The triumph of Victoria Manalo

SAN FRANCISCO will now finally have a park honoring a Filipino after the City's Recreation and Park Commission voted unanimously on May 19 to name its newest park after Victoria "Vicki" Manalo Draves.

An earlier proposal in 2000 to name the South of Market Recreation Center after her was rejected by commission members who chose to name it after member emeritus Eugene Friend rather than after Vicki, an Olympic gold medalist who was born and raised near the Center.

But last year, Vicki's name was presented to the commission again when it was considering a name for a new park to be built on the site of the old Bessie Carmichael Elementary School.

This time, however, the proposal received the active and enthusiastic support of Bay Area Filipino students who came to view 80-year old Vicki as a role model for the Filipino youth. On the way to the May 19 final vote of the commission, the proposal received the unanimous endorsement of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the City College Board of Trustees and the Immigrant Rights Commission.

Vicki's supporters attended the May 19 commission vote and the celebration that took place at the City Hall Conference Room hosted by Supervisor Chris Daly. By speaker phone from Palm Springs, Vicki personally thanked her supporters.

It was much-deserved and long overdue. In the 1948 London Olympics, Victoria Manalo Draves became the first woman in Olympic history to win gold medals in both springboard and platform diving events in the same games and the first swimmer or diver to win two individual gold medals in the Olympics. She was also the first Asian and the first Filipino to do so.

Before achieving Olympic glory, Victoria Manalo Draves won the 1942 US Junior National Diving championship and the 1946, 1947, and 1948 US National Diving Championships platform diving gold medal, as well as the 1948 springboard diving gold medal.

On May 27, 2005, Vicki will be honored as the Most Distinguished Alumna of the City College of San Francisco (CCSF) at its graduation ceremonies at the Masonic Auditorium. Earlier in the day, she will be the guest of honor at the new Bessie Carmichael Elementary School across the old site where the new park bearing her name will be built. Vicki had attended that school in her youth when it was known as the Franklin Elementary School with Bessie Carmichael as the principal.

The night before, on May 26, Vicki will be feted by a coalition of Filipino American community organizations at the San Francisco City Hall North Light Court. (For more information, call +415 3347800.)

Victoria Taylor Manalo was born in San Francisco on December 31, 1924 to a Filipino father, Teofilo Manalo, and an English mother, Gertrude Taylor. Vicki's aunt had immigrated to San Francisco earlier and had married a Filipino. When Vicki's aunt brought her sister to San Francisco in 1923, she met Teofilo and married him a year later.

At the time Vicki's parents were married, there was no law barring it. An 1850 California law prohibiting "all marriages of white persons with negroes or mulattos" and its 1880 amendment including "Mongolians" did not apply to Filipinos. It was not until 1932, after a California appellate court had confirmed that the state's anti-miscegenation law did not apply to Filipinos because they were "Malays" (Roldan vs Los Angeles County), that the California Legislature amended the law to include "members of the Malay race."

Even then, it was extremely difficult for Vicki's parents because, as she told an interviewer, "intermarriage was frowned upon in those days." Her aunt, who worked at the St. Francis Hotel, was advised to divorce her Filipino husband. After she refused to do so, her lifeless body was found at the bottom of the hotel's elevator shaft. It was an "accident," they said, but Vicki's family didn't buy it.

After her aunt's death, Vicki grew up without relatives, just her parents, a twin sister, Connie, an older sister, Frankie, and a younger brother named Sonny, who died as a child. "I wanted to be a ballet dancer," Vicki recalled. "But we were just a very poor family, and there was no opportunity to extend on those desires."

Vicki further recalls: "I didn't learn to swim until I was 9 or 10. I was really kind of afraid of the water. We learned to swim going to what they called the nickel baths in the Mission District. You paid five cents admission and we would go there each summer. We would go there first thing in the morning, and then the Red Cross gave some lessons, and we would participate in that. I tried some dives off the diving board and off the side. … I did not start diving until I was 16."

About a year later, a friend who was impressed with her diving skills introduced her to Phil Patterson, swimming coach of the Fairmont Hotel Swimming and Diving Club. After they met, Patterson told her bluntly that because she was Filipino, he could not accept her as a member of his Club. But if she changed her last name to her mother's surname "Taylor," perhaps he could bring her in as a member of his Patterson School.

Vicki asked her parents' permission to change her name to Vicki Taylor and her mother agreed. "I don't know how my dad felt," she said, "because he never said anything."

After Vicki Taylor started diving at the Fairmont, she was interviewed by a local paper: "I remember the first time I was interviewed for anything, they asked my name and I replied, "Victoria Manalo." I received a chewing out from Phil Patterson," she said.

How did Patterson teach Vicki how to dive? "One evening, he told me to follow another diver. That is really how I learned to dive."

Vicki relentlessly practiced her diving after school hours when she was a student at Commerce High School on Van Ness Avenue and then at San Francisco Junior College (City College of San Francisco).

When the war broke out in 1941, Patterson went into military service and the Fairmont Hotel swimming pool closed down forcing Vicki to stop swimming for a year. In that tie, she found a job working at the Presidio. After Vicki learned about a swimming program at the Crystal Plunge with Charlie Sava as the coach, she talked to Charlie about coaching her and he agreed and assigned Jimmy Hughes to be her coach.

Hughes coached Vicki to her first national AAU diving competition at the Indiana national meet in 1943 when she was 19. Vicki came in third behind Helen Rose and Zoe Ann Olsen on the 3-meter board.

The next national AAU diving competition was held in 1944 at the Athens Athletic Club in Oakland where Zoe Ann Olsen trained with her coach, Lyle Draves. "That is where I first saw Lyle," she recalls.

Vicki's coach, Hughes, could not move her to the next level so he had to "renege on the coaching." Vicki then approached Lyle to be her coach and he agreed.

Under Lyle's guidance, Vicki learned platform diving to add to her springboard diving repertoire. But Vicki could not compete in a diving competition that was to be held at the Fairmont Hotel Swimming and Diving Club because she was Filipino and after she refused to return to using Taylor.

In disgust at the Fairmont's racism, Lyle left the San Francisco Bay Area for Los Angeles. Vicki followed him and married him there in 1946. Under Lyle's tutelage, Vicki went on to win the1946, 1947, and 1948 US National Diving Championships in platform diving and in springboard diving in 1948.

In the 1948 Olympics in London, Victoria Manalo Draves made history by winning gold medals in both the platform and springboard diving events. Lyle's other student, Zoe Ann Olsen, placed second in springboard diving.
As many Filipinos noted then and now, Vicki was destined to win two golds because she was "Victoria" (victory) na (already), "Manalo" (winner) pa (still).

Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com and meet Vicki at City Hall on May 26.

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