American Dream Alive and Well in Rams Park : 16 Years Ago, Chul Yong Kim’s Mother Sent Her 7-Year-Old Son Off to the U.S.; Today, Chul Schwanke Bids for NFL Career

Seven-year-old Chul Yong Kim spends his days splashing in the surf near his small South Korean village and fighting with the children who make fun of his dark skin.

He spends his nights in a house full of women who entertain American soldiers from the nearby army base. He doesn’t see his mother much and is cared for by an elderly lady he calls grandmother. The highlight of his year is the day a black soldier takes him to the base, where he feasts on real food like “ice cream and chicken.”

Odds are that Chul Schwanke won’t still be in a Ram uniform when the squad is cut to 45 for opening day. But then, 16 years ago it didn’t figure that he would ever touch a football, much less carry one 3,427 yards for a college team in the United States.

The temptation is to look at Schwanke’s childhood and feel sorry for him. But he knows he’s much more fortunate than the thousands of others like he was who are still in South Korea and Vietnam.

“I will always have good and bad memories,” Schwanke said after a workout at Rams Park Tuesday. “I won’t ever forget. I know I have a better life over here. There’s a lot of prejudice over there . . . we weren’t very well-loved.

“And we were poor. I ate every day, but ketchup was a real delicacy. I feel very fortunate to be here.”

Still, he hasn’t forgotten a time when he felt nothing but terror.

Seven-year-old Chul sits huddled in his airplane seat, wondering what has happened to his world. His mother has told him that he’s going to America, the land of opportunity. But right now, he’s scared. When the plane lands in Minneapolis, he meets the people who will be his new parents. A little later, Chul discovers a photograph of his mother holding him as an infant. The picture, in defiance of adoption procedures, was carefully hidden in the binding of a photo album. He won’t be able to bring himself to look at it again for two years. Why has she done this terrible thing?

Schwanke still questions his mother’s motives and has mixed emotions about her, but after he had spent just a couple of years in his new Hutchinson, Minn., home, he knew he would be eternally grateful that she made the decision.

“They told me what was going to happen to me, but I couldn’t really fathom what was happening until I was on that plane,” he said. “The first couple of weeks were really hard. But it wasn’t long before it dawned on me that I didn’t have anything back there.”

Except memories. Memories of a mother and a sister he seldom saw, a father he never knew and a grandmother who gave him the only love he’d ever known.

“I don’t know if she’s still alive,” Schwanke said. “I’d like to see her again, but I don’t know how I could. I’d like to go back some day, but all I know is I lived in a little village by an Army base.

“I think my father is an American. He probably lives here. And my mother supposedly married an American serviceman and came here, too.

“Eventually, I’d like to know where my mother is. I’d like to hear why she did it. But then sometimes I don’t want to know. I just know I’m happy it happened.

“I have an older sister who is 100% Korean, so my relatives adopted her back in Korea. They take pride in their heritage,” he said of the Korean obsession with ethnic purity. “I wouldn’t have fit in.”

That was little consolation to the frightened 7-year-old who stepped off the airplane and into the lives of Robert and Mavis Schwanke on May 3, 1970. The couple already had a son of their own, wanted another and decided to make it a child unwanted elsewhere in the world.

“When you talk about what he’s accomplished, you’ve got to talk about this country,” Robert Schwanke told the Minneapolis Tribune last year. “When I look at him, I realize how great this country is. He comes from a place where he would have been discriminated against, and you wonder sometimes, what could he have been over there? And then you see what he is here.”

South Korea, of course, has yet to corner the market on bigotry, and the newest Schwanke didn’t exactly look like Wally Cleaver.

A month earlier, Chul was playing in the waves in South Korea and now he is sitting in a classroom of a predominantly white suburban elementary school. His command of the English language is limited, at best, and he doesn’t know how to ask to go to the restroom. When the inevitable accident occurs, Chul is reprimanded in front of the class by his teacher and sent home with a note pinned to his shirt. He’s a little confused at the time, but it isn’t long before the pain of humiliation grabs hold.

“I don’t think the teacher meant anything mean by it,” Schwanke says now. “At least I hope not.”

The overt acts of prejudice were just around the corner, though. Still, there was a difference. Schwanke didn’t have to face them alone anymore. He could run home crying to a mom and dad who wanted to hear his story and soothe his injured feelings.

“Kids called me everything from nigger to chink,” he said. “But from third grade up, I always had good friends and it seemed like it hurt them more than me. I remember how much that impressed me.

“If a group of big kids started calling me names, they stood up for me. I was in a lot more fights in Korea than I was here.”

Soon, it was Schwanke who was meting out the punishment--on the football field. He played two games at quarterback in his first year of age-group football. He ran the ball on every play, though, so the coach made him a halfback, and he has been running ever since.

In three years at Hutchinson High School, where his father teaches social studies, he became Minnesota’s premier prep back, gaining 1,040 yards and scoring 16 touchdowns in his senior year.

After passing up scholarships to Nebraska and Air Force, he established nine school records in running for 3,427 yards and 24 touchdowns at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion.

Those are impressive numbers, but in a National Football League training camp, Chul Schwanke is just another 5-11, 213-pound running back with good speed, good hands and very little chance of landing a spot on the roster.

“I was a little bit in awe Monday, but you get over that in a hurry,” he said. “I know it’s an uphill battle, but maybe I can open some eyes.”

Football once served as Chul Schwanke’s vehicle for acceptance. Now it could be the key that opens all the treasures of the American dream.

The odds, of course, are against him. But then, what’s new?