The call of the life that wasn’t: Russ Ellis and what could have been
Meditative Story
WaitWhat
4.6 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2021
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Russ Ellis has led the kind of life they write books about. The first full-time Black professor at California’s Claremont Colleges. Acclaimed sociologist. Celebrated sculptor and painter. Even a recording artist. But as he reveals in this episode, even the fullest life can be haunted by a single event half a century earlier.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Boom, Boom, Boom, |
| 0:03.0 | Boom, Hoppa, |
| 0:05.0 | Boom, Hoppa, |
| 0:06.0 | Poundhapp, |
| 0:07.0 | June 30, |
| 0:12.0 | 1956 is a bright and smoky day in Los Angeles, |
| 0:16.0 | or so I'll piece together later. |
| 0:19.0 | From the moment I wake up, I am so focused I can only dimly register my surroundings. |
| 0:25.3 | I have one job. |
| 0:27.6 | Get to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. |
| 0:31.4 | For years, my life has been a vector, pointed directly at an event born 2,700 years earlier. |
| 0:40.6 | For an athlete like myself, there's no greater achievement than the Olympics. |
| 0:45.9 | No higher honor, no clearer test of one's worth. |
| 0:51.3 | How do you get to the Olympics? |
| 0:56.0 | You show up at the Coliseum. This glorious white art modern monument competition. |
| 1:02.0 | And you run faster than the other guys. |
| 1:06.0 | Not all of them. |
| 1:08.0 | Eight of us had made it to the 400-meter-dash trials finals. And to advance to the |
| 1:13.5 | Olympics, I just need to be in the top four. At 86, Russ Ellis has led such a rich life. |
| 1:26.4 | A celebrated sociologist at UC Berkeley, |
| 1:29.0 | and then the vice-chancellor there, |
| 1:31.1 | the first four-time African-American instructor at the Claremont Colleges, |
... |
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