The Boys in the Boat (Young Readers Adaptation), page 16
On the balcony Hitler raised a clenched fist shoulder high. Goebbels leapt up and down. Hermann Göring slapped his knee, a maniacal grin on his face.
In the American boat, Don Hume bowed his head as if in prayer. The German stroke oar toppled backward into the lap of his number seven man. In the Italian boat, somebody leaned forward and vomited overboard. The crowd continued to roar, “Deutsch-land! Deutsch-land! Deutsch-land!”
Nobody knew who had won.
The American boat drifted on down the lake, beyond the grandstands, into a quieter world. The boys leaned over their oars, gasping for breath, their faces still shattered by pain.
Finally the loudspeakers crackled back to life with the official results. The bow of the American boat had touched the line six-tenths of a second ahead of the Italian boat and exactly a second ahead of the Germans. The chanting of the crowd faded suddenly.
On the balcony of Haus West, Hitler turned and strode back into the building, unspeaking. His henchmen scurried in behind him. The American boys did not understand the announcement at first. But when they did, their grimaces of pain turned suddenly into broad smiles.
In Seattle, Joe’s half siblings whooped and hollered and cheered and tumbled about the house. Harry applauded. Joyce cried. With tears streaming down her face, she carefully returned the four-leaf clover to her book and hugged Harry for the first time ever.
The boys rowed slowly past the grandstands to polite applause. Al Ulbrickson and George Pocock shoved their way through the crowds, desperately trying to get to their crew. The boys pulled up to the float in front of Haus West. An official presented them with an enormous laurel wreath. Al Ulbrickson arrived on the float breathless and crouched down by the boat. The wreath had been passed from boy to boy. He pointed to it and grumbled to Roger Morris, “Where’d you get the hay?” Roger motioned over his shoulder with his thumb and said, “Picked it up downstream.”
The boys climbed out of the shell and stood at attention while a German band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then they shook some hands, hoisted the Husky Clipper onto their shoulders, and carried it back to the shell house. In their dirty sweatshirts and mismatched shorts, they looked as if they’d just come in from an ordinary workout on Lake Washington. But as their coach would soon attest, they were no ordinary crew. A reporter stopped Ulbrickson on the way into the shell house and asked him what he thought of his boys. For once, Ulbrickson didn’t hesitate before he spoke. “They are,” he said, “the finest I’ve ever seen in a shell.”
The medal ceremony, Bobby Moch on the podium.
The next day, the boys prepared the Husky Clipper for shipment back to Seattle, put on their Olympic dress uniforms, and headed to the grand Olympic Stadium in Berlin. After the gold medal soccer match between Austria and Italy, the boys took to the field to receive their medals. As they lined up next to the German and Italian crews, Olympic officials went down the American line, hanging gold medals around the boys’ necks and placing small laurel wreaths on their heads. Their names appeared on the enormous forty-three-foot-wide announcement board at the eastern end of the stadium. “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play, and the American flag slowly ascended a flagstaff behind the announcement board. As Joe watched the flag rise with his hand over his heart, he was surprised to find that tears had crept into the corners of his eyes. Moch choked up too. So did Stub McMillin. By the time it was over, they were all fighting back tears.
That night, as the boys went out on the town, Joe stayed in. He lay awake all night. He spent much of the night simply staring at his gold medal where it hung at the end of his bunk. As much as he had wanted it, and as much as he understood what it would mean to everyone back home, he realized that the medal wasn’t the most important thing he would take home from Germany.
Immediately after the race, even as he sat gasping for air in the Husky Clipper, not sure whether they had won, a sense of calm had enveloped him. In the last desperate sprint to the finish—in the searing pain and bewildering noise of the last few moments—Joe had realized with startling clarity that there was nothing more he could do to win the race. Except for one thing. He had to abandon all doubt. He had no choice but to throw himself into each stroke as if he were throwing himself blindly off a cliff. He had to trust absolutely that the others would be there to save him from catching the whole weight of the boat on his blade. And he had done it, over and over, forty-four times per minute, not just believing but knowing that the other boys would be there for him. All of them.
In those final few meters, Joe and the boys had finally forged the prize they had sought all season, the prize Joe had sought nearly all his life. Each had entirely given himself up to being a part of something larger and more powerful and more important than himself.
Now, finally, Joe felt whole. He was ready to go home.
The 1956 reunion row.
Epilogue
Within days of the closing ceremony of the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis renewed their persecution of German Jews and others they deemed inferior. The anti-Semitic signs returned to German streets. The brutality and terror intensified. In December, Hermann Göring met privately with a number of German business leaders and said, “We are already at war. All that is lacking is the actual shooting.”
The larger world knew little of these war plans. The illusion surrounding the Olympic Games was complete, the deception masterful. Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest had convinced the world that this new Germany was an advanced, civilized culture. But just three years later, by September 1939, the illusion had utterly fallen away. Hitler invaded Poland and the most catastrophic war in world history was under way. In the next five years, it would take the lives of between fifty and sixty million people. So many died that the exact number would never be known.
After the Olympics, the boys took different routes back to Seattle, and except for Bobby Moch, who graduated, the entire crew was back in the boat by October. On April 17, 1937, they again won the national championship in Poughkeepsie, this time by four lengths, setting a new course record. This was the last race for Joe, Shorty, and Roger. In their four years together, they had never once been defeated.
Joe and Joyce on their graduation and wedding day.
Joe moved in and lived with his father while he finished at the University of Washington. After he and Joyce both graduated and were married the same day, they bought a house in Lake Forest Park, near Seattle and not far from the finish line of the Washington-California crew races. He and Joyce would live there for the rest of their lives. Over the years, they raised five children, and Joyce never forgot what Joe had experienced in his early years. She held true to her promise to make sure that he never went through anything like it again.
Joe with his young family.
In 1941, when America joined in the fight against Germany, some of the boys from the boat were too tall to serve as soldiers, but they contributed in other ways. Many of them had earned engineering degrees, and they worked for companies essential to the war effort. Joe worked at the Boeing Airplane Company, where he helped design elements of the B-17 bomber. Gordy Adam worked for Boeing too, and Chuck Day served as a naval doctor in the South Pacific. Shorty Hunt worked as a naval engineer.
The boys remained close for the rest of their lives. They met at least once a year, usually twice, for the rest of their lives. Every ten years, they gathered at the University of Washington, pulled the Husky Clipper from its rack, and rowed out onto Lake Washington. At their last reunion row, in 1986, they were one man short of a crew, as Chuck Day had died of lung cancer. Their backs were aching, their joints troubled. But they dipped white blades into the water and glided out onto Lake Washington, still pulling together as one. Then, with evening coming on, they hobbled back up the ramp to the shell house, waved to photographers, and put their oars in the racks for the last time.
Joe in the woods.
In August of 2011, I traveled to Berlin to see where the boys had won gold seventy-five years earlier. I visited the Olympic Stadium and then took the train out to Köpenick, wandering through its cobblestone streets. I walked past the vacant lot where the town’s synagogue stood until the night of November 9, 1938, when a torch-bearing mob looted it and burned it to the ground.
In Grünau I found the regatta grounds little changed from 1936. The covered grandstands still rise near the finish line. The Langer See is still placid and tranquil. Young men and women in racing shells still row in racing lanes laid out just as they were in 1936. Late that afternoon, I stood on the balcony of Haus West. I remained there for a long, quiet minute, near where Hitler stood seventy-five years before. Standing there, it occurred to me that when Hitler watched Joe and the boys fight their way back from the rear of the field to sweep ahead of Italy and Germany, he was watching his own doomed future. He did not know that one day hundreds of thousands of boys just like them would return to Germany, dressed in the olive drab uniforms of the American army, intent on hunting him down.
By the time I visited Germany, Joe had passed away. A few years earlier, Joyce had died as she had lived, holding Joe’s hand. The rest of the boys were gone as well. But there is one survivor of the 1936 gold medal race: the Husky Clipper. She hangs in the light, airy dining room of Washington’s Conibear Shellhouse. Suspended from the ceiling, she is a graceful needle of cedar and spruce. Her red and yellow woodwork gleams under small spotlights. Beyond her, on the eastern side of the building, Lake Washington spreads out behind a wall of glass.
Every fall several hundred freshmen—men one day, women another, most of them tall, a few of them noticeably short—assemble beneath her on early
The Husky Clipper where it hangs today.
October afternoons. They fill out registration cards. They anxiously look around the room. They chat nervously until the freshman coach steps in front of them and calls for quiet in a loud, no-nonsense voice. As they settle down, he begins to talk to them about what they can expect if they seek a spot on his crew. Mostly, at first, he talks about how hard it will be. Then he shifts his tone a bit and begins to talk about the glory of earning a chance to pull one of the white blades of Washington. He talks about recent victories and the now age-old rivalry with California.
Finally he pauses, clears his throat, raises his hand, and points up at the Husky Clipper. Several hundred necks crane. The freshmen gaze upward. A new, deeper level of quiet settles over the room. And then he begins to tell the story.
The 1936 Olympic press badge of Seattle’s legendary sportswriter Royal Brougham.
TIMELINE OF EVENTS
•March 31, 1914: Joe Rantz is born in Spokane, Washington, a former lumber town on the banks of a cold, clear river.
•Spring 1918–Summer 1919: After his mother, Nellie, passes away, Joe lives with various relatives before settling back in with his father, Harry, who has remarried.
•June 28, 1919: World War I ends.
•Summer 1924: Harry’s new wife Thula demands Joe leave the family home. Joe is forced to earn his shelter and meals on his own.
•1925: Harry and Thula pack up their three kids, retrieve Joe, and move to Sequim, Washington. In Sequim, Joe meets Joyce Simdars.
•October 29, 1929: The stock market crashes and the United States plunges into the Great Depression.
•November 1929: Returning from school, Joe finds Harry, Thula, and their kids packed and ready to leave. Once again, Joe is left behind.
•September 1933: After finishing high school, then working for a year to save money, Joe moves to Seattle and enrolls at the University of Washington.
•October 5, 1933: Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler inspects the grounds for the new Olympic Stadium to be built outside of Berlin, Germany.
•November 28, 1933: Following weeks of grueling tryouts, Joe earns a spot on the University of Washington’s freshman rowing team.
•April 13, 1934: The first freshman boat’s first big race is the Pacific Coast Regatta in Seattle’s Lake Washington. With Joyce watching from a ferry full of cheering students, the freshman crew sweep past their archrivals from the University of California.
•June 16, 1934: The freshman boys win the national championships in Poughkeepsie, New York, by an astonishing five boat lengths.
•Summer 1934: As much of the country suffers from an intense heat wave, Joe spends the summer in Sequim, working and saving money.
•January 1935: Head coach Al Ulbrickson announces the team’s new goal: to represent the U.S. at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.
•April 3, 1935: Joe surprises his father Harry at work. It’s the first time in more than five years that he’s seen his dad.
•Summer 1935: Joe gets a job working on the Grand Coulee Dam, a massive construction project. He spends his days hanging from a cliff, pounding at rock walls with a jackhammer.
•Spring 1935: Joe’s team once again places first at the Pacific Coast Regatta, but then the coach demotes Joe and his teammates. The new varsity loses to Cal at the national championships.
•September 15, 1935: In Germany, where preparations for the Games are well under way, Adolf Hitler announces laws that essentially make it illegal to be Jewish. Given these developments, Americans began questioning whether the United States should even send an Olympic team to Berlin.
•October 25, 1935: Joe learns that Thula has passed away from an infection.
•December 8, 1935: Despite many protests, including a ten-thousand-person anti-Nazi march in New York City, the American Olympic Committee decides against boycotting the games in Berlin. The United States will be going to the Olympics after all.
•March 7, 1936: Thirty thousand German troops roll into the Rhineland, a former German territory that was supposed to be a peaceful zone. The takeover is later recognized as one of the first major steps toward World War II.
•April 18, 1936: In the Pacific Coast Regatta, Joe and his new crew blow California out of the water and smash the course record by an amazing 37 seconds.
•June 22, 1936: Although Cal had been stroking impressive times in practice, sparking many to wonder if they’d win, the boys from Washington claim a dramatic victory at the national championships in Poughkeepsie.
•July 5, 1936: At the Olympic Trials in Princeton, New Jersey, Joe and the boys win the right to represent the United States at the 1936 Olympic Games.
•July 24, 1936: The Washington crew arrives in Germany. All violence and hatred in Berlin has been hidden from public view.
•August 14, 1936: With Adolf Hitler watching from a balcony, and Joyce and his family listening on the radio back home in Seattle, Joe and the boys surge from dead last all the way to first place, winning the gold medal by a fraction of a second.
THE ART OF ROWING
as taught by Al Ulbrickson
In their best moments, the eight boys in the Husky Clipper row as one. Facing the back of the boat, each of the young men sits on a small seat that slides back and forth along greased tracks. They strap their feet into stationary pedals. Each rower grabs hold of his oar, pulls himself into position, and waits for the signal from the race’s starter.
Once they begin to row, each boy repeats the following steps over and over. They push through this sequence thirty to forty times per minute, in near-perfect rhythm, until their race is complete.
1. Ready: With his back to the bow, the oarsman begins in a curled-up position. His chest is bent over his knees. His arms are stretched out in front of him, gripping the oar. The blade of each oar is out of the water.
2. Catch: Once the starter gives the signal, each boy drops the blade into the water and leans back hard, toward the bow. His arms remain straight as the blade grabs the water; he lets his back do all the work.
3. Drive: As his shoulders pass over the center of his body, he straightens his bent knees, pushing hard with his legs. His seat begins sliding toward the front of the boat. At the same time, he pulls the handle of the oar nearly to his chest.
4. Layback: The muscles in his back, arms, legs, and chest all work together to pull the oar and push the blade against the water, driving the boat forward. When each rower’s still-straight back is leaning slightly toward the bow, and his legs are extended, he has reached the limit of his stroke.
5. Release: All at once, each rower drops his hands toward his waist and pops the blade up out of the water. At the same time, he rolls one wrist, turning the oar so the blade is flat, parallel to the surface.
6. Recovery: To prepare for the next stroke, he pushes his arms toward the stern of the boat, rotates his shoulders forward, and pulls his knees up toward his chest. As he returns to the crouched position, he rolls his wrist back so the blade is again perpendicular to the surface. He is ready to drop it down and start his catch at the exact same moment as every other boy in the boat.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
If books can be said to have hearts and souls—and I believe that they can—this book owes its heart and soul to one person above all others: Joe Rantz’s daughter, Judy Willman. I could not have begun to tell Joe’s story, and the larger story of the 1936 Olympic crew, if it had not been for Judy’s deep collaboration with me at every stage of the project. Her contributions are too many to catalog here, but they range from sharing her vast collection of documents and photographs, to connecting me to members of the crew and their families, to reviewing and commenting on many drafts of the book at all stages of development. All of these, however, pale in comparison with one contribution in particular—the countless hours she has spent sitting with me in her living room, telling me her father’s story, sometimes tearfully, sometimes joyfully, but always with unbounded pride and love.
