Dr. Sammy lee is the quintessential Korean in body and soul: high-spirited, unassuming, blunt, gleefully unselfconscious, ebullient, and, above all, full of mirth and humor. 

 

Standing barely five feet, he’s fond of calling himself the shortest Olympic champion, but to me and his adoring fans, Sammy looms the tallest Korean American alive when it comes to the life force that seems to ooze from every pore of his skin. At nearly 88, he is ageless, boundless and peerless.

 

I’ve been basking in the glow of this Orange County ear specialist/Olympic champion/coach/globe-trotting speaker for nearly a half-century on countless occasions, private or public. His “Koreans Never Give Up” spirit seems to shine brighter with his advancing age. 

 

A Huck Finn in upbringing, he has never turned down a request from young Koreans to share his life experience. For years, it was a favorite routine for Sammy and his childhood chum, the late Col. Young Oak Kim, to appear together at summer camps and heritage retreats for American-born youngsters.

 

I’ve accompanied him on a dozen occasions, here and there across the ocean, along with his ever-cheerful better-half Roz. They’re an inseparable salt-and-pepper pair.

 

An inveterate storyteller, the Fresno, Calif. native and son of an independence fighter has regaled audiences with rousing tales of early pioneers’ struggles in the apartheid West. Rattling off names, stats, sites and personalities, he’s a walking encyclopedia.

 

A bedrock conservative with a healthy dose of irony and skepticism, never an ideologue, Sammy, along with the late wounded war hero Young Oak Kim, has demonstrated an abiding loyalty to their parents’ life-long devotion to Syngman Rhee’s cause for independence despite the latter’s dictatorial regime’s ignoble end in the 1960 student revolution.

 

Early on during the Korean War, Sammy, on an extended military duty in his father’s homeland, was sort of “adopted” by President Rhee and his Austrian-born wife, Francesca. Their touching relationship is legendary.

 

Although Rhee’s and political foe Dosan Ahn Chang Ho’s followers in exile wrangled for decades, their American-born children as a whole have stayed away from the interminable first-generation feuding. One of the most remarkable scenes at second-wave Korean communal events has been the sight of Sammy, the late colonel Kim, and Dosan’s surviving daughter Susan Cuddy and lone surviving son Ralph Ahn sitting or working together as the living legacy from the first-wave pioneers.

 

Sammy the fighter refused to put up with bigots, bullies and phonies in both childhood and adulthood in the sports arena and the military fields. He was a ferocious tiger in defense of the honor of his ancestral homeland.

 

He won the gold at the 1948 London Olympics. He became the first person of color and first Asian American to win a gold medal for America as a 1st Lieutenant. in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, having graduated from the University of Southern California in 1947.