Toward the end of his life in 1975, Kelley Dolphus Stroud reflected on the fierce persistence of his youth. These were memories recounted by his daughter, Marilyn Casanave, in a magazine article.
“When I was young, I thought that I could do anything,” Stroud told her.
Casanave wrote that the man “would smile and chuckle, then grow sad.”
This was at the memory of an Olympic dream — “a time,” Stroud said, “when all my efforts and energies were not enough.”
They were more than enough to a proud relative today.
Frank Shines has been busy producing a documentary called “Running to Harvard.” It chronicles “the true, untold story of a 2,000-mile journey from Colorado to Cambridge for the 1928 Olympics.”
That year, Shines’ great uncle from Colorado Springs walked, jogged and hitched rides clear across the country to make a U.S. Olympic Trials race, for the games to be held later that year in Amsterdam. The journey by foot was the only option for the Black man who had earned a spot at the Harvard trials but had been denied the all-expenses-paid trip afforded to white counterparts.