• • •
When Joe arrived at the shell house for fall turnout on October 5, 1934, it was another radiant afternoon, much like the day when he had first shown up as a freshman. The thermometer was hovering just under seventy, and the sun was glinting off the Cut just as it had that day a year before. The scenery was altered in only one regard: the long summer of drought had dramatically lowered the level of the lake, exposing brown earthen banks and leaving the floating dock high, dry, and useless. For a while, at least, the boys were going to have to launch their shells by carrying them down the bank and wading into the water.
But what was most different was the attitude of the bunch of boys Joe had rowed with last year. As they moved in and out of the shell house, in shorts and jerseys, helping Tom Bolles register the new freshmen, there was an unmistakable hint of swagger in their step. After all, they were the national freshman champions. Now, as sophomores, it was their turn to lounge in the broad doorway of the shell house, their arms crossed, grinning as they watched the freshmen lining up nervously for their first weigh-in and bumbling about trying to get oars out of racks without clobbering one another before climbing awkwardly aboard Old Nero.
Even beyond the trophy they had brought home from Poughkeepsie, Joe and his fellow sophomores had good reason to be confident and optimistic about the upcoming season. Al Ulbrickson generally made a point of discouraging anyone in the crew house from reading the sports pages during the school year. No good and much ill could come from boys worrying too much about whatever Royal Brougham at the Post-Intelligencer or George Varnell at the Seattle Times might be speculating about on any given day. But over the summer there was little he could do to police the boys’ reading, and there had been much in both papers to catch their eyes. On the morning following the Poughkeepsie Regatta in June, Varnell had come right out and written what many in Seattle were thinking after listening to the race on the radio: “Count this Washington freshman outfit as a potential Olympic lineup in 1936.” And there had also been suggestions over the summer that in order to prepare them for such an Olympic bid Al Ulbrickson would be wise to elevate them to varsity status this year, leapfrogging them ahead of the juniors and any returning seniors. It seemed profoundly unlikely, but the idea was out there, in public, and the sophomore boys already had begun to talk quietly about it among themselves.
And, in fact, the notion had indeed been lurking somewhere in the back of Al Ulbrickson’s mind for a long while now. There were a number of factors in its favor. First and foremost, there was the stunning ease with which the freshmen had won at Poughkeepsie in June. There was the fact that they were an unusually big and athletic bunch, averaging 190 pounds, beefier and stronger on average than the juniors and seniors. That meant there was a great deal of raw potential for power in the boat. He could see plenty of technical flaws in their mechanics, but those could be dealt with. What was more important was their character. They were a rough-and-tumble bunch, not very worldly, but earnest and used to hard work. And character could still, to some extent, be formed in boys as young as the freshmen. They were still malleable. As important as anything else, he could be sure that none of them would be graduating before the Olympic summer of 1936.
Not that Ulbrickson would let any of them know any of this. The last thing he needed was for a bunch of upstart sophomores to start thinking they were God’s gift to rowing. Or that because they had won the two-mile freshman race last June they could win a four-mile varsity race next June. That was a whole nother ball of wax—twice as long and in many ways more than twice as hard. Right now, he needed them to be thinking about building up their bodies, developing mental discipline, learning how to get an oar in and out of the water without splashing half of Lake Washington into their shell. They were good, but they were still green. Eventually, if they were going to become what he hoped they would, he would need to see each of them develop the rare balance of ego and humility that great oarsmen somehow always manage to have. For now, what he saw strutting around the shell house and lounging in the doorway was plenty of ego and not much humility.
Last year these boys had been primarily in Tom Bolles’s charge. Now, whether they ultimately rowed as the varsity or the JV, they belonged entirely to Ulbrickson. From what Bolles had told him, he knew already that he would have to look particularly hard at a couple of them. One was the baby of the boat, a seventeen-year-old boy in the number two seat, six-foot-three George “Shorty” Hunt. He was an ox for work and absolutely indispensable. But he was high-strung, nervous, someone you often had to treat with kid gloves to settle him down, like a racehorse.
The other was the blond kid with the crew cut in the number three seat, Rantz—the boy he’d spotted on the rings in the gym at Roosevelt two years before. He was as poor as a church mouse. Anybody could tell that just by looking at him. When he wanted to, though, Bolles had reported, Joe Rantz would row longer and harder than any man in the boat. The problem was that he didn’t always seem to want to. All last spring he had been erratic as all get-out—on one day, off the next. He marched to his own drummer. The other boys had taken to calling him Mr. Individuality. He was physically tough, independent, seemingly self-assured, friendly, and yet at the same time strangely sensitive. He seemed to have hidden vulnerabilities, tender spots that you had to watch out for if you wanted him to come through for you, though nobody, not even the other sophomores, could figure out quite what they were, where on earth they had come from, or whether putting up with them was even worth the effort. But Al Ulbrickson wasn’t one to waste a lot of time trying to figure out a touchy kid’s tender spots.
He picked up a megaphone and barked at the sophomores to assemble down on the ramp. The boys shuffled toward the water. Ulbrickson took a position slightly up the ramp from them, to gain a bit of height advantage over these very tall boys. Things like that mattered to Ulbrickson. To marshal large men who were not all that much younger than him, and in many cases just as strong willed, he needed every advantage he could get. He straightened his tie and took his Phi Beta Kappa key from his vest pocket and began to twirl it on its lanyard, as he often did on such occasions. He gazed out over them for a moment, saying nothing, letting his attitude silence them. And then, without prelude, he began to tell them how it was going to be.
“You will eat no fried meats,” he began abruptly. “You will eat no pastries, but you will eat plenty of vegetables. You will eat good, substantial, wholesome food—the kind of food your mother makes. You will go to bed at ten o’clock and arise punctually at seven o’clock. You will not smoke or drink or chew. And you will follow this regimen all year round, for as long as you row for me. A man cannot abuse his body for six months and then expect to row the other six months. He must be a total abstainer all year. You will not use profane language in the shell house, nor anywhere within my hearing. You will keep at your studies and maintain a high grade point average. You will not disappoint your parents, nor your crewmates. Now let’s row.”
• • •
Ulbrickson’s effort to knock the sophomores down a peg or two had mixed results. Two weeks later he made a move that inevitably revealed the extent of his high regard for them, though he tried to disguise it. When he first listed the tentative “boatings,” or crew rosters, for the new year on the blackboard in the shell house, everyone could see at a glance that four of the five potential varsity boats were crewed, as usual, by a mixture of boys from different classes—some from last year’s second freshman boat, some from each of last year’s two JV boats, and some from last year’s varsity boat. Just one boat was intact from last year, Joe’s boat, the freshman first. For now at least, the sophomores were to sit together just as they had in June when bombs signifying their victory had exploded over the automobile bridge at Poughkeepsie: George Lund at bow, Shorty Hunt at two, Joe Rantz at three, Chuck Hartman at four, Delos Schoch at five, Bob Green at six, Roger Morris at seven, Bud Schacht at stroke, and George Morry in th
e coxswain’s seat. The boat assignment seemed tangible and undeniable evidence that what the sophomores had been speculating about was true—something was special about them, and Ulbrickson had unusual confidence in them as a unit. But lest anyone—and particularly the sophomores themselves—read too much into it, Ulbrickson put the boat far down the list that generally signified a crew’s status in the program. The sophomore boys were not in the first boat or the second. They were, in fact, in the fifth boat, the lowest rung on the ladder and the last place in which anyone would expect to see serious contenders for next spring’s first varsity rowing.
The boys did not know what to make of the mixed message. Although they were not particularly close, they were glad to be rowing together again, if only because they seemed to do it so well. But given their championship, they recognized what seemed an unwarranted demotion and felt more than a little intimidated by their new coach’s bearing. The swagger promptly disappeared from their steps. Ulbrickson was a harder man than Bolles, and this season would clearly be harder than the last.
As the fall training season got under way, Joe in particular struggled to keep up his spirits. It wasn’t just the status of his boat that worried him. It wasn’t just the brutality of the long workouts or the inevitable days of rowing in the rain and bitter cold. It was personal stuff. Despite the long summer of work, he found himself even poorer than he had been the previous year. Even the cost of a movie on a Saturday night now seemed unwisely extravagant to him. His dates with Joyce devolved into bleak meetings in the cafeteria, where they mixed catsup with hot water and called it tomato soup and rounded out the meal with soda crackers. The diamond ring on Joyce’s finger comforted both of them, but at times Joe could not help but look at it and wonder whether he would ever be able to live up to its implications.
There were family matters eating at him as well. Joe had finally gone to his brother Fred and asked him point-blank where their father was, and Fred, after some hemming and hawing, had told him. Harry and Thula and Joe’s half siblings were living in Seattle. They had been there all along, in fact, since the night in 1929 when they had driven away and left Joe behind in Sequim.
• • •
They had moved at first into a dilapidated shed down on the waterfront, on the fringes of Hooverville. It wasn’t a tar-paper shanty, but it wasn’t much better. There were only two rooms. One, with a toilet and a sink, served as kitchen and bathroom; the other, with a woodstove in a corner, served as living room and bedroom for all six of them. At night trucks rumbled by just a few inches from their front door. Prostitutes and toughs loafed under streetlamps down the way. Rats scurried about in the corners of both rooms. Harry, unable to find the job they had come to Seattle seeking, went on the public dole.
They didn’t stay in the waterfront shed for long, but where they went next was only marginally better, an old house on Phinney Ridge, west of Green Lake. The place had been built in 1885 and had not seen a repair or improvement since. It had only one electrical outlet and only a single woodstove for heat. The stove did them little good anyway because they could not afford firewood to fuel it. Perched on the ridge, the house caught every wintry blast that blew down from the Arctic and into the city. Desperate to heat the house and put a little food on the table, Thula began to frequent local soup kitchens and a neighborhood commissary set up by the Unemployed Citizens League, an organization founded by local socialists. Dedicated to distributing food and firewood to the destitute, members of the league gleaned what they could in the way of partially spoiled crops in the fields of eastern Washington and foraged for firewood in the Cascade Mountains, bringing whatever they could find back to Seattle. The pickings at the commissary were always slim, however. Most of the meals Thula managed to put before her children consisted of thin stews made from parsnips, rutabagas, potatoes, and chipped beef. Lacking wood for the stove most of the time, she took to turning her electric iron upside down, plugging it into the one outlet, and cooking their stew on it.
Thula’s father had died in 1926, but her mother lived in a large house just a few blocks down the hill, across Aurora Avenue, near Green Lake. Mary LaFollette had never been happy about Thula’s marriage in the first place, and she was decidedly unhappy now with Harry and the way things had unfolded. The single concession she made to recognizing his family’s plight was that every Sunday morning Thula was allowed to send her children to the house for bowls of Cream of Wheat. But that was it. One bowl of Cream of Wheat each week and nothing more in the way of support. The ritual seemed designed to send a message. Eighty years later Harry Junior’s voice still trembled when he remembered it: “One bowl. Once a week. I never could figure that out.” Thula got the message, though. She told Harry to get out of the house, and not to come back until he had a job. Harry headed for Los Angeles. Six months later, he returned with a motorcycle but no job.
Thula gave him another ultimatum, and finally Harry did find a job, as head mechanic with the Golden Rule Dairy and Bakery in Fremont. The Golden Rule was a fiercely nonunion shop—which would, over the next few years, find itself at the center of a citywide boycott and labor battle—and as a result wages were low. But they were wages nonetheless, and Harry couldn’t afford to be particular. He moved his family to a small but respectable house at Thirty-Ninth and Bagley, not far from the bakery and not far from the north end of Lake Union where Joe rowed nearly every afternoon. That’s where Joe found them in the fall of 1934, at an address that Fred finally provided.
• • •
There wasn’t much of a reunion. Joe and Joyce climbed into the Franklin and drove over to the house one afternoon. They parked on Bagley, took deep breaths, and climbed a flight of concrete steps to the front porch, holding hands. They could hear someone playing violin inside. Joe knocked on a yellow Dutch door, and the violin fell silent. A shadow moved behind lace curtains on the upper half of the door. There was a moment’s hesitation, and then Thula opened the door halfway.
She did not seem particularly surprised to see them. Joe had the sense that she’d been expecting this for a long time. She glanced at Joyce and nodded at her pleasantly enough, but she made no move to invite them in. There was a long moment of silence. Nobody knew quite what to say. Joe thought Thula looked careworn and exhausted, much older than her thirty-six years. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyes a bit sunken. Joe focused for a moment on her fingers, red and chafed.
Finally Joe broke the silence. “Hello, Thula. We just came by to see how you are doing.”
Thula peered at him silently for a moment, her expression veiled, then dropped her eyes as she began to speak.
“We’re fine, Joe. We’re doing fine now. How is school going?”
Joe said it was going well, that he was on the crew now.
Thula responded that she had heard that, and that his father was proud of him. She asked Joyce how her parents were doing, and expressed her regret when Joyce replied that her father was quite ill.
Thula continued to hold the door just half open, her body blocking the entrance. Even as she addressed them, Joe noticed, she continued to look down at the porch, as if studying something at her feet, trying to find the answer to something there.
Finally Joe asked if they could come in to say hello to his father and the kids. Thula said that Harry was at work and the kids were visiting friends.
Joe asked if he and Joyce could come back and visit them another time.
Thula seemed suddenly to find what she had been looking for. She raised her eyes abruptly and leveled them at Joe. “No,” she said, her voice colder now. “Make your own life, Joe. Stay out of ours.” And with that she closed the door gently and slid the deadbolt into position with a soft, metallic click.
• • •
As they drove away from the house on Bagley that afternoon, Joyce simmered. Over the years she had been slowly learning more about Joe’s parents and what exactly had happened back in Sequ
im and before that, at the Gold and Ruby mine. She’d learned about his mother’s death and the long, lonely train ride to Pennsylvania. And stitching it all together, she could not understand how Thula could have been so cold to a motherless child, nor how Joe’s father could have been so impassive in the face of it all. She could not understand, either, why Joe seemed to show so little anger about it all, why he continued to try to ingratiate himself with the two of them, as if none of it had ever happened. Finally, as Joe pulled over to the curb to drop her off at the judge’s home, Joyce erupted.
She demanded to know why Joe let his parents treat him as they did. Why did he go on pretending that they hadn’t done him any harm? What kind of woman would leave a boy alone in the world? What kind of father would let her do that? Why didn’t he ever get angry at them? Why didn’t he just demand that they let him see his half siblings? She was nearly sobbing by the time she finished.
She glanced across the seat at Joe, and saw at once, through a blur of tears, that his eyes were full of hurt too. But his jaw was set, and he stared ahead over the steering wheel rather than turning to look at her.
“You don’t understand,” he murmured. “They didn’t have any choice. There were just too many mouths to feed.”
Joyce pondered that for a moment, then said, “I just don’t understand why you don’t get angry.”
Joe continued to stare ahead through the windshield.
“It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can’t waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead. When they left, it took everything I had in me just to survive. Now I have to stay focused. I’ve just gotta take care of it myself.”