planted close to the house and more than 30 feet tall, couldn't be relocated. It died when the wrecking crane came.

2. The second tree was planted at East Tech High School in Cleveland, where Owens attended. That tree never grew to maturity.

3. The third tree was planted on the grounds of James Ford Rhodes High School in Cleveland, near the track where Owens practiced. It still lives.

4. The fourth tree was given to the winning 4 x 100-meter relay team. Owens, Ralph Metcalf, Frank Wykoff, and Foy Draper competed on the team.

The team voted on who should take the tree home, and Draper won the vote. Draper later lost his life in World War II, and the tree, which still lives, was planted on the campus of the University of Southern California in his memory.

There may be one more tree to account for. Owens, because of his stature, may have been given a tree of his own for the relay win. No records were kept by the U.S. team about how many trees were received, or where they were planted.

It also is possible that Owens was given a fourth tree by one of his Olympic teammates. For many, the thought of lugging a tree around Europe during the post-Games tour wasn't inviting.

"At the time, the trees were insignificant to some of the athletes. They got the gold medals and that's what they wanted," Constandt said. "Some of these trees were simply discarded.

" While Owens may have officially received only three trees, he went on record as having four planted in his honor after the Olympic Games.

In the documentary Jesse Owens Returns to Berlin, Owens says: "And what about the oak trees that were given to me to plant? One, I gave to the Rhodes High School in Cleveland, Ohio, the city where I spent my youth. One has flourished in the backyard of my mother's home in Cleveland. And one still stands among the cherished mementos on All-American Row at Ohio State University, where I spent my college days. And the fourth one? The fourth one unfortunately has died."

Some feel that Owens may have exaggerated the number of trees he received. Biographer William J. Baker, a sports history professor at the University of Maine, said it wouldn't have been unlike Owens to do so.

"Jesse said what he thought people wanted to hear," Baker said. "Later in life, he was making speeches, dramatizing his life to make it as attractive as possible. That often meant embellishing the truth in ways that would not stand up to further scrutiny."

Even Baker, who has spent countless hours researching Owens, doesn't know if the tree supposedly planted on the Ohio State campus is such an embellishment.

"I can't speak to whether or not there is a tree at Ohio State," Baker said. "I do not have the smoking gun, you could say, because I don't have any precise documentation that a tree was actually planted there."

Regardless of how many trees Owens received, he always maintained that one was destined for Ohio State. During and after the 1936 Olympic Games, reporters repeatedly questioned Owens about the trees. Each time, he answered that one would be planted on campus.

Columbus Dispatch columnist Bill McKinnon suggested that Owens plant the tree in the All-American Buckeye Grove, where Ohio State football greats and other athletes had trees planted for them.

No records, photographs, or newspaper articles regarding the tree's planting at Ohio State have been uncovered. Many think the lack of evidence chops right through Nagy's premise.

"There is no reference to Jesse Owens' planting a tree anywhere on campus," said Raimund Goerler, an associate professor in University Archives. "You're trying to tell me that the university, even in the 1930s, wasn't conscious enough to have a ceremony to plant that tree?"

And while it would have been easy for Owens to plant the tree himself, if the university wasn't conscious enough to hold a ceremony, it would have been unlike him to do so.

"He wouldn't have planted it by himself," said Chuck McMurray, a longtime friend of Owens'. "He was too humble of a person to do that."

Most of the trees that were planted by the returning athletes were put in the ground between Sept. 30 and Nov. 1 of 1936 during official ceremonies, according to Olympic historian June Wuest Becht.

"The planting of these trees was a big deal," Becht said. "Of the people I have found that planted trees, all of them had newspaper articles from the event. They had pictures of people with shovels.

"This was pretty big stuff on the campuses where the trees were planted, from what I have seen."

There is no mention of Owens' planting a tree on campus in the Columbus newspapers or the Ohio State student newspaper, even though he made three well-recorded trips to the city in 1936.

The first trip in early August was much ballyhooed, filled with parades and presentations to Owens from the city's leaders. The second recorded trip was in October, when Owens campaigned for Republican presidential candidate Alf M. Landon. The third trip was in November, when Owens attended the Ohio State-Michigan game with his wife.

Three trips, plenty of ceremonies. None reportedly involved a tree.

"If you are trying to prove the tree is on campus, that's a significant problem," Goerler said. "It's hard to prove a negative, but I really don't think that the tree is here."

Many believe otherwise, including Owens' daughter, Marlene Owens-Rankin.

"My father intended to plant them in places that were extremely meaningful to him; that's why he chose to plant one at Ohio State," Owens-Rankin said. "There is one there. If there's not, it's not because it wasn't planted there."

While there may not be concrete proof that one of Owens' trees is on campus, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence. The tree Nagy has found near the library is the right age and species to be one of the Olympic trees.

Nagy, who graduated in 1979, recalls horticulture professor Phil Kozel telling students that the tree was on the south side of the Main Library.

The student newspaper, the Lantern, reported the same in its Aug. 8, 1978, issue. But both Kozel and the Lantern had one significant detail wrong. They thought that the Olympic tree was a white oak, instead of an English oak.

University officials looked for the tree after the Lantern article appeared, but determined that the white oak on the south side of the library was too young to be an Olympic tree. A few feet away from that white oak is an English oak, the one that Nagy believes is the Jesse Owens tree.

"I've had all these people tell me that it's not here," said Nagy, as he set a video clip to run on his computer. "But right here, you have Owens saying that it's on campus."

The clip is from the 1964 documentary, where Owens says a tree "stands among the cherished mementos on All-American Row at Ohio State University."

There is no All-American Row at Ohio State, but Owens may have been referring to All-American Buckeye Grove. The grove originally stood east of Ohio Stadium. Today it's located south of the stadium.

If Owens planted his tree at All-American Grove, it didn't stay there. But Nagy can account for how the tree might have ended up near the library.

In the 1940s, construction projects near All-American Grove caused the relocation of several of the trees planted there. The Jesse Owens tree would have been about the right size to be transplanted, and curiously, an oak tree was planted on the south side of the library during that time.

Urban forester Steve Cothrel analyzed the oak tree in 1988 to determine its age. In his findings, he wrote: "Regardless of other evidence unearthed, this tree is without question the same age as the Olympian trees."

Science may even go further toward proving the tree's heritage.

At Nagy's request, Glenn Howe, an assistant professor in the School of Natural Resources, recently collected leaves from the tree and isolated DNA samples from them.

The samples could be tested against DNA samples from surviving Olympic trees. Regardless of the results, they could never fully complete the story.

"This wouldn't be unlike using DNA evidence in court," Howe said. "You may be able to give some rough probabilities on how likely or unlikely something is, but you can never really be definitive."

Taking additional samples from the few remaining documented Olympic trees would be a tedious, money-consuming project.

"There's a trade-off between getting the information and how much money you want to spend on it," Howe said. "Until you do it, it would be hard to say how costly it would be.

" It all adds up to a standoff. On one side, you have Owens himself, claiming an Olympic tree was planted at Ohio State. On the other, you have the overwhelming lack of evidence that such a tree was planted.

On one side, you have Nagy, who has spent years trying to trace the tree's history. On the other, you have the university, which would be proud to honor the tree-if Owens indeed planted it.

"That people still wonder and care about the tree says something more about us than it does about Jesse Owens," Baker said. "It says that things like those trees are important to us as symbols of something or someone we give importance to."

SIDE STORY:

Finding and authenticating the Jesse Owens tree is an obsession for John Nagy.

Folders overflowing with research are stuffed in one of his desk drawers. He maintains a Web site on his search. His computer is dotted with Post-It notes listing relevant phone numbers.

"It's hard to say why I've spent so much time on this," Nagy admitted. "But when I was little, I heard a lot about Jesse Owens and I thought he was really cool. He was from Cleveland, and we were from Cleveland. I think that's probably where it started."

Jesse Owens himself provided the rest of the inspiration.

In 1978, Nagy and a friend were walking in downtown Columbus when they saw a small crowd of people gathered around one smiling man-Jesse Owens.

Nagy, then a college student, didn't have a pen or a piece of paper for an autograph. Owens graciously supplied both, and signed: "My best to you always, Jesse Owens, '36 Olympics."

"What impressed me the most was that Jesse seemed glad to give me his autograph," Nagy said. "I just wish I had asked him about the tree."

A few years later, when Nagy's search began for the tree began in earnest, it was too late to ask Owens.

Owens died in 1980, after a long fight against cancer. He is remembered as one of the greatest and most loved athletes ever.

"At the time that I met Jesse Owens, I didn't realize that there was going to be a controversy about that tree," Nagy said. "If I had asked, he would have probably met me on campus to show me it. "He was that nice of a guy."

Jeff Nielsen is a communications associate for the Alumni Association and a frequent contributor to OSAM.

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