The MAC’s Influence on Swimming in the U.S.

Dive into the world of early Olympic swimming with Michael Loynd, the author of “The Watermen” and discover the impact of the MAC on the aquatic arena in the latest MAC Connections Podcast. #MACConnections #olympics #onlyattheMAC

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Missouri Athletic Club Connections highlights the foremost private club in St. Louis known for attracting exceptional people and enriching lives for generations.

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Hello and welcome to Missouri Athletic Club Connections, a podcast highlighting Missouri's only premiere athletic club. The MAC is recognized as the foremost private club in Saint Louis, known for attracting exceptional people and enriching lives for generations. I'm MAC Membership Development Executive Kara Kelpe. And today I have with me Michael Loynd. He is a representative of the IOC's World Union of Olympic Cities, a member of the International Society of Olympic Historians an Olympic lecturer and the author of The Waterman The Birth of American Swimming and One Young Man's Fight to Capture Olympic Gold. Thank you for joining me today, Michael. Thank you for having me. I appreciate this. Wonderful. And that's a mouthful. You're pretty significant. Well, I don't know about that, but but I do like like sports. And in fact, I just became the chairman of the Saint Louis Sports Commission here, so. my goodness. Supremely excited about that. Yeah. Thank you. Love that. Thank you. Just tremendous to have you spend another day here at the MAC. I know you were recently with our MAC book club. Yes. And gave a wonderful discussion and led some wonderful conversation about your book. So thank you. it was. It was great. You know, again, from Saint Louis, Love Saint Louis, loved sports, always loved the MAC. So it was an honor to be there. Well, good. Well, we're so thrilled that that could bring you then to join us today. I don't mean to rehash the entire book club discussion, but I know it was a good one. But let us know just a little bit. For those of us who weren't able to attend that book club meeting. Tell us a little synopsis about the book. Yeah, well, really, to start it out and this is where the MAC comes into play. I mean, the the USA Swimming, our USA swim team is the greatest Olympic legacy in all of Olympic history. We have won more gold medals than the next 11 countries combined. So just put that in perspective, that's great. But there was a time when nobody in America swam and that was at the turn of the 20th century. And because of things the MAC did and others we became this huge dynasty. But it all goes back to that. Wow. So the book is basically about that time period. And it was about the teenager who changed it all because at the time there was probably a dozen swimming pools in the entire country. Less than 600 people swam in the entire country. Most people looked at it as this obscure, kind of uncouth sport. They associated it with the poor people who would have to bathe in our city's waterways because they had no bathing facilities at the tenement houses. And so it was just not looked at in a good way. And this teenage kid whose dad was basically the Bernie Madoff of the day, he was a big Wall Street swindler, but he had walked out on the boy and his mom years before it happened. They were kind of living in poverty. His name was Charles Daniels The boy. And swimming was the only place he could go. And it was the way he the one thing he did that could redeem his family name. And again, at the time, it wasn't a known sport. And in the process, he not only invents the freestyle stroke, which is weird to think that that was invented only about 100 years ago. You think it's been around forever? No kidding. But it totally changes the culture of the United States. And to do so, he has to go up against the British Empire, which invented the competitive sport of swimming, had dominated for 75 years. Nobody had even come close to beating them. And this kid takes them on. It's just a great underdog story. I loved every minute of it. No kidding. That's sounds tremendous. Well, I've just started the book and I was mentioning this earlier. I think you paint a wonderful picture of some things I wasn't aware of about the history of swimming, because you just take it for granted, like so many other sports, that it has been part of our American culture and it really is relatively new in the history of things. Absolutely. I was I was floored just doing the research. And one of the things that turned me on to the research was we were doing some stuff for the 1904 Olympics, which were in St Louis as the third Olympiad, and we wanted to capture that time by getting an Olympic ring sculpture here, which they call “Spectacular” at Wash U. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Yes. Yeah. So we have that now. Yes. At Wash U. Which is great. And but in the process we were researching some of the athletes and one of them was Charles Daniels. Like you were saying, I had no idea about the history of swimming. So I just I just assumed the freestyle had been around forever, that we were always good, of course. Right. Why wouldn't we? But that was not the case. And the deeper I dug, the more fascinated I became. And I was like, Wow, this this guy won five medals here. That's that's significant. He won the first gold medal in U.S. swimming and he won eight medals over his career, which weren't beaten until Mark Spitz did it in 1972. So he was a big figure and the fact that you'd never heard of him. We don’t really talk about that. I hear Charlie Daniels and I think of a guy with a hat, a fiddle and a bow. A little bit. Right, Right. Yeah. Not the same. That's that's right. Not the same guy. So this is great. Yeah, well, for us, I think it's really relevant because, of course, we've been celebrating our 120th anniversary as a club this year. We've looked back at our archives all year long, but we are missing some of those stories that accompany some of the lists of Hall of Fame athletes, some of the, you know, records and things that you can read about when you're looking at our early Cherry Diamond magazines. But you're missing some of those stories and some of the personality. And you see a list of names. And just as you mentioned, we hadn't heard of of Charles Daniels. Right. Or some of these names we may have heard of and know a little about, but we really don't know about it, how it came to be at the club. And you've painted a wonderful picture through this book and filled in a lot of gaps that we have in our archives about the history of swimming. So what did you learn in your research that maybe might relate back to some of the club? Because Charles Daniels wasn't a member, he was not a member, but he was here. He was here at least once a year, which you'd think about, train travel wasn't all that great back then, so that was a big effort to come, right? But St Louis was significant Swimming hub. So the top swimming hubs at the time was New York, Boston, Chicago, St Louis and San Francisco. St Louis was the fourth biggest city at the time. The MAC was started in 1903 is when they built their facility and they built a swimming pool, which not too many people had. It wasn’t like you could call a pool person and say, Hey, can you build this for me? People didn't really quite know how to build these things. They just built big concrete bunkers and they weren't always I mean, they weren't filtering the water. No, you mention that in the book, right? There were some descriptions and I was like, yeah, you're swimming in some kind of shade of brown, so there was no chlorine back then. So if you actually want to clean the pool, it did drain it and fill it back up. There were no side gutters. So, you know, water was getting sloshed around. They didn’t have goggles. They called it a tank. It was it was literally a tank. Even our Cherry Diamond calls it the tank. Right. And that's literally what it was. And there were no lane lines. There was no black line at the bottom of the pool to guide you. So it was it was kind of a rough a rough go. And it was always cold. The water was always cold. A little risky. A little risky. Yeah. Yeah. And our original building, which is where Charlie Daniels would have trained before the current clubhouse was erected, the original building. It was in the basement. Yes. And I think that was pretty typical of where a lot of swimming pools, of course, at the time were. It was it was because you think about digging a tank, you know, they didn't really have the engineering wherewithal to build it on a different floor and stuff like that. So so that's where it was. And MAC, they had one of the original swimming pools and ironically, when they opened up in 1903, when they opened up their new building, they hired the head of their swimming division was a guy named Alex Meffort, who came from New York, who was one of Charlie Daniels first coaches. wow. So he was he was a famed swimmer when there weren't too many swimmers at the time. Wow. And he came here. And the wonderful thing about the MAC is when you think about the Olympics of the 1904, Olympics was the third Olympics. And I love this story about the MAC. swimming at the Olympics in 1904. It does not happen without the MAC. And here is why. Because the Olympics at the time is basically a story between Jim Sullivan, who is the head of the Amateur Athletic Union here out of New York, very powerful. And Pierre de Coubertin, who started the Olympics. He was a Frenchman and he started the Olympics and the Olympics after their second one in Paris in 1900 were in shambles. So they didn't have a stadium there. People ran on grass fields. There weren't any nobody, nobody showed up. There weren't any fans. Sure. The trophies they awarded ranged from silver cups to bowls to one swimmer got a 50 pound bronze statue of a horse, you know, copper and silver medals. So they didn't even have a gold medal at that point. Wow. And it was just a disaster. So. Sullivan tried to steal it from Coubertin because he's like, I like these Olympics because it can show America is a strong competitor in sports. And he wanted to take on the British and prove that, you know, America was just as good as the Brits, if not better. But he hated swimming. He didn't like swimming and all. He so in the 1904 Olympics came and he was put in charge of them and which is through some wrangling between him and Coubertin. He just said, I want a track and field. That's all he cared about. And the other sports, he left them to their governing bodies. So kind of kind of fun, like golf. A guy by the name of Albert Lambert, who Lambert Fields, named after his family, did Listerine and he was a golfer and an airplane pilot. He was in charge of golf, the Davis Cup, which we know he was put in charge of tennis. Davis. And swimming was left to the MAC. Wow. And Alex Meffert was the one who put it all together. So without him, swimming does not happen at the 1904 Olympics. And then you wonder if it ever happens again. Wow. But that's what charged America to really pay attention to swimming, of course, and got everybody excited. And the culture started because of Charles Daniels winning so many medals. That's incredible to think, because now swimming and diving is one of my favorite sports to watch during the Olympics. Right. Right. And and one of the premier swimmers at the time was a guy by the name of Mark Schwarz, who is from the MAC, and he was probably Daniels, one of his biggest competitors. I mean, they'd swim neck and neck, and Daniels kind of took him under under his wing. They went to the Olympics together in 1906 in Athens, and Schwarz had some trouble there. But Daniels and him became friends. And he I think he always stayed at his house when he was here and stuff like that. So there's there's a lot of great history here. Another MAC guy was a guy by the name of Gus Goessling who went over to the 1908 Olympics with Daniels in London. wow. And there's an incredible story. So the Brits did not want Daniels to win, especially in London. He Daniels was really good at turns and they built a 100 meter pool, the length. So he couldn't turn. Because they said. That's how he'd always beat them. Not only that, but then in the gold medal round, they told everyone except Daniels, they changed. They always say, Get on your mark, get set, go in the gold medal round. They told everybody but Daniels were going to go on your mark. Go. So Daniels was still taking off his his robe when they made the call and Goessling was there and he's like, yeah, that, that really happened that that So it was it was really an amazing story. Wow. On an international stage. I can't imagine the pressure, but how incredible to really be advancing a sport all on your own shoulders for an entire country. Pretty much. Yeah. He really did it. It was incredible. Well, I know in looking back after we initially spoke and looking back through some of our early Cherry Diamond issues, the Schwarz brothers and Gus Goessling are all mentioned. Yeah, but I love that you're bringing to life some of these stories. So I've gone back to look and see if there's any follow up commentary after some of the additional Olympic Games. And I haven't found any yet, but I appreciate you bringing that to light because I'm going to keep searching. I think those are wonderful stories. Yeah, the Schwarz brothers were kind of a pair, So Mark Schwarz, older brother, was a good swimmer. He wasn't as fast as Mark, but he always used to tease Mark because Mark had a tendency, again, no goggles back then, no lane lines. He had a tendency to swim diagonal instead of straight, which, you know, when he wasn't swimming straight, kind of threw off his times and he had problems with that. And his brother would always tease him about about doing that. So it was kind of funny. So all of this research that you've uncovered, were you finding all of these different details locally or. Yes, you had to dig up a lot of old newspapers, A lot of And the wonderful thing about athletic clubs, because when you think about it, they were the ones pretty much with the pools because they could afford to do it. They kept excellent journals, they kept monthly journals about what went on at the club. Like you were saying, the Cherry Diamond, right, in New York. Yeah. New York had a similar thing called the Winged Foot. And you pull these up and it was all the inside scoop and they were just kind of reporting on themselves. But it really gave some great details about what was going on at the club at the time, who these people were personality wise. And, you know, they were covered in the paper a little bit more. So after Daniels started getting more popular. Sure. And we started winning because everybody likes, you know, to see winners. But that that was it. And when you do these kind of research things, because there was nobody I could interview, obviously, because everybody's dead, right. You you got to dig and you got to dig hard. And I had three great aha moments that I'm like, okay, I have a book here. And the first one is I wrote to Daniels. He had two granddaughters who were still alive. They're both late seventies, early eighties, and they wrote back to me and they said, Come visit us. So one lived up in Milwaukee and the other lived in Carmel by the sea. And I drove up to go visit the one and I was talking to her for a little bit and, you know, I'm sure she was gauging me to see if I'm serious. And, who the hell I was, right. And she said, okay, well just sit here for a minute. So after about 15, 20 minutes of conversation she went in the back room and she came out with these wonderful old photo albums of Charles Daniels, all his old clippings and everything that she said his mom put together for him. so. So that was great. So I got to go through all those. And the second thing was getting the divorce file of his parents that was sealed for a hundred years at New York. It was during COVID. So I had to convince an archivist to go down there into the warehouse. God knows how dank it was to dig this up. So he did, and I got that. And the third thing was, again, during COVID, I was trying to get ahold of the International Swimming Hall of Fame. Yes, they have wonderful archives down there, but it was closed during COVID, and I called about once every six weeks and nothing, nothing, nothing. Finally, I get a call about a month before I'm supposed to turn the final manuscript into Random House, and a guy says, Hey, I've heard you've been trying to get a hold of me. I said, Yeah, you know, into the archives. I’m like Yeah. He says, Well, I'm Bruce Wigo. I used to be president here. And he goes, I'm down here right now if you can get down here. And I said, I'll be down there Monday. So. So I flew down there during COVID and was able to go through and I spent three days in the archives, which was great, which kind of fleshed out all the other characters around him, the manuscripts and stuff like that. So it was great. That's really exciting to be able to spend your time doing all of that research and bringing to life this character that clearly we owe a lot of wonderful history for the swimming sport to, which is tremendous. Yeah, it was. And again, the MAC played such a big part in those early days because really New York, Chicago, San Francisco and the MAC were the two biggest swimming hubs, and a lot of the early swimming Olympians came from those clubs, right. Which was, which was just fascinating because they were the only ones grooming these these people to swim. And that was the case for probably about the first decade or two of the of the Olympics. And it sounds like there was a lot of competition internally, of course, with the Amateur Athletic Union and everyone kind of knowing who is the person at which club to beat and keep on their radar. Despite the challenges of travel at the time, I think it's phenomenal that they all kept in touch and there was a lot of crossover between them. There was, there was. And St Louis always had like a big swimming championship that everybody came down for. So it's kind of cool to think about, you know, that all the big swimmers came down here for because it was such a swimming hub back then. Sure. Yeah. So you've told us a little bit about how you got involved in writing this and getting interested in the Olympics. Are you an athlete yourself? Is there something that kind of in you draws you to being so involved in sports? Passionate. You know, I was blessed with speed, so I always had that. But as far as my athletic abilities themselves, I was probably a mediocre athlete and I was a poor swimmer. I, you know, in doing this, that's a funny thing. I realize, you know, I swam growing up like you did on your swim team and and everything like that. And I've enjoyed swimming, but I can't I'm not a good breather, you know, when it comes to long swims. And I realized my technique, freestyle technique, was so bad, I got the wonderful thing about doing all this research. I was able to talk to some of the greatest Olympic swimmers that have come out of the United States. And in talking to them and like Mark Spitz, he was like, hey, you know, I swam without goggles, too. Yeah, I look back. I'm like, yeah, I guess you did. Yeah. Yeah. Which which is interesting. And yeah, and Rowdy Gaines talking to him about technique and stuff like that, you realize, my God, I've been doing it so wrong all these years. Yes, so, so yes, I'm a mediocre athlete, but I try and I enjoy sports a lot. Well, that's all that counts, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Are you looking forward to the Olympics again, taking place in Paris next year? Always. Always. Yeah. I'd hoped it might be there. We'll see. Really looking forward to L.A. Olympics. Yes. So we're trying to do a little preview. We're trying to get the torch back through here through St. Louis and a couple of other things when they're back in the United States, so it'll be fun. Keep us posted. I will, yeah, I'd love to have you back. A nice little torch relay. Yes, it'd be great. That'd be very exciting. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. It's great sharing these stories. We now have more to look forward to and thinking about swimming here at the club. So we'll look forward to seeing what happens as the Olympics get closer to us next year. Wonderful. Thanks for laying this foundation for us. I appreciate it. Love it. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Perfect. I appreciate it. Again this has been and MAC Connections podcast. We'll look forward to the next episode.