Olympics: New Rochelle's Stars, Part III

Olympics: New Rochelle's Stars
Birthday Bio

Another previous Olympiad with distinct ties to New Rochelle is also our featured Birthday Bio for this week. It is a compelling Olympics story, as our local history intern Michael Weaver reveals:

 

Marty Glickman was born on August 14, 1917, to a family of Jewish immigrants from Romania. Known as a child to be the fastest kid on the block, he excelled as a track and football star at James Madison High School and Syracuse University. At eighteen years of age, he planned to make his place in history as a sprinter in the 1936 Summer Olympics. Unfortunately, it was not to be. The Olympics that year were held in Berlin during the days of Nazi Germany, and the head of the U.S. Olympic team did not want to offend Adolf Hitler by bringing in a Jewish athlete. Glickman and Sam Stoller, another Jewish athlete, were replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, and never again were they allowed the opportunity to take part. (Jesse Owens would become the first American track & field athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympiad, magnificently triumphing over Hitler’s claims of Aryan racial superiority.)

Marty’s career did not end there, however, and he became the premier sports announcer in New York, commentating on the Knicks for twenty-one years, the Giants for twenty-three years, the Yonkers Raceway for twelve years, the Jets for eleven years, and finally received a plaque as compensation for the gold medal he was likely to win in 1936 from the Olympic Commission in 1998. Glickman spent most of his later years in New Rochelle, until his death from complications from heart surgery in 2001. Glickman received one of the most egregious snubs in Olympic history, but managed to recover and make his mark on sports history nonetheless.

You can read Marty’s very own account of the 1936 Olympics incident on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website.