Author Neville Fay once wrote, “Trees have a tendency toward immortality.” That may be especially true for a 90-year-old oak in Fayette County, a tree whose rings trace back to the five rings of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany, and to a man named John Woodruff.
Woodruff grew up in a poor family in Connellsville. His parents were only a generation removed from slavery. He didn’t have much, but he had speed, discipline and determination.
He excelled in the classroom. He became a standout on the track at Connellsville High School. And that talent earned him a scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh.
He was just a freshman at Pitt when he made the 1936 U.S. Olympic Track Team.
Anne Madarasz, chief historian and director of the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum at the Heinz History Center, says Woodruff was one of just 18 Black athletes who traveled to Berlin that year to represent a country that, in many ways, still treated them as second-class citizens.
“Just like with his University of Pittsburgh team, when you travel as an Olympic athlete, the Black athletes cannot stay with the white athletes,” Madarasz said. “The Olympic team, they gather them together in New York, they don’t stay in the same hotels as the white athletes, they are kind of sequestered and housed. So, they go on the boat together, they are a team together, but it really is these 18 athletes that provide kind of a bond and a community for each other and support each other throughout the games. And then, they are going to Adolf Hitler’s Germany.”
The 1936 Games were the first ever to be televised. Adolf Hitler intended them to be a global showcase for German superiority — a celebration of his so-called master race.
But athletes like Jesse Owens and John Woodruff would dismantle that theory in front of 110,000 people inside Berlin’s Olympic Stadium and millions more watching around the world.
Woodruff’s defining moment came on Aug. 4 in the 800-meter race, which he would win in unforgettable fashion.
“The Canadian, Phil Edwards, sets out and takes the lead,” Madarasz said. “And Woodruff is hemmed in and there is nowhere he can move. So, he essentially stops dead, lets everyone pass him, moves to the outside lane and then starts running again. He is ahead and then loses the lead and then he has got to maneuver again and win the race.”
Woodruff surged across the finish line in 1 minute, 52.9 seconds. He won gold, having out-run and out-maneuvered the best in the world.
But the medal wasn’t the only thing he carried home.
Like every gold medalist in Berlin, Woodruff was presented with a small oak sapling from Germany’s Black Forest, a living symbol of his victory.Â
A 90-year-old oak in Fayette County is a reminder of the legacy John Woodruff made at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
Today, his gold medal is preserved inside the University of Pittsburgh’s Hillman Library, unchanged since 1936. But in Connellsville, that sapling took root. And over the last 90 years, it has grown into something far larger than anyone could have imagined.
George Von Benko, co-founder of the Fayette County Sports Hall of Fame, is among those working to make sure John Woodruff’s story and what he represented aren’t forgotten. He says that there are only two Olympic Oaks left in the U.S. One from Jesse Owens that he planted in Cleaveland, though that tree became deceased and had to be replanted, and Woodruff’s tree in Connellsville.
“What does this tree mean to this community?” KDKA’s Chris DeRose asked.Â
“It means a great deal,” Von Benko said. “I have actually seen students gathered near the tree to hear the Woodruff story. And John for many years came back, and he would sit around the tree with students, young people, who he dearly loved and he would talk to them about life and about the way to get ahead, about his story, which in itself is a great story of overcoming things, and that’s what that tree means to a lot of people. And the fact that it is still standing majestic in the corner is just unbelievable, isn’t it?”
John Woodruff died in 2007. But his tree still stands tall, rooted, unshaken. It’s a living reminder not just of one Olympic victory, but of a life spent serving others as a soldier, teacher, coach and mentor.
A young man who once defied hatred on the world’s biggest stage came home and quietly planted hope. And if it’s true that trees have a tendency toward immortality, then this Olympic Oak just might prove it.
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