Daniel James Brown - The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

ALSO BY DANIEL JAMES BROWN

The Indifferent Stars Above

Under a Flaming Sky

VIKING

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Photo credits: : Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R80425 / o.Ang.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Brown, Daniel, 1951

The boys in the boat : nine Americans and their epic quest for gold at the 1936 Olympics / Daniel James Brown.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-62274-2

1. RowingUnited StatesHistory. 2. RowersUnited StatesBiography. 3. University of WashingtonRowingHistory. 4. Olympic Games (11th : 1936 : Berlin, Germany) I. Title.

GV791.B844 2013

797.1230973dc23

2013001560

For

Gordon Adam

Chuck Day

Don Hume

George Shorty Hunt

Jim Stub McMillin

Bob Moch

Roger Morris

Joe Rantz

John White Jr.

and all those other bright, shining boys of the 1930sour fathers, our grandfathers, our uncles, our old friends

CONTENTS

18991933

What Seasons They Have Been Through

1934

Resiliency

1935

The Parts That Really Matter

1936

Touching the Divine

Dawn row on Lake Washington

PROLOGUE

George Yeoman Pocock

T his book was born on a cold, drizzly, late spring day when I clambered over the split-rail cedar fence that surrounds my pasture and made my way through wet woods to the modest frame house where Joe Rantz lay dying.

I knew only two things about Joe when I knocked on his daughter Judys door that day. I knew that in his midseventies he had single-handedly hauled a number of cedar logs down a mountain, then hand-split the rails and cut the posts and installed all 2,224 linear feet of the pasture fence I had just climbed overa task so herculean I shake my head in wonderment whenever I think about it. And I knew that he had been one of nine young men from the state of Washingtonfarm boys, fishermen, and loggerswho shocked both the rowing world and Adolf Hitler by winning the gold medal in eight-oared rowing at the 1936 Olympics.

When Judy opened the door and ushered me into her cozy living room, Joe was stretched out in a recliner with his feet up, all six foot three of him. He was wearing a gray sweat suit and bright red, down-filled booties. He had a thin white beard. His skin was sallow, his eyes puffyresults of the congestive heart failure from which he was dying. An oxygen tank stood nearby. A fire was popping and hissing in the woodstove. The walls were covered with old family photos. A glass display case crammed with dolls and porcelain horses and rose-patterned china stood against the far wall. Rain flecked a window that looked out into the woods. Jazz tunes from the thirties and forties were playing quietly on the stereo.

Judy introduced me, and Joe offered me an extraordinarily long, thin hand. Judy had been reading one of my books aloud to Joe, and he wanted to meet me and talk about it. As a young man, he had, by extraordinary coincidence, been a friend of Angus Hay Jr.the son of a person central to the story of that book. So we talked about that for a while. Then the conversation began to turn to his own life.

His voice was reedy, fragile, and attenuated almost to the breaking point. From time to time he faded into silence. Slowly, though, with cautious prompting from his daughter, he began to spin out some of the threads of his life story. Recalling his childhood and his young adulthood during the Great Depression, he spoke haltingly but resolutely about a series of hardships he had endured and obstacles he had overcome, a tale that, as I sat taking notes, at first surprised and then astonished me.

But it wasnt until he began to talk about his rowing career at the University of Washington that he started, from time to time, to cry. He talked about learning the art of rowing, about shells and oars, about tactics and technique. He reminisced about long, cold hours on the water under steel-gray skies, about smashing victories and defeats narrowly averted, about traveling to Germany and marching under Hitlers eyes into the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, and about his crewmates. None of these recollections brought him to tears, though. It was when he tried to talk about the boat that his words began to falter and tears welled up in his bright eyes.

At first I thought he meant the Husky Clipper , the racing shell in which he had rowed his way to glory. Or did he mean his teammates, the improbable assemblage of young men who had pulled off one of rowings greatest achievements? Finally, watching Joe struggle for composure over and over, I realized that the boat was something more than just the shell or its crew. To Joe, it encompassed but transcended bothit was something mysterious and almost beyond definition. It was a shared experiencea singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long gone, when nine good-hearted young men strove together, pulled together as one, gave everything they had for one another, bound together forever by pride and respect and love. Joe was crying, at least in part, for the loss of that vanished moment but much more, I think, for the sheer beauty of it.

As I was preparing to leave that afternoon, Judy removed Joes gold medal from the glass case against the wall and handed it to me. While I was admiring it, she told me that it had vanished years before. The family had searched Joes house high and low but had finally given it up as lost. Only many years later, when they were remodeling the house, had they finally found it concealed in some insulating material in the attic. A squirrel had apparently taken a liking to the glimmer of the gold and hidden the medal away in its nest as a personal treasure. As Judy was telling me this, it occurred to me that Joes story, like the medal, had been squirreled away out of sight for too long.