Photo: Drew Reynolds (B.A. '97)

Now 92, Adolph Kiefer has been swimming almost daily for about 84 years. The activity may be the one constant in the history of an Olympic gold medalist who shook hands with Hitler (then unaware of the dictator’s designs) and rose through the U.S. Naval ranks teaching thousands of enlisted men how to swim. The pool remains a refuge from dry ground for the man who made many humanitarian turns throughout his life: He’s designed swimming pools for millions, rubbed elbows with the likes of Jesse Owens, befriended Sir Edmund Hilary and Ted Williams, and lent his name to a company that became synonymous with the water world.

A self-described Chicago boy, Kiefer says his first swim probably happened after he fell into a drainage canal. He was about seven then, in the middle of eight children growing up in Albany Park. Before that: “My father used to take us to Lake Michigan after church,” says Kiefer, nicknamed Sonny Boy for his apparent “sunny” disposition. “We’d jump off his shoulders, but we couldn’t swim. I always wanted to go after Sunday school because we’d get a black walnut ice cream cone on the way home.”

Somewhat to his family’s surprise, Kiefer, then around 10, decided to swim back and forth across Sister Lake in Michigan. He swam it on his back.

“I didn’t know it was the backstroke,” he says. “I thought I invented it.”

Soon after, at a YMCA camp, he says he out-swam a kid a head taller than him. After another victory, Kiefer says, “My father gave me a dollar, which should have made me a pro. He said, ‘Son, you’re going to be the best swimmer in the world.’ He died shortly after that, and I decided I was going to be the best swimmer in the world.”

After their patriarch’s death, the Kiefer family lost everything in the Great Depression. At the age of 11, Kiefer held two jobs selling popcorn and magazines in the neighborhood. Then he became an elevator operator in the city. When the World’s Fair came to Chicago in 1933, Kiefer took a job as a junior lifeguard at the Baby Ruth Swimming Pool, which showcased world champions from the 1932 Olympics. There he met Tex Robinson, a University of Michigan national champion who encouraged the young swimmer, even offering room and board when Kiefer hitchhiked up to Ann Arbor to practice. Before he finished Theodore Roosevelt High School, Kiefer broke his own world record in the backstroke—repeatedly. He was the first man to better the one-minute mark in the 100-yard backstroke. His 1936 high school time remained the Illinois state record until 1960.

In the summer of 1936, in spite of a boiling political climate in Europe, the U.S. Olympic team, with a high school phenomenon on board, set sail for the Games in Munich, Germany. Kiefer would bring home backstroke gold.

“I was a little bashful at the time,” Kiefer says. A big brother of sorts, Jesse Owens introduced him to the other athletes and the two became lifelong friends.

Owens, the iconic figure of the 1936 Games, won four gold medals in track and field. Hitler, with his notions of Aryan supremacy on the line, left his front-row seat, perhaps avoiding a handshake or acknowledgement of an African-American champion. Ironically, Hitler, Hermann Goering, and a Nazi entourage did come calling to an Olympic swimming facility.

“My name [Adolph] was very popular in Germany,” says Kiefer, who spoke to Hitler through an interpreter. “He was a little guy with a little bit of a mustache and hair peeking out of his hat. He looked exactly like his pictures.”

He says the German people adored Hitler at the time. “I shook his hand,” says Kiefer, who says no one knew of the atrocities the madman had in store. “I should have thrown him in the pool.”

After the Olympics, a series of events would take Kiefer in different directions. He toured the world with other Olympic champions, putting on swimming exhibitions. Hollywood called, too. He was photographed at studios and set up with a scholarship to learn acting at Columbia College back in Chicago. Meanwhile, he developed his confidence through an advertising gig, acting as the go-between for artists and clients with catalog ads, primarily for Montgomery Ward. He married a water ballerina from Northwestern, and answered the call to arms after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The war cancelled two Olympic games, but he swam competitively, dominating the international race scene, for another dozen years. Stationed in Virginia, Kiefer was appalled by what he saw transpiring right off the coastline. German submarines were sinking ships trying to get out to sea. “But we were losing more lives to drowning than bullets,” he says. “I couldn’t sleep at night.”

Kiefer’s trip to the nation’s capital helped to stem that tide. With backing of superiors and the aid of yeomen, Kiefer wrote two Red Cross books on water-safety survival. H e also helped train some 1,200 instructors across the globe, who, in turn, taught countless others how to properly abandon ship and survive at sea. Perhaps the satisfaction of that job well done hit home when he was in Greece: While furnishing equipment for the 2008 Summer Games, he met another WW II veteran. The old Navy captain told him that if he hadn’t learned the “Victory Backstroke” (Kiefer’s own), he would have died.

After the war, business success followed for Kiefer. He founded Adolph Kiefer and Associates in Chicago in 1946. The company, focusing on water inventions and innovations, boasts up to fourteen patents—everything from the first nylon swimsuits to the modern-day, floating racing lanes. He became part of the Sears Sports Advisory Council, where he tested gear designed by adventurist Sir Edmund Hilary and worked alongside two of his good friends: Owens and baseball great Ted Williams.

Kiefer recalls the future mayor Richard M. Daley running around in diapers while he and the elder Daley hatched plans to build swimming pools throughout the inner city of Chicago in the 1950s.

As an aquatic explorer who also took to scuba diving all over the world “for pleasure and treasures,” Kiefer seems to believe that water not only deserves the utmost respect (hence his call for safety) but is also a critical link to community building (hence his philanthropic bent).

And for the Chicago boy motivated by his father’s single-dollar encouragement, this swimmer’s life has paid some pretty good dividends.

—William Meiners (M.F.A. ’96)