Chul Schwanke

Persevere—don’t give up. Take advantage of those people who want to help you.  Be leery of those folks who don’t necessarily want to help you. School is the one thing people cant take away from you. The last word I would say is to be nice to people, be kind to people.

Chul Schwanke

My name is Chul Schwanke.  I’m African-American and Korean if you were wondering. I was born in 1963 in a little town called Pusan. I grew up in Pusan until I was seven.  The first seven years of my life I just know from what people have told me. Pouson is a little town in Korea where there was a U.S. Army base nearby.  My father was a soldier and my mother was Korean. That’s how I came to be 47 years ago.  I was not pure Korean, I was mixed, so I was treated differently than if I would have been a full-blooded Korean.

I was adopted when I was seven by a German family in Hutchinson.  I believe I came to the United States on May 3rd of 1970.  I was adopted by two teachers.  My dad taught history and my mom taught math. Hutchinson is not a very diverse town at all.  I always used to joke around that you could pick me out of a school yearbook by just going through and looking for the spot.  And that would be me.

Growing up in Hutchinson had its benefits, but it also had its points when it wasn’t too fun.  I would either have friends that really liked me, or people that really hated me.  There was not a whole lot of people in the middle ground.  I had to look out for those kids who would bully me because I was different.  Because I looked different, my hair was different.

In the 8th or 9th grade I started participating in sports and subsequently part of the bullying stopped.  A lot of that acceptance that I didn’t get from just being who I was, I would get that acceptance from excelling in sports.

I was the all-state football player when I was a senior, and then went to South Dakota on a football scholarship.  Football was the only sport I played while I was in college.  When you picture Vermillion, South Dakota, you wouldn’t think that would be a place where you would see a whole lot of diversity, but that’s probably the place where I saw the most amount of diversity.  There’s a large Native American population and it had connections through recruiting, so a lot of football players came from Minneapolis, Omaha, Sioux Falls, and Florida of all places.  It was very enlightening and I’m happy that I did find that in Vermillion.

After, I was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams.  That summer I went out to Fullerton California to experience my first football camp.  I did not make the team, but the next year I signed a free agent contract with Cincinnati, when the Bengals were actually pretty good.  But, after that, I didn’t make the team and that was the end of my football playing.  I went back to school and finished up with a psychology degree.

When I started working for Minneapolis in 1998 I was a social worker. I was working with students who had been recommended for expulsion finding placements for the rest of the school year.  If you did something really serious to get you suspended or expelled you will most likely be working with me.

I don’t have any kids, but I do have 11 birds and three dogs.  I never intended to have eleven birds, just wanted to have one.  And then one became two and two became four and four became six, seven, eight, nine.  It’s sort of like potato chips, you can’t have just one.