Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Why Jesse Owens Saved Hitler's Mysterious Trees (PTFO Vault) About this episode At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Adolf Hitler gave the legendary runner a gift: four potted oak-tree saplings — one for each gold medal that Owens won, while surrounded by Nazis, in one of the greatest sports performances ever. Correspondent David Fleming examines what Owens did with The Hitler Oaks... and why his decision remains an enduring act of American defiance.
(This episode originally aired June 8, 2024.)
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Transcript 6,884 words · 21 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.
0:06 Speaker 01 Love the crown molding.
0:08 Speaker 00 Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.
0:12 Speaker 01 Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet.
0:16 Speaker 00 No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.
0:19 Speaker 01 No FiOS? Yeah... no thank you.
0:23 Speaker 00 Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.
0:25 Speaker 02 Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.
0:30 Speaker 03 With a Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.
0:56 Pablo Torre? This episode is brought to you by Apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach, and follow-up into one place instead of several separate tools. It's used by sales teams of all sizes,
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1:58 Pablo Torre? Okay, so hello, it is me Pablo, entering, invading even your ears because I have done something I have not done before, which is, take the advice of someone who once told me that if people wish to support you financially, if they wish to support your journalism, your very strange future of journalism, meaning your newsroom, your ambitions, your desire to investigate things people don't want you to investigate, you should let them. And so I am. On Substack, my newsletter, at www.pablo.show, we'll put a link in the show notes of this episode, I have turned on paid subscriptions. And if you didn't know I have a Substack, guess what? It's free. And that's still there for you, and it's worth it. But
2:43 Pablo Torre? the paid subscribers who support this show and us will get legitimately cool, personalized benefits to come. We will make it worth your while. We are figuring out, here at PTFO, our post-draft kings' future. And, you know, more good news on that front, I hope, to come. But in the meantime, Pablo.show is where you sign up, click the link in the show notes, help support us, please. Thank you, thank you, thank you on that front. And this, this episode today, is a handpicked episode from deep inside the PTFO vault that we sincerely hope you enjoy. Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
3:29 Speaker 05 When I first met the tree in probably 2016, I thought it was a perfect treat.
3:35 Pablo Torre? Right after this ad.
3:42 Pablo Torre? Flem, I'm a plant guy. I'm a tree guy. If you look behind you, over your shoulder in our studio, that is an homage to an interest that I have long held.
3:52 Speaker 06 Uh huh, uh huh.
3:53 Pablo Torre? I don't know if you have a property full of greenery, but I don't. I live in the city, here in New York. Thank you for being here, by the way.
4:02 Speaker 06 You're welcome. Actually, I thought that's why I was here, to help you with your Limelight hydrangeas, which mine are, mine are really world-class. I'm just gonna go ahead and say that.
4:12 Pablo Torre? I'm jealous. I have like, two dozen houseplants.
4:16 Speaker 06 Well, that's, that's pretty good.
4:17 Pablo Torre? But in a simulation of the real thing. And so as the lawn owner, as a guy with his own set of shrubbery, I just expressed jealousy at the outset here.
4:32 Speaker 06 Yeah, I get it. But you know, come down, we'll get you into nature. It's called forest bathing. We'll do that. We'll have like a retreat, a retreat. We'll do a little gardening, some lawn work.
4:43 Pablo Torre? It's real, though. Like forest bathing.
4:45 Speaker 06 Oh, it's definitely real. Forest bathing, 100%.
4:49 Pablo Torre? Restorative, psychologically beneficial. So all of this brings us to the Olympics.
4:57 Speaker 06 Of course. I mean, I'm sure that's where we were.
4:58 Pablo Torre? As is our want.
5:00 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
5:01 Pablo Torre? Because there's this photograph, Lam, as we approach the closing ceremonies of the Olympics in Paris. There's a photograph that I think about whenever it's near the end of an Olympic Games. And it's a famous photo that you have done some research into for us that revealed that I had no idea what the [bleep] I was even looking at. So explain when and where and what this photo is.
5:26 Speaker 06 We're sort of nearing the end of the Olympics. You start to think about iconic moments. You think about incredible iconic performances. And always in my mind, associated with that is this picture from the 1936 Games.
5:42 Speaker 06 From the medal stand of the Games, which were in Berlin at the time. What your eye sticks on with this photo are all the Nazi salutes.
5:53 Pablo Torre? At the top of the medal stand.
5:54 Speaker 06 Yes.
5:55 Pablo Torre? Not doing the Nazi salute is who?
5:59 Speaker 06 Is Jesse Owens.
6:01 Speaker 07 After the fanfares of the Olympic opening comes the most amazing performance by America's black streak Jesse Owens in the 100 meters. The world's most superb runner makes the others look as if they're walking as he wins the final and equals the world's record time. This and his later victory in the long jump may well be the athletic performances of the century.
6:18 Speaker 06 One of the greatest Olympic performances of all time, really to this day. Bar none, Jesse Owens in 1936.
6:30 Speaker 06 He's receiving one of his four gold medals, but it's in a stadium full of people doing the Nazi salute. And he's next to a row of athletes and other people doing-
6:44 Pablo Torre? Officials.
6:45 Speaker 06 Right. And your eye is just stuck on that. And you don't really notice the secret little thing that we discovered that sent us down this rabbit hole.
6:55 Pablo Torre? At the actual center of the photograph, I did not notice this until you told me to like zoom in on it. And when you zoom in on it, you see that he's carrying something that I'd never noticed before, Flew.
7:10 Speaker 06 He's holding a tiny little oak sapling.
7:14 Pablo Torre? Why?
7:37 Pablo Torre? All right. So in case you slept through every history class you may have ever taken, I do want to clarify that this is going to be a story that starts with Jesse Owens, who is one of the greatest black athletes of all time, and also Adolf Hitler, who became the chancellor of Germany when the Nazi party came to power in 1933 in the aftermath of Germany losing World War I. Which is why the 1936 Berlin Olympics wound up being this festival of swastikas and Aryan supremacy and anti-Semitic propaganda, as evidenced by that famous picture we just discussed.
8:17 Pablo Torre? But that only begins to explain why Jesse Owens was standing atop that medal stand, surrounded by Nazi salutes, and cradling this mysterious and tiny potted plant.
8:34 Speaker 06 So to do that, we have to go all the way back and talk about the Olympic Games and how in 1936 they were allowed to be in Berlin.
8:49 Speaker 06 The Games were given to Germany years earlier, actually as a gesture to try and help bring Germany back into the world community.
9:00 Pablo Torre? Spoiler alert, this effort did not pay off.
9:04 Speaker 06 Yeah, that was not a great idea. By 1936, of course, Hitler has come into power in Germany.
9:12 Speaker 07 Berlin's great day dawns with the arrival of the Olympic flame at the end of its 2,000-mile journey from Greece. And meanwhile, a packed stadium and flag-draped cheering streets greet Chancellor Hitler on his way to perform the opening ceremony.
9:27 Speaker 07 Like a modern Caesar, he stands on the balcony to receive the salutes of the athletes of 50 nations.
9:33 Speaker 06 The Games go on in Berlin, and part of the ritual of the Games in Germany was the idea that every gold medal winner would receive an oak sapling because of its historic connection to Germany and Germany's history.
9:49 Pablo Torre? And I didn't know this either, but to the German culture, an oak symbolizes, you know, the king of the forest.
9:59 Speaker 06 Right, because the oak is usually the biggest, tallest tree. And in German folklore, Germania represents the German people. She's wearing a crown of oak leaves.
10:12 Pablo Torre? Right.
10:13 Speaker 06 So the oaks are very important, and as a gesture, each person that won a gold medal, along with their gold medal, were given this tiny oak sapling and told to go back to where you're from around the globe and keep these trees, plant these trees, and watch them grow as a symbol of these Games, which on its face is kind of a good idea.
10:36 Pablo Torre? Now, the flip side of this good idea is that these were Hitler's Oaks.
10:42 Speaker 06 Correct.
10:43 Pablo Torre? And were called as such.
10:45 Speaker 06 They were known immediately as Hitler Oaks.
10:48 Pablo Torre? And so the Hitler Oaks, right, that came back with the US gold medalists.
10:54 Pablo Torre? What do we know about those oaks and what happened to them?
10:59 Speaker 06 So there were 24 American gold medals, which means there were 24 oak saplings. And almost all of them were lost or discarded or just gotten rid of.
11:11 Pablo Torre? Right, for the obvious reason of not wanting to have a Hitler oak in your yard.
11:16 Speaker 06 Right. Cannot blame anybody for that.
11:19 Pablo Torre? Yeah, a gift bag from history's greatest monster. Not necessarily what I would have put on, you know, in my own front yard.
11:26 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah. Thanks Hitler for the merch, but I'll pass.
11:32 Pablo Torre? And so the obvious question then is why the [bleep] would Jesse Owens of all people, Flem, be the one to become the caretaker of a Hitler oak?
11:41 Speaker 06 That's what we're gonna find out. But it's not just Jesse Owens. In the last 100 years, an entire community has come together to, they have fallen in love with this tree and they have come together to save this tree.
12:07 Pablo Torre? This message is brought to you by Apple Card. With Apple Card, you earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases, like groceries or merch or tickets to the game. Plus, it can be used anywhere MasterCard is accepted. No matter your team, no matter where you shop, Apple Card is here to help you tackle game day. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.
12:41 Speaker 00 Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.
12:47 Speaker 01 Love the crown molding.
12:49 Speaker 00 Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.
12:52 Speaker 01 Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet?
12:56 Speaker 00 No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.
13:00 Speaker 01 No FiOS? Yeah, no thank you.
13:03 Speaker 00 Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.
13:06 Speaker 02 Get Verizon FiOS because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.
13:10 Speaker 03 With a Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.
13:45 Pablo Torre? So, at the risk of just stating the obvious, it is important that we recall what it would have been like to be Jesse Owens in the 1930s, in a segregated United States.
13:59 Pablo Torre? Because Jesse Owens was black, he was not legally eligible to receive a college scholarship, for instance, let alone get on-campus housing. And then, when he finally worked hard enough to make the US Olympic team, despite all of that and more, Jesse Owens discovered that the Games were being held in Nazi Germany.
14:25 Pablo Torre? An event that the NAACP, alongside many, many others, were all saying that Jesse Owens should not attend.
14:34 Speaker 06 He was being torn in both directions, whether to go, whether to stay home, whether to take on Hitler, whether to just boycott the whole thing. You have to remember, Jesse Owens, he grew up in Cleveland. He went to Ohio State. Jesse Owens was a world-renowned athlete after the 1935 Big Ten Championship, which some people refer to as the greatest 45 minutes in sports. In the span of 45 minutes in 1935, Jesse Owens set or tied four world records in track and field. He's setting or tying a world record every 11 minutes?
15:13 Pablo Torre? Yes. This is the milieu unto which he has to make a decision of, am I, the greatest track star in America, going to go overseas and essentially enable, potentially a propaganda operation for Adolf Hitler?
15:29 Speaker 06 He is the single greatest track and field athlete in the world. But there was a serious and strong campaign to try and encourage him not to go, to just sit it out, to not let his abilities bring attention to Hitler's theories about Aryan supremacy. And so I reached out to Dr. Damian Thomas, who is the sports curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
15:56 Pablo Torre? Yes.
15:57 Speaker 06 And he helped explain what Jesse Owens had to deal with even before the Games.
16:04 Speaker 08 At the time, I think people, people were trying to figure out how to best deal with the threat that Hitler posed. Do you appease him? Do you play along? Certainly, there were discussions and people, people asked him not to participate. But a boycott would have largely been unprecedented. And it's a lot to ask Jesse Owens. And we see that there was widespread support of African American athletes to ultimately participate because there were 18 African Americans who participated. And that was by far the largest contingent of African Americans
16:47 Speaker 08 who had participated in the Olympics up to that time.
16:51 Speaker 06 So there were all these athletes who were going to the Games. The ones who didn't want them to go, they were being branded by the U.S. Olympic Committee as un-American agitators.
17:04 Pablo Torre? Right, so this is an enormous news story. And once he gets there, again, another spoiler alert, Jesse Owens [bleep] destroys everybody. He wins gold in the 100-meter dash, in the 200-meter, in the 4x100.
17:17 Speaker 06 Yes.
17:18 Pablo Torre? And then the long jump.
17:19 Speaker 06 The long jump, it's one of those, if you see the film of it, it's one of those things where you and I, we've watched athletics, we've covered athletics, we've interviewed athletes. It's one of those moments where even almost 100 years later, your jaw drops. It's almost like he's detached from the gravity of the earth. And when you think he's supposed to start coming down, he keeps going. And you're like... This is 100 years ago.
17:46 Pablo Torre? A hard thing for Adolf Hitler to see and feel great about.
17:51 Speaker 06 Right. I'm a human being watching this 100 years later in awe. And then I think, oh my God, Hitler had to watch Jesse Owens do this right in front of his face.
18:01 Pablo Torre? Yes, the entire point was that here was gonna be the proof that Germany was supreme. That white supremacy was was real. And Jesse Owens explodes that for different times. And so this brings us to the thing that I, the most famous image that has been passed down through history, which is the story of what happens when Jesse Owens finally confronts Adolf Hitler face to face. Because Adolf Hitler, as again, the leader of Germany, is the guy who's also greeting all of the athletes at the end. And the story is that Adolf Hitler refuses to shake the hand,
18:43 Pablo Torre? the black hand of the American Jesse Owens.
18:47 Speaker 06 And that is part of the mythology that's grown out of what Jesse Owens did. But it's not actually the whole, full, true story.
18:59 Speaker 08 So Hitler attended the first day of the Olympics. And what he did is he went and greeted the German athletes who had won medals and had performed triumphantly. The International Olympic Committee went to him and said that you just can't shake the hands of the Germans. You have to shake the hands of all of the winners if you're going to shake hand. And so Hitler decided that he was no longer going to shake anyone else's hand. So then when Jesse Owens wins and there's no handshake, people began to speculate, well, has Hitler snuck Jesse Owens? Is this a racial moment? Is this somehow demeaning to Jesse Owens?
19:50 Pablo Torre? And so I'm just gonna jump in here to say that I did not plan on exonerating Adolf Hitler in any way when producing today's episode. But, yes, Damian Thomas is correct. Hitler's refusal to shake the hand of Jesse Owens in Berlin was not actually specific to Jesse Owens at all. After day one, Hitler did not publicly congratulate any of the gold medalists. But the big reason that so many of us Americans have heard that story and have assumed it to be true for so long is relevant here as well.
20:29 Speaker 06 So it turns out that this was a part of the myth that Jesse Owens himself perpetuated for years for a whole nother set of reasons that sort of just takes us further down this story.
20:45 Speaker 08 The story became really important for Jesse Owens later on because in his post-running career, he would often make money on the banquet circuit. And this became one of the most popular stories that he would tell about this missed opportunity with Hitler and how he was snubbed. And it was a way of sort of denouncing Germany and their racist policies. And he was celebrated because people wanted to feel good about America vis a vis Germany and vis a vis America's own racial history.
21:26 Speaker 08 And so it was a key story that sat at the heart of his ability to make money in his post-racing career.
21:38 Pablo Torre? So the banquet circuit that Dr. Thomas referenced, I did not know that Jesse Owens was making appearances like as a speaker, making money doing that.
21:48 Speaker 06 Right, because your assumption is this guy is a worldwide hero.
21:53 Pablo Torre? Yes.
21:54 Speaker 06 He's an American Olympic icon.
21:57 Pablo Torre? He just beat Hitler.
21:59 Speaker 06 Surely he comes home to an America where it's ticker-tape parades and endorsements and never has to lift a finger the rest of his life. It's the exact opposite.
22:10 Pablo Torre? No, of course, it's a reminder that, again, we're in the 30s. Jesse Owens is a second-class citizen in the United States.
22:19 Speaker 06 I mean, Owens, Owens himself even said, "Hitler refused to shake my hand, but so did the President of the United States."
22:27 Pablo Torre? Right. By the way, this was FDR.
22:29 Speaker 06 FDR, that's the America that he came back to. It's a place where he has to work as a janitor. It's a place where he has to work as a custodian.
22:39 Pablo Torre? He's also a gas station attendant.
22:41 Speaker 06 It's a place where, when he does get invited to a celebration of the Olympic heroes at the Waldorf Astoria, he's got to go in through the freight elevator.
22:53 Speaker 08 Jesse Owens struggled financially. You know, he had some failed business ventures. He had some tax problems. And he was often forced to engage in some things which he would later, later feel a bit embarrassed by in his later life. One of these such examples was when he engaged in a racing exhibition in Cuba. And he raced a horse in an exhibition race.
23:28 Speaker 09 Cuba. Jesse Owens, the ebony streak of Olympic Games, celebrates turning professional by racing against a horse. Jesse had a start of 40 yards and 100, and he won by inches.
23:41 Speaker 08 There was also a moment where he had a race with Joe Louis. It was a race that he also found to be demeaning because he was crawling and Joe Louis was running backwards. Also during his time, he worked with the Harlem Globetrotters. As a middle-aged man, would run around the court during halftime, jumping over hurdles as part of the entertainment for the Harlem Globetrotters game. So he had to do a number of things like that in order to survive financially.
24:19 Pablo Torre? I did not realize the degree to which Jesse Owens was a circus performer after having accomplished some of the greatest things in the history of sports.
24:26 Speaker 06 So Damian mentioned that Owens did find some of those things that he had to do to make a living degrading. And there's a great quote from Owens that said, "People say it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals."
24:51 Pablo Torre? By the way, that isn't just some clever rhetoric from Jesse Owens. Jesse Owens actually wound up giving one of his four gold medals from Berlin to a friend to thank him for helping him find work in the entertainment industry. And by the 1950s, Jesse Owens was reportedly so broke that he used the other three medals to pay for a hotel stay and his expenses in Pittsburgh. But that's not all that awaited Jesse Owens upon his return to America, because not only did the guy work as a gas station attendant, as well as a janitor and a circus performer, his home, his neighborhood, entire urban sections of Cleveland, in fact, had
25:36 Pablo Torre? been financially and ecologically degraded on the basis of race. This was thanks to a legal policy instituted by the aforementioned president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And that policy, which is now illegal today, was known as redlining.
25:55 Speaker 10 As part of the 1930s-era New Deal, the government insured mortgages for homeowners to prevent foreclosures during the Depression. Color-coded maps ranked loanworthiness of neighborhoods in more than 200 cities and towns across the United States.
26:09 Speaker 11 Green was super good in terms of the risk of loaning in that area, and then red was hazardous.
26:15 Speaker 10 Those redlined areas were deemed credit risk because of the residents' racial demographics. Today, those so-called hazardous neighborhoods consist of lower-income minority residents.
26:26 Speaker 11 The goal of redlining at the time was to make it subtle.
26:30 Speaker 06 Federal government representatives would literally take a red line and mark out areas of cities, hundreds of cities, that they deemed unworthy of investment and risky for things like mortgages and businesses.
26:48 Pablo Torre? It was racism codified. It was discrimination literally mapped onto America itself.
26:56 Speaker 06 It created huge sections of cities where if you can't invest, if you can't buy a home there, then over the next decades, over the next 90 years, people wouldn't bother to build parks and grow grass and plant trees. And so these sections, besides being sort of like lacking investment or homeownership, these areas of cities now are 5 to 20 degrees hotter during summers, which lead to exponentially more heat and health-related issues.
27:35 Speaker 12 Many red line districts are now the warmest areas in the United States. Research completed by the Museum of Science found red line neighborhoods like Roxbury and East Boston to be, on average, 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than non-red line neighborhoods in Boston. These warmer areas tend to have fewer trees and parks to help cool the air. As a result, residents have higher energy bills, limited access to green space, and disproportionate risk of heat-related death.
28:10 Pablo Torre? So what I am also finding out because of this episode is the degree of scientific research into which health outcomes and life expectancies are tied to trees, to the way in which we need these things, these living things, to help
28:29 Pablo Torre? Create the life that America had promised its people. And this is not just like one random hippie saying this. There is a whole body of research that shows that redlining connects to environmental injustice. And this is a study by Case Western Reserve University, FLAM, which evaluated the map of Jesse Owens's Cleveland and showed that these same neighborhoods, a century later, as you were alluding to, remain the areas most plagued by poverty and crime. All of this being directly connected.
29:03 Speaker 06 There was also a study in 2022 by Maryland that pointed out older, larger trees with more canopy can impact variables like heat islands, air quality, soil health, and stormwater management. Higher tree diversity also leads to more resiliency against invasive pests and disease outbreaks. Differences in tree communities and size may help explain why redlined spaces have become more associated with poorer health outcomes and shorter life expectancies for people living inside of them. And the connection back to Jesse Owens is they came back to a place where he lived in Cleveland
29:47 Speaker 06 that was purposefully left devoid of trees.
29:52 Pablo Torre? So the full accounting of everything that Jesse Owens was facing, the snubbing of his own president in FDR, the redlining of his of his country and specifically his own home, his own home neighborhood in Cleveland, that just the degradation of being this circus performer character. All of this infuses the four Hitler Oaks that he takes back home with a far more profound meaning.
30:16 Speaker 06 I think what happened next is one of the most heroic things that Jesse Owens ever did. Right? Despite all the things that you just mentioned, all the things we talked about, the kind of country that he returned to as an Olympic hero and was still a second-class citizen. Despite all of that, Jesse Owens still has enough hope to take those oaks and not throw them in Lake Erie, not discard them, not give them away. He gets down on his hands and knees and he digs and he plants these trees. He doesn't forget them. He plants them. He plants them. He brings them home to a place devoid of trees, and he plants them in the ground.
31:11 Speaker 00 Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.
31:17 Speaker 01 Love the crown molding.
31:19 Speaker 00 Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.
31:23 Speaker 01 Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet?
31:26 Speaker 00 No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.
31:30 Speaker 01 No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you.
31:33 Speaker 00 Don't you want to see the rest? OK, bye-bye.
31:36 Speaker 02 Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.
31:41 Speaker 13 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
31:55 Speaker 14 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
32:06 Speaker 13 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
32:11 Speaker 15 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
32:17 Speaker 13 So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.
32:37 Speaker 03 With a Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.
33:09 Pablo Torre? So Flem, it's time to do a thing that I've been waiting to do on this show for a year now, which is some tree forensics. So Jesse Owens comes back home, he has four gold medals, he has four trees. What happens to the Hitler Oaks? Where does he plant the saplings?
33:26 Speaker 06 I've been looking into it for you. All right. I know you like the papers. I know you like the notes.
33:30 Pablo Torre? You have your research.
33:31 Speaker 06 I've got my research. Okay, so here's what we know about the four oak saplings. Some sources say that he planted one at East Tech High School, which is where he actually went to school, but hasn't been verified. There are other stories that he planted one at his mother's home in Cleveland. Again, that may have been torn down, can't be verified. There are also stories that he planted one on the campus at Ohio State, where he went to school. Again, not verifiable. The only oak sapling that we know for sure that's been authenticated was at James Ford Rhodes High School, where Owens didn't go to school, but he practiced track there because they had a decent track and the conditions at his own school were no good.
34:16 Pablo Torre? So we have the one. We have one Hitler oak still standing at James Ford Rhodes High School.
34:22 Speaker 06 Well, not technically. So we've got one tree authenticated, and what happens is around 2017, this oak tree, which is big and beautiful and right and has been on this campus for decades, it begins to reach the end of its natural life, and it's dying. And this incredible symbol is about to go away forever. And you remember that beautiful community that we mentioned earlier?
34:55 Pablo Torre? Right.
34:56 Speaker 06 That's where this whole community rallies to save a Hitler oak.
35:01 Pablo Torre? And so who are the people who are leading the movement to save a Hitler oak?
35:07 Speaker 05 My name is Jeffrey T. Varesbi. I am the Chief Operating Officer at Cleveland Neighborhood Progress. I'm a community development leader.
35:15 Speaker 16 My name is Speck Swab and I, and my title is Director of Conservation and Community Forestry at Holman Forest and Gardens. And so a simpler way to say that is, yeah, like I'm a tree nerd, a tree scientist. Love talking about trees.
35:30 Speaker 06 These are some of my favorite people that we met on this journey just because, again, they're so passionate and they're so just all in on this project. What happens is this great guy, one of the great guys that we met, Jeff Varesbi, he learns of the Hitler oak right around 2017, right at the exact time when the tree is beginning to die.
35:51 Speaker 05 When I first met the tree in probably 2016, I thought it was a perfect tree.
35:57 Pablo Torre? I just want to pause the tape here. That's just one of the great declarations in the history of Palatory, finds out. When I first met the tree.
36:06 Speaker 06 Yeah, I haven't met the tree, but I'm proposing a PTFO field trip so that we can all go meet the tree.
36:15 Pablo Torre? We'll have our people call the trees people.
36:17 Speaker 06 Yes.
36:19 Speaker 05 It was 40 feet tall. It had big branches. It had leaves everywhere. And I was like, this is a gorgeous, amazing tree. And the tree partners at Holden immediately looked at me like I had three heads and like, no, that thing's clearly dying.
36:34 Speaker 16 A lot of times they'll actually like produce a lot more acorns or whatever their seed is because at the end of the life, they want to make sure they can put as much effort into reproduction as possible to pass on their genes. I've even heard people call it like the glory of a tree under stress because then sometimes they're just covered with flowers and you're like, this tree is doing great. It's producing so many flowers and so many seeds, but it's because it's under stress and it knows it's going out. And so it just spends that last burst of energy to try to make sure it sends its genetics forwards.
37:03 Speaker 06 You know, I just want to join in with the, with the, with the tree nerds and point out the, the sort of the, the beautiful moment that, that they're describing, which is when a tree reaches the end of its natural life. It's, it puts all of its final energy into trying to ensure that its life will continue.
37:24 Pablo Torre? The glory of a tree under stress is truly a beautiful.
37:29 Pablo Torre? Scientific concept.
37:31 Speaker 06 It's the second best line ever on your show, besides, uh, I Met the Tree.
37:36 Pablo Torre? Wait, so hold on. The tree that is beautifully dying, the Hitler oak, how do they make sure that it does live on? What do you do with the acorns as it's gloriously perishing?
37:48 Speaker 06 Well, that's exactly what I thought. I'm like, oh, so you just collect the acorns, right? And, and put them in some, uh, potting soil and bam, you got another, um, Hitler oak. But it's way more interesting and way more complicated, uh, than, than just planting an acorn.
38:03 Speaker 16 So if you want a genetically identical individual, what you can do is you get like a young twig essentially off of it. And I've done this process before and I feel kind of like a witch when I'm doing it. Because basically we'll take a tree that's in a pot and we'll get a twig from another tree and we cut the tree that's in the pot. And then we cut the twig off the tree and you have to like use a little knife to get it to line up exactly. And then you put them together and you just like wrap it with like a rubber band essentially, and you dip it in wax. And you try to do this in the winter when it's completely dormant. Um, and then you put the spot where you put those two together, you put that against a little heating bar and you heat it up. So it's, things is the growing season and it's ready to grow.
38:45 Speaker 16 And then those two merge together and they become one tree.
38:51 Pablo Torre? So why don't you point out that none of that, it sounds like it should work.
38:54 Speaker 06 Right.
38:55 Speaker 16 And then when the spring comes, it'll leaf out with, you know, the roots from the other tree and the twig from the old tree. So basically what you've done is you've taken a piece of this tree, you've given it new roots and a new life. And it's basically a new individual that's only, instead of the 80 something years old that that whole tree is, that twig is only a couple of years old.
39:13 Pablo Torre? That sounds crazy. That's how you reproduce a tree?
39:16 Speaker 06 Yeah. You, uh, you, you, you create some kind of secondary zombie tree limb.
39:21 Pablo Torre? You tie it together.
39:23 Speaker 06 Yeah.
39:23 Pablo Torre? You make the tree think that it's growing season and it grows.
39:27 Speaker 06 I mean, they treated it, it was like a child. I got the idea that they were talking to it. They were checking in every day, waiting to see if it would produce, uh, buds or leaves.
39:38 Pablo Torre? Like an actual living thing.
39:39 Speaker 06 They were all rooting for this Hitler oak to live.
39:43 Pablo Torre? I don't know if you intended to make that pun, but I salute you nonetheless. They were rooting for it to live.
39:50 Speaker 06 And it does. It works. I mean, all this sorcery, you know, it works and they they've managed to replicate and propagate these Hitler Oaks. And now they've grown over years into saplings that can be transplanted into the ground. And so now they've got four new genetically identical Hitler Oaks to stand for the four gold medals and the four original oak saplings. And they plant them in different areas around Cleveland.
40:20 Pablo Torre? All of this continuing to be an even greater act of defiance than the one that had been mythologized in Berlin.
40:29 Speaker 06 And it goes on because now in Cleveland, these Hitler Oaks, they're helping to educate people about the importance of trees, about how to combat redlining.
40:41 Speaker 16 And that's one of the environmental injustices that the community, forestry community, is trying to really face and address right now, to say that we need to get more trees into these areas. Because as a tree person, now I see all the benefits of trees. It helps mental health. It helps stress. It makes it cooler when it's hot days. You know, it creates space for community, for people to hang out. I'd like to think that like, you know, Jesse Owens wants to see these trees grow and survive and thrive. But then it's also an opportunity for us to bring awareness to that issue and try to engage community members with it.
41:18 Speaker 06 So the trees themselves and the act of regenerating them and replanting them are now fighting a whole nother fight in Cleveland.
41:41 Pablo Torre? And so the obvious question near the end here, Flem, is whether anybody feels any discomfort, residual lingering discomfort, from the fact that these are
41:53 Pablo Torre? Hitler Oaks, that these are gifted, again, from one of history's greatest monsters.
42:00 Speaker 06 Yeah, and I think that's one of the best parts of this whole story. They mean so much more to the people in that community that they don't really see them that way.
42:10 Speaker 17 And today, with the eyes of a new generation of African-American track stars looking on, the rebirth of Owens' old dying tree was planted in new ground next to the Rockefeller Park Lagoon.
42:22 Speaker 18 The new tree was propagated from the Jesse Owens Olympic Oak and planted right next to the site of the original.
42:30 Pablo Torre? So Flem, what I'm finding out at the very end here is that we have been mislabeling the subject of today's episode. These are not actually the Hitler Oaks at all.
42:42 Speaker 06 No, they have, over time, they have become, they've changed, and they mean something totally different now. They've become the Jesse Owens Oaks.
42:53 Speaker 05 These are the Jesse Owens Olympic Oaks. They are nothing but that, the Jesse Owens Olympic Oaks. His story is one of resilience. There was pressure to not participate in the 1936 Olympics. There was pressure to boycott because being black in America in 1936 was also one in a community in which you were not afforded freedoms, you were not afforded full liberty. And he was denied that all the way. And so I actually think that that makes it even more powerful.
43:22 Speaker 08 I think it's important that we tell a well-grounded story about Jesse Owens, both about his triumphs and his challenges. He is someone who is reflective of a very important moment in African-American history. And so, to that extent, I'm really glad that people are keeping these Oaks alive and keeping the story of Jesse Owens at the forefront of our national memory.
43:53 Speaker 06 Hitler kind of outsmarted himself by gifting to Jesse Owens the very thing that he could use to fight racism and redlining in Cleveland. I mean, how about that for a transformation from Hitler to the Jesse Owens Oaks?
44:12 Pablo Torre? Dave Fleming, thank you for reporting a story that continues to grow.
44:19 Speaker 06 Now you're gonna pull out the puns?
44:30 Pablo Torre? This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.
44:36 Pablo Torre? And I'll talk to you next time.
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