Nathan Zimble
A Near Olympian In Wrestling
In his heyday, both as a wrestler and as a wrestling coach, Nathan Zimble was the best. He was such a great wrestler for the Gallaudet University team in the early twenties that he was invited to tryout for the Olympics in 1920. And as a wrestling coach at Arkansas School for the Deaf (ASD), he produced an endless assembly line of state wrestling champions.
While Nathan was producing champion wrestlers, he was also an adept administrator as the school principal. “Nathan was effective; just simply the bests recalls a retired Gallaudet professor, an alumnus of ASD.
It was not the best of times for Nathan when he was at Arkansas. Prejudice against Jews was very strong. The board serving the school administration did not like him – it had nothing to do with his job performance both at the office and on the wrestling mat. What it mattered to them the most was he was a Jew. For this he was heavily persecuted. And eventually he was stripped of his duties as principal even though he didn’t lose his job. Things got so bad that he left Arkansas for good and went back home.
Nathan became deaf at the age of 14 because of spinal meningitis, a common disorder among those who became deaf later in life. This debilitating illness nearly ended his life – he laid in the hospital for a year and temporarily lost his vision before regaining it. Becoming deaf was his first experience and first exposure to the deaf community.
Nathan’s first exposure to the deaf community was attending classes at the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Massachusetts. He only lasted three months at the school, though, the experience being as it is was too traumatic for him to handle. Not surprisingly his first impression of the deaf was that they were idiots! His parents heard about the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf in Philadelphia and placed him there. It was no better – Nathan wanted nothing to do with it – but the school headmaster explained to him about Gallaudet and encouraged him to enroll there.
Undersized for his age, Nathan was the prototype 98-lb runt that beach bully is forever kicking sand into his eyes. Arriving at Gallaudet for the first time, he was mistaken for a Kendall School student and was instructed to report there!
Campus bullies liked to pick on him because of his size – getting tired of being picked on Nathan learned to wrestle. He learned wrestling so fast that he became the team star at the 11 2-lb class; actually Nathan continued to weigh 98 lbs., but the 11 2-lb class was the lightest weight class in wrestling. What this meant was that Nathan was beating up wrestlers that outweighed even at the 11 2-lb class!
Making a name for himself in wrestling, he got invited to the wrestling tryouts for the 1920 USA Olympic team. The tryouts took place at the old Madison Square Garden in New York, and he finished second place in his weight class.
After graduating from Gallaudet he accepted a position as a teacher at the Arkansas School for the Deaf. Seeing many deaf students idle with time on their hands after classes, Nathan got them involved in wrestling.
His wrestlers were so well coached that the school won 14 consecutive state AAU wrestling championships. The newspaper headline story “ASD wins Team Championship,” became routine year after year.
While Nathan was producing state wrestling championships, the political situation at the school became messy. The school superintendents were forever feuding with the politically appointed school board. One board member didn’t like Nathan, or rather put – didn’t like the idea of a Jew serving as the school principal, and wanted Nathan out.
Nathan’s friends and supporters were willing to fight for him, but he had enough, and got out of the teaching profession. He even fumed down offers from other schools for the deaf.
For the remaining years of his life Nathan worked in the office of a family-owned factory in Philadelphia.
Nathan was honored posthumously in 1995 when he was inducted into the Gallaudet Athletic Hall of Fame. Not too many deaf Jews live in the Southern states, except for the Southern Florida (Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach corridor). Much of the nation’s deaf Jews reside in the bigger cities of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
