A gravesite inside Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, kissed by the sun and ocean breezes along Point Loma, is where one of the most decorated and anonymous Olympians in San Diego history rests.
A plot, P 2474, marks the location of Dennis Fenton. It simply states he was from Ireland, rose to the rank of Master Sgt. after enlisting in the U.S. Army and serving during World War I.
The chalk-white slate does not explain that 100 years ago, Fenton won a bronze medal in shooting during the Olympics in the same city of Paris hosting the games now.
It offers no details of the four medals — three of them gold — that Fenton collected at the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium.
So much history.
So much silence.
“I think of a man who came to this land of opportunity with $15 in his pocket and made a name for his country,” said Rosemarie Fenton McLain, the quiet Olympic star’s 89-year-old daughter-in-law who lives in the Fletcher Hills area.
“He could have made a living with his signature then, but he was too humble. He always said no. He died in obscurity, actually.”
The tie to the Paris Games, a century removed, was dusted off when a researcher and genealogist from Fenton’s native Ireland ed the family while working on a book. The Olympic yarn began to unwind through those exhaustive records.
Fenton was born in Ballincota, an Irish village on the breathtaking Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry. He came to the U.S. aboard the SS Ivernia, which was later torpedoed and sank by a German U-boat in Greece.
He landed at Boston Harbor in 1906 and initially worked at a leather factory, according to Olympics.com. He enlisted in the Army in 1908 and served in the Philippines and China as a world on the brink wrestled with its darkest chapter.
“He came over an Irishman and was immediately an American,” said Rosanna Linn, his granddaughter who lives in El Cajon. “He became career Army. That was his life.”
That path led to becoming a member of the 35th Infantry’s machine gun company, where he ed the competitive rifle team and was hand-picked for the Olympics.
Fenton ed 235 shooters from 18 countries who gathered in 1920 at Beverloo Camp, a station for Belgian soldiers during the war that sits outside of Antwerp. He won team golds in the free-, military- and small-bore rifle events.
Records detailed a course without tree cover, testing shooters as winds battered scores. During the competition, the Belgian Corps of Engineers rattled shooters, too, by detonating German grenades in a shrubby area two and a half miles away.
Fenton later added a bronze medal in the small-bore individual event at another camp. Stories of his world-class marksmanship were chronicled in American newspapers from Massachusetts to Hawaii. His accuracy was so renowned that Fenton McLain said he used to go deer hunting with only one shell.
“One,” she said.
Linn marvels, too.
“Grandpa wasn’t using a scope, he was using iron sights at 600 meters (in the longest event),” she said.
Fenton returned to the Olympic stage four years later in Paris, walking away with a team bronze in a frontiersy-sounding event called running deer, single shot.
The front of the medal shows various sports equipment and a harp with the words “VIIIeme Olympiade Paris 1924.” On the opposite side, a rival is helping up a rival in an early nod to the Olympic ideal of sportsmanship.
The bottom displays the Olympic rings, the first time they were featured on medals.
The medal lacks the shine of those being won this month, but towers over them with the dripping richness of its aged Olympic history. One hundred years later, back in Paris.
“What are the odds of that?” Fenton McLain said.
Time marches on, but the DNA of Olympic winners does not.
“The dedication that these people put in, the time,” said Linn, considering what it required of Fenton then. “The money. The effort. The sacrifice. All those things come to me.”
Fenton moved to San Diego when he retired from the Army, building two houses in Lemon Grove. His family found fresh and lasting roots. The connection to the military, the Olympics and San Diego only strengthened until his death in 1954.
“He was one of the most patriotic people I’ve ever met,” Fenton McLain said. “He was all about America. When planes fly over (the grave) and tip their wings, it brings tears to my eyes.”
A teen immigrant’s story, told through the lives we build and the global games we continue to play.
An echo from the past. A stirring connection to now.
