Ronald Bank escaped from Alcatraz Island on May 19, powering his way past any sharks that might or might not have been lurking in San Francisco Bay and splashing ashore at Fisherman’s Wharf - alive and in first place for his age division.
In his third attempt at the annual Alcatraz Sharkfest open-water swim, the 66-year-old retired electrical contractor from Little Rock - a self-described “ex-Yankee” - swam 1 ½ miles in 57-degree water, finishing in 45:00:09. He improved upon two earlier attempts by 14 minutes, and while he placed 571st of 816 racers, he was first among the five 65- to 69-year-olds who wore wetsuits.
“They have a wetsuit division and they have a ‘naked’ division,” he explains. The not-wetsuited racer who placed first in the same age group finished more than a minute ahead of Bank but that guy was from Michigan, and no-wetsuit is a completely different division. He doesn’t count.
Before it became part of the National Park System, Alcatraz Island was the site of a federal penitentiary considered so secure it housed the nation’s most notorious public enemies, including Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly.
From 1934 to 1963, 36 prisoners were involved in 14 escape attempts but according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ history of Alcatraz (bop.gov/about/history/alcatraz.jsp) “officially, no one ever succeeded in escaping from Alcatraz, although to this day there are five prisoners listed as ‘missing and presumed drowned.’”
Does Bank’s success suggest that he could have survived an escape from Alcatraz back in the day?
“Oh yeah,” he says - if it was a fair day without sharks. And he’s not the only one. Finishers included an 80-yearold and a 10-year-old. “Yeah. I could have swam it without a wetsuit, probably, but it’s pretty cold. The biggest problem with that swim is it’s cold. And the current. You have to do it at slack tide.”
His award was a medal and a bottle of Great White Shark wine. “They didn’t give the 10-year-old any wine,” Bank says.
Since they didn’t begin their journey with incarceration, how did competitors get out to the famous island nicknamed “The Rock”?
“They start out in the morning. They march you down to the ferries. Eight hundred people get on the ferries,” Bank says. After being ferried to Alcatraz, racers hop off the boats to bob about in the bay. “They jump you out of the ferries, and they have a line of kayaks out there. You swim up to the kayaks, and then they blow the horn on the ferries, and it’s a race thing to the finish line.”
Bank is sure he was the only Arkansan at this year’s event. He hung up an Arkansas banner hoping to draw Arkansans to take photos with him, but the only people he caught were Canadians. They posed under his banner “because they forgot to bring their Canadian banner.”
Official results do list someone named James Lyda as hailing from “Yuma, AR,” but there is no Yuma on the Arkansas map. Meanwhile, Internet searches turn up evidence of a man with that name living in Yuma, Ariz.
Whatever, Bank is not the first Arkansan to win in the event.
“A friend of mine who has one leg did it a couple of years ago,” he says. In 1998 when he was 61, Benny Wise of Little Rock won his age division. That was the year that Bank’s wife, Kay, wouldn’t let him enter.
Bank says, “Benny and I had all these great plans. We were going to drive across the country together, stop off in Vegas. My wife said, ‘You can’t do that because you’re going to drown.’ Ben is 10 years older than me, he’s got one leg, and he was put in the paper for doing it, by the way, he gets in the newspaper. In the paper, he said, ‘My buddy was supposed to go with me, he didn’t.’
“That was me, the buddy.”
In 2008, Wise returned to Alcatraz, and this time, Bank went with him. “We swam it together, and he won his age group because he was 71,” Bank says, “and I didn’t win mine. I was in the pack but I didn’t win it.
“And then I went again with my grandchildren when I was 63. I didn’t quite get close enough to win it. So I said, ‘I’m going to train this time.’”
Unlike that Michigander who outpaced him without a wetsuit, Bank doesn’t have a big, cold body of open water like Lake Michigan lying around for his training convenience. He prepared indoors at the Bess Chisum Stephens Community Center pool. “I go over there to swim a mile a day. Last couple of weeks, I’ve been swimming two miles, trying to get ready,” he says, adding, “and then you have to get ready for the cold water and the waves and the current. And people swimming over you and underneath you.
“It’s an amazing thing to see.”
“I’ve been swimming forever,” Bank says. Once upon a time a varsity swimmer for Arizona State University, he has been active in U.S. Masters Swimming for four decades. He was inducted into the Arkansas Swimming Hall of Fame in 1995.
“I’m an old guy,” he says. “My wife worries about me drowning, I worry about getting a medal. I’ll tell you a funny story: My grandson went with me the last time, and I said, ‘Grandson’ - he was 12 - I said, ‘Clayton, you’re going to be able to tell your grandchildren that your grandfather swam this event when he was 63 years old.’ He said, ‘Grandpa, I can’t do that.’
“I said, ‘Why not, Clayton?’ He says, ‘Well, Grandpa, I’m not planning on getting married, so therefore I wouldn’t have any grandchildren.’
“Is he wonderful or what? I say, ‘You’re kidding me. You’re not going to tell anybody?’
“He says, ‘Well, I’ll tell somebody.’”
ActiveStyle, Pages 29 on 05/27/2013