The Boys in the Boat (Young Readers Adaptation), page 13
All over the state of Washington, people stood and cheered. What had been a dream was now a reality. The boys from Washington were going to the Olympics. For the first time ever, Seattle was going to compete in an athletic event on the world stage. Sitting by the radio at Harry’s new home on Lake Washington, Joyce and the kids cheered too. Harry said nothing, but pulled out a large American flag, tacked it on the wall above the radio, and stood back to admire it. The kids ran off to tell their friends. Joyce herself was quietly jubilant. The victory meant she would not see Joe again for months, but it would be worth the wait.
Flashing broad, white grins, Joe and his crewmates paddled back to the Princeton shell house, tossed Bobby Moch in the water, fished him out, and then lined up for the photographers. Ulbrickson said a few words, but they did not really capture the moment. Finally, he had in his grasp what had eluded him for years. Everything had come together. He had the right oarsmen, with the right attitudes, the right personalities, the right skills. Thanks to George Pocock he had a perfect boat, sleek, balanced, and wickedly fast. He had a winning strategy and a coxswain with the guts and smarts to make hard decisions and make them fast. It all added up to something far beyond the sum of its parts.
But there was a problem. That night, the chairman of the U.S. Olympic Rowing Committee, Henry Penn Burke, informed Al Ulbrickson, George Pocock, and Ray Eckman, the athletic director at Washington, that if the boys wanted to go to Berlin, they would have to pay their own way. Ulbrickson was stunned and livid. No one had hinted that the winning crew would have to fund its own trip. The university had barely been able to pay to send the boys east to Poughkeepsie and Princeton. And the boys themselves, working-class Americans, certainly didn’t have the dough. Burke, who was also the chairman of the Pennsylvania Athletic Club, noted that the Pennsylvania Athletic Club had the necessary funds. If Washington couldn’t come up with five thousand dollars by the end of the week, Burke said, the crew from Pennsylvania would take its place in Berlin. As far as Ulbrickson was concerned the whole thing stank.
Late that night Ulbrickson, Pocock, Eckman, and the Washington sportswriters began making phone calls back to Seattle. The next morning, Seattleites awoke to alarming headlines and radio news bulletins, warning that their boys might not be able to afford the trip to Berlin. The entire town went to work. Students flooded the streets of downtown Seattle selling paper badges for fifty cents apiece. Money and pledges began to pour in from newspapers, companies, anonymous donors, Washington alumni, and the boys’ hometowns, everywhere from Joe’s Sequim to Bobby Moch’s Montesano. In two days, they raised five thousand dollars. The boys from Washington were officially the United States eight-oared Olympic rowing team, and good to go to Berlin.
Joe’s Olympic passport.
23
Rowing for Liberty
In Berlin, the preparations for the Olympics had begun several years before, back when Joe and Roger were first trying out for the freshman boat. At first, the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler, did not want to host the games at all. Almost everything about the idea, in fact, had offended him. The very heart of the Olympic ideal was that athletes of all nations and all races should come together and compete on equal terms. But Hitler and his Nazi party believed that the Aryan people were superior to all others. The notion of Jews, blacks, and members of other races from around the world visiting his country was revolting to Hitler. Once he rose to power in 1933, however, his feelings about the Olympics began to change.
Hitler had grand plans for Germany. The country was devastated after its defeat in the First World War. The German economy had collapsed. The country’s army had been outlawed. Now Hitler wanted his nation to rebuild its military might, reclaim the territory it had lost in the past, and expand further across Europe and the world. He wanted the people he considered his race, the Aryan race, to reign supreme over all people. Yet he needed time to build up strength. If other nations discovered his plans before he had a chance to rebuild, they could crush those plans, so he had to keep his goals secret. One of his chief advisers, Joseph Goebbels, convinced Hitler that hosting the Olympics would be an ideal distraction. It would give the Nazis a chance to portray Germany as a civilized and modern state. The Olympics could be used to convince the world that Hitler governed a powerful but friendly nation. A country that the larger world should recognize and respect. As they put on a show of peace and progress, the Nazis could quietly restore Germany’s military might and prepare to conquer Europe.
Berlin decked out for the Olympics.
Once Hitler committed to the effort, the Olympics became a major public works project. Thousands of young German men transformed a 325-acre section outside Berlin into the Reichssportfeld, the site of the games. They constructed a great Olympic Stadium large enough to hold 110,000 people. They built a swimming stadium, an equestrian stadium, a gymnasium, tennis courts, restaurants, and more. The buildings were built with natural, German stone, and the workers were all Germans too. To get jobs Hitler decreed they had to be registered citizens and members of the Aryan race.
The Olympic rowing course lay fifteen miles to the southeast, in the leafy and pleasant lakeside community of Grünau. The rowing, canoeing, and kayaking events were all set to take place on the Langer See, one of several lakes fed by the Dahme River. The Langer See, with its deep blue water, had long been the center of water sports in Berlin. In 1925 there were dozens of rowing clubs based in and around Grünau. Some were exclusively Jewish, some only Aryan, and some happily mixed. As the Olympics approached, however, all this changed.
On September 15, 1935, Hitler stood before the leaders of the German government and announced three new laws. First, the Nazi party emblem, the swastika, was to become the official flag of Germany. Second, only people of German or related blood could be citizens of Germany. The third law was aimed directly at Jews. Among other things, it prohibited the marriage of Jews and non-Jews. In the next few months and years, Germany’s government would add dozens of additional laws restricting every aspect of the lives of German Jews, taking away even their most basic freedoms. Across Germany, in towns and cities, signs proclaiming “Juden unerwünscht” (“Jews not welcome”) appeared over the entrances to hotels, drugstores, public swimming pools, and shops of all sorts. Books written by Jewish authors and others the Nazis did not like were burned in public places. In Grünau, Jewish rowing clubs were banned. Other clubs were threatened if they did not kick out their Jewish rowers. Men who had rowed with one another for a lifetime began to turn their backs on their former crewmates and neighbors. Forbidding signs went up over the doors of shell houses. Doors were locked, keys changed.
These frightening developments had not gone unnoticed outside Germany. In the United States, there was a movement to boycott the 1936 Olympics in protest over the treatment of Jews in Germany. On November 21, 1935, ten thousand anti-Nazi demonstrators marched peacefully through New York City, calling for America to stay home from the games. In December, the Amateur Athletic Union of the United States voted on a new resolution. If the vote passed, the group would send a three-man committee to Germany to investigate claims that Nazis were mistreating Jews. But the vote failed. There would be no investigation. The boycott effort was effectively dead, and American athletes prepared to go to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics.
After Princeton, the New York Athletic Club invited Ulbrickson and the crew to use its training facilities at Travers Island, an elegant spot on the nearby Long Island Sound. The club had a formal dining room and an oyster bar, a full-featured gymnasium, a boathouse, a baseball diamond, a bowling alley, a barbershop, and every conceivable sort of athletic training equipment. The boys had easy access to excellent rowing water on the sound. And best of all for boys from the fields, forests, and small towns of the Pacific Northwest, it was just a few miles from the glamour and excitement of New York City.
The nation was in the grip of the greatest heat wave in its history, but the boys didn’t let the sweltering heat stop them from visiting major sites like Rockefeller Center and Wall Street, the source of the great stock market crash of 1929 that had begun the Great Depression. They rode the subway out to the beach at Coney Island. They made their way through the crowds on the boardwalk. They shoveled down five-cent hot dogs at Nathan’s, ate cotton candy, guzzled ice-cold Coca Cola, gobbled peanuts, rode the hair-raising Cyclone roller coaster. And in Times Square one afternoon, a tall, somewhat heavy man rushed up to Shorty, took a good look, and said, “You’re Shorty Hunt!” He looked at the other boys. “You fellows are the Washington crew, aren’t you?” He gushed that he had recognized Shorty from a picture in the newspaper. For the first time the boys suddenly felt like celebrities. And something else began to dawn on them. They were beginning to understand that they were not just the University of Washington crew anymore. They were America’s crew. The W on their jerseys was about to be replaced with USA.
They were rowing for something larger now. This fact struck Bobby Moch as he was sitting in the shade under a tree in a wide-open field on Travers Island, opening an envelope from his father. The envelope contained a letter listing the addresses of the relatives he hoped to visit in Europe, as he had requested. But it also contained a second, sealed envelope labeled, “Read this in a private place.” Now, alarmed, Moch opened the second envelope and read its contents. Gaston Moch told his son that when he met his relatives in Europe, he was going to learn for the first time that he was Jewish. Bobby sat under the tree, brooding for a long while. He was not upset that he was Jewish. He was bothered by the fact that his father had felt it necessary to conceal his heritage from his friends, his neighbors, and even his own children. Now Bobby was heading off to race in a country that was gradually making it illegal even to be Jewish at all.
For Joe, the moment of clarity came on the eighty-sixth floor of the new Empire State Building. None of the boys had ever ridden an elevator more than a few floors in a hotel, and the rapid ascent to the eighty-sixth floor of the Empire State Building thrilled them nearly as much as the roller coaster out at Coney Island. Standing on the observation deck, Joe looked out at the many spires of New York rising through the smoke and steam and haze. He had never seen anything like it, and he did not know whether he found it beautiful or frightening.
He dropped a nickel in a telescope for a better view of the Brooklyn Bridge, then swept the telescope across Lower Manhattan and out to the distant Statue of Liberty. In a few days, he would be sailing under her on his way to Germany, a place where liberty was not a given right. The headlines about the Nazis were impossible to ignore. Joe didn’t know all the details, but as he understood it, liberty was under some kind of assault in Germany.
For the first time, Joe realized that he and the boys would not just be rowing for gold. They would be rowing for a way of life, a shared set of values. Liberty was perhaps the most important of those values. But to the boys from Washington, America also stood for trust in one another, for mutual respect, for humility, and for fair play. These ideals were part of what had drawn them together as a crew. And they were about to show the world the power of those ideals when they took to the water at Grünau.
George Pocock spent the last few days before their departure for Germany carefully sanding down the hull of the Husky Clipper, then applying coat after coat of marine varnish, buffing each coat until the shell glistened. He wasn’t doing it just for looks. The race in Berlin could come down to fractions of a second. He wanted the shell to have the fastest racing surface possible.
On July 13, Pocock supervised the boys as they carefully loaded the sixty-two-foot Husky Clipper onto a long truck and drove it through the heart of New York City with a police escort. They pulled up alongside the SS Manhattan, the 668-foot-long ship that would transport 334 members of the U.S. Olympic team to Germany, and searched for a place to stow their shell. It took them an hour to figure out a way to hoist it up to the boat deck. Then they tied it down, covered it with a tarp, and hoped and prayed that no one would mistake it for a bench.
The SS Manhattan.
On the boat to Berlin.
Two days later, with cameras rolling and flashbulbs popping, the boys bounded up the gangplank and onto the Manhattan at ten thirty in the morning. They were giddy, charged with excitement. After stowing their gear and meeting some of the other athletes, they joined hundreds of others waving American flags up on deck. As the noon departure time approached, more than ten thousand spectators crowded onto the pier at the edge of the Hudson River. Blimps and airplanes circled overhead. Black smoke began to billow out of the red, white, and blue smokestacks of the Manhattan.
The crowd on the dock, waving their hats over their heads, began a thunderous chant: “’Ray! ’Ray! ’Ray! For the USA!” A band struck up a tune, the lines were cast off, and the Manhattan began to back slowly out into the Hudson. Joe and the other boys rushed to the rails, waving their flags, taking up the chant. The whistles on tugs and ferries and nearby ships began to shriek. Out on the river, fireboats let loose with their sirens and shot white plumes of water high into the air.
As the boat passed the Statue of Liberty and cruised out into the Atlantic, Joe stayed on deck, leaning on the rail, enjoying the cool air. He was trying to remember everything so he could tell Joyce all about it when he returned home. Hours later, when the sun had begun to set in the west, Joe retreated into the ship, looking for the rest of the boys and food. The Manhattan—her lights ablaze and loud with music and the laughter of young people at play—sailed forward, out into the darkness of the North Atlantic, on its way to Hitler’s Germany.
Joe’s Olympic jersey.
24
Fighting, Fuming, and Coming Together
As Joe drifted into sleep aboard the Manhattan that night, the first light of dawn crept over Berlin, where Nazi police and soldiers were marching groups of men, women, and children through the streets at gunpoint. The arrests had begun hours earlier, under the veil of night. The Nazis were moving Gypsy families living in shanties and wagons out of a Berlin suburb and into detention camps. In time they would be sent east to death camps and murdered.
Their removal was just one more step in a process that had been unfolding for months. The Nazis were transforming Berlin into something like a vast movie set, an artificial world with all the horror and anti-Semitism hidden away. The signs prohibiting Jews from entering public facilities had been taken down and stored for later use. A fiercely anti-Jewish newspaper had been temporarily removed from newsstands. Fourteen hundred homeless people had been rounded up and removed from the streets. Shop windows had been polished. Streets had been swept and reswept, trains freshly painted, broken windows replaced. Books banned by the Nazis temporarily reappeared in bookshop windows. Joseph Goebbels, the man who helped convince Hitler to host the games, handed locals a script for their performance when they met foreigners, instructing them to be charming, easygoing, and welcoming to all.
On the Manhattan, the trip over was difficult for Don Hume and Roger Morris. Hume had developed some kind of cold in Princeton. Now he and Morris became terribly seasick. But Joe was enjoying himself. He was meeting other Olympians and eating all the food he could find.
The athletes were expected to remain in the tourist-class areas of the boat. First class was supposed to be for the sort of people Joe had seen on the golf courses at Princeton. But the boys didn’t think much of this class business. Soon they were prowling on plush carpeting through a maze of corridors leading to spacious cabins with wood paneling, a smoking lounge with a wood-burning fireplace, and a grand ballroom with high white plastered ceilings, marble columns, and delicately hand-painted murals. They found the first-class dining room with its own orchestra balcony and dining tables draped with elegant tablecloths. And they found the Grand Salon, where movies were shown every evening. Soon they discovered that when five or six large young men who just happened to be Olympic oarsmen sat in the Grand Salon, nobody was about to remove them. So they took to visiting the upper decks every evening, stopping on their way into the Grand Salon to swipe a platter of hors d’oeuvres and then passing it around as they watched the show.
One afternoon Joe returned to his cabin to find his new rowing uniform. There was a pair of white shorts and an elegant white jersey with a U.S. Olympic shield. Red, white, and blue ribbons were stitched around the neck and down the front. The fabric of the jersey was smooth, almost like silk. He held it up for a better look, and it shimmered in the light streaming in through his porthole. The jersey immediately meant the world to Joe. He had never been beaten. He had never been obliged to follow the old custom of surrendering his jersey to a rival oarsman. He had no intention of letting this jersey be the first. Joe Rantz was taking this one home.
On the morning of July 24 the ship docked in Hamburg, Germany. The boys awoke early to unload the Husky Clipper. They were edgy, anxious to get off the boat. Except for Don Hume, who was still fighting some kind of cold, they had put on five or six pounds each during the nine-day voyage. They were starting to feel flabby and out of shape. They wanted to stretch their arms and climb into a racing shell. By noon they were on a train to Berlin, and when they arrived in the city’s palatial old Lehrter Station that afternoon, they were stunned. Thousands of Germans had packed the station to get a glimpse of them. A black locomotive with swastikas emblazoned on its sides loomed nearby. A brass band struck up a song. The athletes boarded open-top buses and followed a parade route through the city. Tens of thousands of Germans cheered and waved Olympic, Nazi, and occasionally even American flags.
