To celebrate this year's Filipino American History Month, Positively Filipino pays tribute to those who paved the way and established our community's presence in the American tapestry. These Fil-Am heroes made their mark in a variety of fields, from labor organizing, public service, journalism and the arts, and in sports. Though they are no longer with us, their legacy lives on and should never be forgotten.

HISTORIANS AND ARCHIVISTS

Fred Cordova

Fred Cordova and his wife, Dorothy, began promoting Filipino American identity at Seattle University where they both attended college studying Sociology. In 1957, they formed and directed the Filipino Youth Activities (FYA) with activities ranging from soccer to folk dancing and parade marching. Dorothy served as Director for the Demonstration Project for Asian Americans (DPAA) which conducted a wide variety of studies on the problems Asian Americans faced in the 1970s. Through DPAA, she collected research and oral histories. When DPAA closed, the Cordovas moved their work to a new organization, Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) where Dorothy was the Founder and Executive Director. Fred, author of Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans, served as Founding President Emeritus and Archivist of FANHS.

Founded in 1982, FANHS’ mission is to promote understanding, education, enlightenment, appreciation, and enrichment through the identification, gathering, preservation, and dissemination of the history and culture of Filipino Americans in the United States. It now boasts more than 35 active chapters throughout the United States and holds national conferences biennially. Seattle houses the National Pinoy Archives, one of the largest collections on Filipino American history anywhere. It includes thousands of materials on individuals and organizations throughout the United States. The group has a small museum in Stockton, California, where a large number of Filipinos immigrated to work in the San Joaquin Valley fields.

Fred, a former reporter at the Seattle-Post Intelligencer and Catholic Northwest Progress, headed public information at the University of Washington. He was among those who pushed Washington state to declare October Filipino America History Month (FAHM), a bill that was signed into law on May 7, 1992. The states of New York, California, Hawaii, and Minnesota also recognized FAHM. In 2009 the U.S. Senate and Congress proclaimed October as Filipino American History Month. In 2015 and 2016, President Obama officially recognized FAHM in October with a celebration in the White House.

“The legacy that Fred Cordova leaves is to have ‘Filipino American/Pinoy/Pinay’ always at the center of his being. You don’t go away from it. You’re always proud of being Filipino American. That’s what he sends to the coming generations,” said Rey Pascua, president of the Filipino American Community of Yakima Valley.

In Cordova’s own words, “Everybody doesn’t have to be a hero; everybody doesn’t have to be famous. Each person who’s Filipino American, to me, is very, very important as a story…Our stories are really in our people. It’s not so much in what the achievements are…as much as what is the story itself.”

Fred Cordova passed away on December 23, 2013 at the age of 82. The couple were married for 60 years and have eight children, 17 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren. Up to today, at close to 90 years old, Dorothy Laigo Cordova continues to chronicle the Filipino American experience.

Helen Brown

Helen Agcaoili Summers Brown was born in Manila of an Anglo father and Filipino mother. She moved to the United States when she was 17 years old. While attending Pasadena City College, she chose to do a report on the Spanish influence on Manila but could not find anything on the subject in school or in county libraries. She combed through her father’s scrapbooks to complete the assignment, and this propelled her to become a lifelong collector. She earned her bachelor’s degree in Education and her master’s degree in Social Work from the University of California, Los Angeles.

When Brown retired from the Los Angeles Unified School District in 1974, she started organizing what she had been collecting for decades into a home library. In 1985, her library moved to Luzon Plaza at 1925 W. Temple Street, in the heart of Filipinotown. Its current location is at 135 N. Park View Street in Los Angeles.

“Auntie Helen’s” Pilipino American Reading Room and Library (PARRAL) in the late ‘90s consisted of more than 5,000 books, periodicals, maps, artifacts, musical instruments, tribal weapons, games, dolls, kitchen utensils, and more. “A multimedia library,” Brown said. The name was later changed to the Filipino American Library (FAL). It became the first of its kind in the United States.

After graduating in 1937, Brown became a teacher, got married and raised four sons. With the huge influx of Filipinos to Los Angeles in the 1960s, Brown rediscovered her identity and became a “born-again” Filipino. She identified with Filipino students who were unschooled in their culture but eager to learn and were struggling in their new surroundings. She lobbied the school district to recognize the special needs of the Filipino children and brought together resource materials to educate teachers.

Brown believed that nothing was too insignificant when it came to preserving the social history of Filipinos in the United States. She also wanted the library to be a place for anyone interested to learn about Filipinos and Filipino Americans.

Helen Brown passed away on January 25, 2011. She was 95 years old.

Dawn Bohulano Mabalon

Dawn Buholano Mabalon (Photo courtesy of Jesus Gonzales)

Dawn Bohulano Mabalon was born in Stockton, California. She attended San Joaquin College and University of California, Los Angeles where she received her master’s in Asian American Studies and earned her doctoral degree in History from Stanford University. She later taught at San Francisco State University as an associate professor of history where she focused her work on the history of Filipino Americans, Filipinos in Stockton, and Filipinos’ role in the 20th century labor movement.

She and Dillon Delvo founded The Little Manila Foundation, which worked to preserve Little Manila in Stockton. Mabalon authored three books (Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipino American Community in Stockton, California, Filipinos in Stockton and co-edited Filipinos in San Francisco) and was working on a fourth. Her works elevated the status of Little Manila in Stockton and helped lead to Little Manila being listed as one of America’s Most Endangered Places.

She is a recipient of the following awards: 2008 Captain Charles M. Weber Award, Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship for Excellence in College and University Teaching, San Francisco State University Presidential Professional Development Award, President’s Award for Excellence in Historic Preservation and the Filipinas Magazine Achievement Award for Community Service.

In 2017, along with Gayle Romasanta, Mabalon wrote a children’s book about Larry Itliong, the Delano labor leader.

In August 2018, Mabalon died while snorkeling in Kauai, Hawaii. She had been vacationing with her family when she suffered an asthma attack. She was memorialized in October 2018 at San Francisco State University.

Ricardo Ocreto Alvarado

Ricardo Alvarado immigrated to San Francisco in 1928 from the Philippines. He was part of the wave of Filipino immigrants known as the manong (“older brother”) generation, who came to the United States between 1901 and 1935, after the Spanish American War of 1898 made the islands a U.S. territory. At first, he made a living working as a janitor and houseboy. During World War II, he served his new country as a medical technician in the Army’s highly decorated First Filipino Infantry Regiment. When he returned from the Pacific, he supported himself as a cook at San Francisco’s Letterman Army Hospital. In many ways, his biography reflects the limited career opportunities so many immigrants encountered in the 1940s and 1950s.

For 20 years he studied the city and nearby rural areas in his free time with his view camera in hand, recording the Filipino community in San Francisco after the war. More than a hobby, photography was his passion. He canvassed the Bay Area’s city streets and rural back roads for subjects. His view camera gave him entrée into large social functions—weddings, funerals, baptisms, parties, and dances—as well as intimate family gatherings. He recorded street scenes, beauty pageants, cockfights, agricultural workers tending crops, and entrepreneurs on the job. The subjects are family, friends and peers who open their homes and give themselves generously to his camera. The result is sociologically compelling but also sweetly intimate.

In 1959, Alvarado ended his work in photography and returned to the Philippines to marry Norberta Magallanes. They had two children, Janet and Joseph Alvarado, who live in San Francisco.

When he died in 1976, he left behind a rich trove of historically significant and visually arresting images, yet they remained hidden until his daughter, Janet Alvarado, found his collection of nearly 3,000 photographs and recognized their importance. She formed The Alvarado Project to ensure that her father’s unique record of Pinoy life would be preserved and would receive the attention it deserves.

"The basic story of Filipino American history until well after the war, primarily is a story of bachelors," said Franklin Odo, the Smithsonian curator who collaborated with Janet Alvarado on the exhibition, Through My Father's Eyes. He says the photos are remarkable, not only for their artistic merit, but for what they say about a people's resiliency. "The first wave, the first period before World War II anyway is that of large numbers of men coming to work," he continued. "And they're basically migrant workers working up and down the West Coast in agricultural pursuits, picking apricots, cutting asparagus, going up to Canada and Alaska to can salmon, that type of thing. So one of the things that he does in these photographs is document community life families, children...You see family life that people don't normally associate with early Filipino American history."

Alvarado’s daughter, Janet, said: "And I think knowing the very special and deep bond I had with my father as a young girl, I think I see this as I get to live his dream and carry it out for him. So if I'm feeling proud to be his daughter, I think he must be feeling very proud to know that I didn't overlook the collection or it didn't get lost."

LEGISLATORS, POLITICIANS AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

Thelma Buchholdt

Thelma Juana Garcia was born in Claveria, Cagayan, Philippines. Her father was of mixed tribal heritage including Aeta and Ibanag, while her mother was of Ilocano heritage. Through an uncle who was based in Las Vegas, Nevada, she was able to enroll at Mount St. Mary’s College in Brentwood, Los Angeles where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in Zoology. She met her husband, Jon Buchholdt while studying in Las Vegas and they raised four children. She and her husband enrolled in the District of Columbia School of Law in Washington, D.C. and earned their law degrees in 1991, and were subsequently admitted into the Alaska Bar Association.

In the late 1960s in Anchorage, Alaska, Buchholdt became involved in politics as a member of the Ad Hoc Committee of Young Democrats. She ran for the Anchorage School Board and lost in a surprisingly close race for a first-time candidate. George McGovern named her the Alaska coordinator for his 1972 presidential campaign. After her work on the McGovern campaign, in 1974, Thelma was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives as an Ad Hoc Democrat. She was subsequently re-elected to the Alaskan legislature in 1976, 1978, and 1980. She was the first female Filipino American legislator in the United States of America.

Buchholdt’s life was one full of "firsts": founder of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Alaska (1966); first female to be elected President of the Filipino Community of Anchorage, Alaska, Inc. (1973); first Asian American elected to the Alaska State Legislature (1974); first female Filipino American elected to a legislature in the United States (1974), founder and coordinator of the Filipino Heritage Council of Alaska, Inc. (1975); first president of the Asian Alaskan Cultural Center, the first cross-cultural center of its kind in Alaska (1983); first Asian American elected to serve as President of the National Order of Women Legislators (1987); founder of the Alaska chapter of the Filipino American National Historical Society (1994).

Thelma Buchholdt died of pancreatic cancer on November 5, 2007 at her home in Anchorage, Alaska.

In 2008, Thelma Buchholdt was awarded the James "Jim" Doogan Lifetime Achievement Award by the Alaska Democratic Party. On June 24, 2008, the City of Anchorage recognized July 5, 2008 as Thelma Buchholdt Day. On March 6, 2009, she was inducted into the Alaska Women's Hall of Fame in recognition of her long-term, significant contribution to Alaska. The "Thelma G. Buchholdt Picnic Shelter" was erected in 2010 at Woodland Park, near her Anchorage home.

Eduardo Malapit

Eduardo Enabore Malapit was born in Kauai, Hawaii and raised in the town of Hanapepe. His parents owned the Hanapepe Pool Hall during the 1960s. He attended Waimea High School and obtained his bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Hawaii and his jurisprudence degree from the University of Notre Dame Law School in 1962. He worked as a public prosecutor after graduation.

His first time in public office was as a councilman on the Kauai County Council for eight years. He was elected as Mayor of Kauai in 1974, becoming the first mayor of Filipino American descent in the United States. He served as mayor for four consecutive two-year terms from 1974 to 1982. Under his leadership, public parks were renovated, community centers, police stations, fire stations, and sewage treatment plants were built. His term also coincided with the Nukolil Development, which caused controversy. His office was heavily damaged by a pipe bomb and the perpetrators were never captured.

He left the mayor’s office in 1982 and became chairman of the Hawaii State Board of Labor and Industrial Relations from 1983 to 1987. He served as the Governor’s representative for the County of Kauai from 1987 to 1990, and also worked as a part-time magistrate.

He was known for his leadership in community service. He held positions in Kauai Pop Warner Football League, West Kauai Jaycees, Koloa Youth Baseball Organization, Koloa Lions Club, Hawaii Visitors Bureau, Kauai Catholic Vicariate, and the Kauai Filipino Community Council.

Eduardo Malapit died on August 27, 2007 at the age of 74 in Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii.

Maria Luisa Mabilangan Haley

Born in the Philippines, Maria Luisa Mabilangan-Haley was the daughter of a Philippine diplomat. She was educated in India, Pakistan, France, and Spain. She lived and worked in seven countries in Asia and Europe before immigrating to the United States and becoming a U.S. citizen. Haley moved to Arkansas in 1971 when she married John Haley, a lawyer. They divorced in the early 1990s, and he died in a plane crash in 2003.

Haley was an official of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission (AIDC) from 1979 to 1992 as an International Marketing Consultant and Director of Communications. She coordinated then Governor Bill Clinton’s trade and investment missions overseas and was staff adviser to the governor on trade at the National Governors’ Association. She served as Protocol Officer for the State and the governor’s office for 10 years.

She served in the White House at the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) under President Bill Clinton’s administration in 1993-94. She was the point of contact for the selection and approval of three economic development agencies: Commerce; Transportation; HUD and 12 independent executive agencies. The former president nominated Haley to the Export Import Bank of the United States, where she was part of the board from 1994 to 1999. She helped manage a $55 billion portfolio aimed at promoting U.S. exports, business development, and international investments. She was the congressionally mandated advocate for small business, and financing for small business exports doubled during her tenure. She also initiated and led the Bank’s Africa program initiatives, resulting in a significant increase in bank financing and activities on the continent. From 1999 to 2001, Haley returned to the White House as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of PPO. She managed the day-to-day operations of PPO and participated in legislative strategies on confirmation of Presidential nominees. She left the White House in 2001.

In 2001 and 2002, Haley served as an adviser to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the Philippine government. From 2001 to 2007, Haley was Senior Director for Asia with Kissinger McLarty Associates (KMA), a partnership headed by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former White House Chief of Staff and Envoy for the Americas, Thomas F. “Mack” McLarty.

Haley received numerous honors and awards, including the Ron Brown Award for Advancing Trade Opportunities from the U.S. Small Business Exporters Association, the 2000 Stan Suyat Memorial Leadership Award from the Asian American Government Executives Network, and the Philippine Presidential Award by the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, and the 2006 Corporate Leadership Award from Filipinas Magazine.

At the time of her passing, Haley was the Executive Director of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission (AEDC), appointed by Gov. Mike Beebe following his election in 2006. This cabinet agency of more than 100 employees leads statewide economic development, creates targeted strategies that produce better paying jobs, promotes communities, and supports the training and growth of a 21st century skilled workforce.

Former President Bill Clinton called her a “great public servant, a wonderful person and friend for more than 30 years.” “We mourn her passing,” the former president added. “Thousands of people in Arkansas, throughout the United States, and in the Philippines, benefited from Maria Haley’s life-long commitment to bring economic opportunities to more people,” he said.

“Maria Haley did more for the State of Arkansas than most people will ever know,” Governor Mike Beebe said. “After living all over the world, Maria made Arkansas her adopted home, and dedicated herself to its betterment for more than 30 years.” The National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA) said, “Ms. Haley was a strong voice for Filipino American empowerment, providing much needed advice, assistance and encouragement to community leaders in their efforts to build a national presence in Washington, D.C. in the mid-1990s. She was especially attentive to the needs of Filipino Americans who were seeking elected office or pursuing opportunities for public service.”

Maria Luisa Mabilangan Haley died on September 13, 2011 in Little Rock, Arkansas from a brain aneurysm. She was 70 years old.

Stanley Donald Suyat

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Stanley Suyat went from law school into the Peace Corps as a teacher in the Philippines. He graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle and Fordham University Law School. His aunt was married to Thurgood Marshall, the first Black appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and a giant in the civil rights movement. "He was a young man when they got to know Thurgood," said Linda Suyat, his wife. "It was an influence in inspiring him to become an attorney, to be of service, to help his fellow man.

He was dedicated to mentoring and helping youngsters. He returned to the Peace Corps 30 years later as an associate director for management. Suyat practiced law for several years and was formerly a partner with Carlsmith Ball Wichman Case and Ichiki before going to Washington, D.C. He signed up to work on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign and ended up working in Washington, D.C. for six years. His last assignment was with the U.S. Department of Energy as Director of Civil Rights and Diversity.

"He was very interested in getting people of different cultures and backgrounds to understand each other," said former city Corporation Counsel Gary Slovin. Suyat's Washington appointments were positions intended to bring agencies "to recognize there would be more people of different cultures in government and that there was a lot of insensitivity toward differences. He saw that it was a future issue that had to be addressed in the country. That was going to be the theme of the next 10 years for Stan," he said. Suyat directed the young attorneys program in which the corporation counsel's office gave beginning lawyers training. "Probably of all the things he did, that was one of which he was most proud," Slovin added.

Linda Suyat said her husband "often spoke to groups to encourage minorities to achieve more. That was his interest." He was active with the Asian-American Government Executives Network (AAGEN), which mentors young people. He was a founding president of Hawaii Youth at Risk, organized in the 1980s based on a California program that helped troubled teenagers through a wilderness experience camp and counseling.

He died on July 25, 1999 in Honolulu from lung cancer. He was only 55 years old. The AAGEN established the annual Stanley Suyat Memorial Leadership Award.

Apolinar Sangalang

Apolinar Sangalang was born in Pampanga, Philippines. He became a member of the Philippine army and was given the opportunity during World War II to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He was a survivor of the Bataan Death March. He moved his family to New Mexico where he was stationed after the war, but he later moved first to Stockton in the 1950s and then Lathrop in the 1960s. He picked Stockton because there were “lots of Filipinos there.” He became a minister and choir leader at St. Mark’s United Methodist church in Stockton. He earned his Bachelor of Arts and master’s degrees in Religious Education-Theology from the University of the Pacific.

Sangalang was the first Filipino American mayor in the United States mainland. He was an original council member in the city of Lathrop, California when it was incorporated in 1989. He served as the town’s mayor in 1993 at a time when the position was appointed and rotational. The city’s Asian American population, with a Filipino majority, makes up around 22% of all residents.

Pam Carder, Lathrop’s city manager and planning director said that age was never an issue with Sangalang, who took office when he was 83. “He was the youngest 83-year-old I ever saw. He was extremely well-spoken, a good thinker.”

His community involvement included: Past Commander, Manual A. Roxas Post 798, the American Legion, 1964-66; past President of the San Joaquin County Veterans Coordinating Council, 1968-69; past President of the Filipino Community of Stockton and Vicinity, 1976-78; past President of Lathrop District Chamber of Commerce, 1977-83; past President of San Joaquin County Chamber of Commerce, 1982; past President of Fil-Am Chamber of Commerce of San Joaquin County, 1979; past Chairman of the Lathrop Advisory Council, 1982; past Chairman of the Associated Filipino Organization of San Joaquin County, Filipino Center, 1970; past President of the American Ex-Prisoners of War, Delta Chapter, 1980; past Mayor of City of Lathrop, 1993; past Councilman of City of Lathrop; and past President of the Filipino Community of Lathrop, Manteca, French Camp and Vicinity.

In 2006, the eight-acre Stonebridge Park at Slate Street and Deerwood Way in Lathrop was re-named the Apolinar Sangalang Park. At the ceremony, Mayor Gloryanna Rhodes remembered meeting Sangalang 17 years ago and said he was a dedicated volunteer with a lot of zest and vigor.

Apolinar Sangalang died on August 27, 2004 in Manteca, California at the age of 98 from heart and kidney failure.

Peter Aduja

Born in Ilocos Sur, Philippines, Peter Aduja immigrated to the U.S. at the age of eight to Hilo, Hawaii. His father worked on a sugarcane plantation as a sakada. He attended Hilo High where he was the student body president. At the University of Hawaii, he majored in Government and History. While at the university, he worked as a timekeeper at Pearl Harbor. In 1944, he joined the U.S. Army with 50 other individuals to volunteer for the 1st Filipino Infantry Regiment. Following WWII, he married Melodie Cabalona and taught on the island of Hawaii at Naalehu Intermediate School before attending Boston University where he earned a law degree in 1951. Along with Ben Menor, they became Hawaii’s first Filipino lawyers.

In 1954, Aduja was elected to the Territorial house of Representatives, becoming the first Filipino to be elected to public office in Hawaii and the United States. He ran as a Republican and lasted for only one term. The Republican Party was in decline in 1954. “My wife reminds me from time to time that it was a mistake,” Aduja said. “If I’d chosen to be a Democrat, I would still be in office.”

He then worked for the Department of Attorney General. He ran for State Senate in 1959 but lost. From 1960 to 1962, he was a district judge. In 1966, he ran again for public office and became a member of the Hawaii House of Representatives until 1974.

Peter Aduja died on February 19, 2007 while on vacation in Las Vegas. Governor Linda Lingle declared March 29, 2007 to be Pater A. Aduja Day. He is survived by two children, one of whom is former Hawaii State Senator Melodie Aduja.

Benjamin Menor

Born in the Philippines, Benjamin Menor came to Hawaii with his family at the age of eight. His mother pushed him to stay in school rather than work in the plantations. He attended Hilo High School, where he graduated salutatorian, and the Honolulu Business College.

He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, from 1944 to 1946, fighting in the Philippines. After the war, he received a B.A. from the University of Hawaii in 1950 followed by a J.D. from Boston University. He and Peter Aduja were classmates. Menor viewed the legal profession as a means to promote social justice as he saw how plantation workers were treated as second class citizens whose rights were ignored and trampled on.

Menor was the first person of Filipino ancestry to be elevated to a state supreme court in the United States. Before this, he held various private and public positions including a term as a member of the Hawaii State Senate from 1962 to 1966. He retired from the bench in 1983. Throughout his career, he was active in the Filipino community as a positive role model for Filipino Americans.

Benjamin Menor died on July 4, 1986 in Honolulu at the age of 63, after suffering from throat cancer. His son, Ron, became an attorney and councilman for District 9.

Alfred Laureta

Alfred Laureta was born in Ewa, Hawaii in 1924, the only son of laborers who migrated to Hawaii. After graduating from Lahainaluna High School on Maui, Laureta worked his way through the University of Hawaii at Manoa and then attended the Fordham University School of Law on a scholarship. While in New York, Laureta met his wife, Evelyn, a nursing student, who died in 2012.

Back in Hawaii after college, Laureta helped form a new law firm with partners Bert Kobayashi, a future state Supreme Court associate justice; Russell Kono, who went on to become a state district court judge; and George Ariyoshi, who would serve three-plus terms as Hawaii governor. After the Democrats took control of the Territorial Legislature in 1954, Laureta was appointed House attorney for the 1955 session, along with Patsy Mink, who would represent Hawaii in Congress, and Herman Lum, future chief justice of the state Supreme Court. He later worked in Washington, D.C., as administrative assistant to newly elected U.S. Rep. Daniel Inouye. In 1963 Laureta was appointed director of the Department of Labor by Gov. John A. Burns, a post he held until the governor appointed him to the bench.

He served as a judge of the 1st Circuit Court in Honolulu from 1967 to 1969 before transferring to Kauai’s 5th District Court in 1969. When President Jimmy Carter appointed him in 1978 as the first Filipino American to serve as a federal judge, it was as the first district judge in the federal court for the Northern Mariana Islands, where he presided for a decade.

Laureta retired in 1988 but continued to serve the community as a volunteer mediator for the Kauai Economic Opportunity, as the Kauai commissioner on the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, and as an elected director on the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, among other things.

Former Kauai Mayor Bernard Carvalho Jr. remembered Laureta as well-connected yet humble, treating everyone he came into contact with the same way. “He took his role as a judge seriously. At the same time, he was an uncle and friend who helped me with a lot of advice. He was always there for me as a mentor and an uncle,” said Carvalho.

Alfred Laureta died on November 16, 2020 at the age of 96 at his Kapaa, Kauai home.

SPORTS

Victoria Manalo Draves

Victoria Manalo Draves won gold medals in both the ten-meter platform and the three-meter springboard diving at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. Not only was she the first American woman to win two gold medals in diving, but she was also the first Asian American and Filipino American woman to win Olympic gold medals.

Manalo Draves was born in San Francisco, California to Filipino chef Teofilo Manalo and English maid Gertrude Taylor. She couldn’t afford to take swimming lessons until she was 10 years old. She took summer swimming lessons from the Red Cross, paying five cents for admission to a pool in the Mission District. She graduated from Commerce High School (now City College) in 1942 and worked a temporary civil service job in the Army Port Surgeon’s office to add to the family’s meager income.

At 16 years old, she met Jack Lavery who introduced her to Phil Patterson, the swimming coach of the Fairmont Hotel Swimming and Diving Club, but due to racial discrimination and prejudice faced by Filipinos, she changed her name to Vicki Taylor to be accepted in Patterson’s school. She joined another program at the Crystal Plunge where Jimmy Hughes served as her coach. Hughes guided her to a third-place finish in her first national AAU diving competition at the Indiana national meet in 1943.

In 1944, she met Lyle Draves, a coach who ran the swimming and diving program at the prestigious Athens Athletic Club in Oakland. She married Draves in 1946 and won the National Tower Diving Championship (10-meter platform) in 1946, 1947 and 1948. Prior to the 1948 Olympics, she won a total of five United States diving championships.

After her Olympic victory, she and her husband visited the Philippines where she gave platform diving exhibitions at Rizal Stadium and for President Elpidio Quirino. She also turned professional, joining aquatic shows. She and her husband operated a swimming and diving training program at Indian Springs in Montrose and later moved the program to Encino, California. They raised four sons.

In the mid-1960s, Manalo Draves was an advocate for the Filipino Education Center in San Francisco where Filipino immigrants settled in the South of Market district. In 1968, she joined Jesse Owens in Las Vegas to raise $700,000 for the City of Hope National Medical Center. In 1969, she was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of fame. In 2005, she was selected as the year’s Most Outstanding Alumnus of City College of San Francisco and received a standing ovation from 2,000 graduating students in attendance. In October 2006, a two-acre park (one acre per gold medal) in San Francisco was named Victoria Manalo Draves Park in her honor, on Folsom and Sherman Streets, four blocks away from where she was born and raised.

Victoria Manalo Draves died on April 11, 2010, aged 85, from pancreatic cancer aggravated by pneumonia in Palm Springs, California where she and her husband moved to in 1995.

Source: Google and Wikipedia

The Magazine

We Stand on their Shoulders, Part 2