• • •
The next day Joe, still feeling awash with goodwill, bought a little gas, drove his old Franklin over to Fremont, and parked in front of the Golden Rule Dairy and Bakery. He rolled the window down and waited, trying to enjoy the rich smell of baking bread but too nervous to really savor it. A little after noon, men dressed in white streamed out of the building and began sitting on the lawn, opening lunch boxes. A bit later a few men in dark coveralls emerged, and Joe spotted his father immediately. At six foot two, he was easily the tallest man in the group. He did not appear to have changed at all. Even his coveralls looked to be the ones he’d always worn back on the farm in Sequim. Joe climbed out of the car and trotted across the street.
Harry looked up, saw him coming, and froze in place, clutching his lunch box. Joe stuck out his hand and said, “Hi, Pop.”
Startled, Harry said nothing but took his son’s hand. It had been five and a half years since he’d seen Joe. He was no longer the scrawny kid he had left behind in Sequim. He had to wonder. Had Joe come to confront him or forgive him?
“Hi, Joe. It’s swell to see you.”
The two of them crossed the street and climbed into the front of the Franklin. Harry unwrapped a salami sandwich and silently offered half of it to Joe. They began to eat, and then, after a long, awkward silence, to talk. At first Harry talked mostly about the equipment in the bakery—the huge ovens and dough mixers and the fleet of delivery trucks that he maintained. Joe allowed his father to go on at length, not particularly interested but reveling in the familiar sound of his big, deep voice, the voice that had told him so many stories while sitting at night on the steps of the cabin at the Gold and Ruby mine, the voice that had taught him so much as they tinkered with machinery back in Sequim or hunted for bee trees out in the woods.
When Joe finally started to talk, questions about his half siblings tumbled out: How was Harry Junior doing? Had he ever caught up with his schooling after the accident with the bacon grease? How big was Mike now? How were the girls getting on? Harry assured him they were all well. There was a long pause. Joe asked if he could come by and see them. Harry looked down at his lap and said, “I don’t reckon so, Joe.” Deep down in Joe’s gut, something surged—anger, disappointment, resentment, he wasn’t sure what, but it was old and familiar and painful.
But then, after another pause, Harry added, without looking up, “Sometimes Thula and I go off on little excursions, though. Nobody home but the kids then.” He looked out the window as if distancing himself from what he’d just said. He seemed relieved—Joe wasn’t going to ask him about that awful night in Sequim when they’d left him behind.
• • •
There is a thing that sometimes happens in rowing that is hard to achieve and hard to define. Many crews, even winning crews, never really find it. Others find it but can’t sustain it. It’s called “swing.” It only happens when all eight oarsmen are rowing in such perfect unison that no single action by any one is out of synch with those of all the others. It’s not just that the oars enter and leave the water at precisely the same instant. Sixteen arms must begin to pull, sixteen knees must begin to fold and unfold, eight bodies must begin to slide forward and backward, eight backs must bend and straighten all at once. Each minute action—each subtle turning of wrists—must be mirrored exactly by each oarsman, from one end of the boat to the other. Only then will the boat continue to run, unchecked, fluidly and gracefully between pulls of the oars. Only then will it feel as if the boat is a part of each of them, moving as if on its own. Only then does pain entirely give way to exultation. Rowing then becomes a kind of perfect language. Poetry, that’s what a good swing feels like.
A good swing does not necessarily make crews go faster, except to the extent that if no one’s actions check the run of the boat, rowers get more bang for their buck on each stroke. Mainly what it does is allow them to conserve power, to row at a lower stroke rate and still move through the water as efficiently as possible, and often more rapidly than another crew rowing less efficiently at a higher rate. It allows them to possess a reserve of energy for a gut-wrenching, muscle-screaming sprint at the end of a race. It is insanely difficult to keep a good swing as you raise your rate. As the tempo increases, each of the myriad separate actions has to happen at shorter and shorter intervals, so that at some point it becomes virtually impossible to maintain a good swing at a high rate. But the closer a crew can come to that ideal—maintaining a good swing while rowing at a high rate—the closer they are to rowing on another plane, the plane on which champions row.
Joe and his crewmates had found their swing as freshmen the day they’d won in Poughkeepsie, and Al Ulbrickson had not forgotten that. He could not, in fact, get the picture of it out of his mind. There had been something marvelous, almost magical, about how they closed out that race. He had to believe that it was still there.
• • •
But as the Pacific Coast Regatta in California approached, in early April, the weather again deteriorated and the sophomore boys could not, for the life of them, seem to regain and hold on to their magic. One day they’d have it; the next day they’d lose it. They would beat the junior varsity on Monday, lose badly on Tuesday, win again on Wednesday, lose on Thursday. When they won, they did so handily; when they lost, they fell apart completely. Fuming, Ulbrickson went public with his dilemma, telling the Seattle Times on April 2, “I have never seen a situation like this. . . . Never before in my experience has a UW training campaign come up to this point without the question of the superiority of a crew being settled long ere this.” Still, he had to make a decision.
Finally he did what he had wanted to do all along. He officially proclaimed the entire sophomore boat to be the 1935 first varsity crew. The local papers announced it to the world. And the sophomores promptly lost their next head-to-head race against the JV boat. The JV clamored to be named the varsity boat for the regatta. Ulbrickson, all but throwing his hands in the air, announced that he’d reconsider. They would race one more time in California. Whoever won the first time trial after they arrived in Oakland would row as the varsity crew in the Pacific Coast Regatta.
• • •
Elevating the sophomores to varsity status was an unusual move, but not unheard of. Ky Ebright was, in fact, in the midst of doing essentially the same thing—perhaps in reaction to all he’d been reading about the Washington sophomores. Improbably, as he had moved toward the Pacific Coast Regatta, Ebright had demoted the varsity boys who had won the national title in Poughkeepsie the year before, in favor of a mixed boat of sophomores and juniors. Only one of the previous year’s national champions now sat in his varsity boat, and Ebright remained perplexed by the poor performance of the older boys. When Royal Brougham arrived in Oakland to cover the regatta, Ebright pleaded with him, “Will you please tell me why the crew that last June was the best in the U.S. can’t row fast enough to beat a pickup boat of sophomores and J.V. oarsmen?” Brougham had no idea why, but he was happy to telegraph the intelligence to Ulbrickson, up in Seattle. And to add a warning. He had put a stopwatch to Ebright’s new pickup boat. “Don’t get the idea that the new Bear varsity is slow, Mr. Ulbrickson . . . this boat has plenty of get up about it.” When Ulbrickson learned the details, particularly the fact that Ebright had replaced even Dick Burnley, the enormous stroke who had powered Cal to victory over his boys in Poughkeepsie, he could only have been stunned. He knew that Ebright was looking beyond this year to ’36, looking for younger talent, just as he was. But who on earth could Ebright have found that would knock a machine like Burnley out of a national championship boat?
• • •
By eight o’clock on the morning of April 7, all three Washington crews were in California, out on the oil-slicked waters of the Oakland Estuary, rowing in the rain with a thirty-mile-per-hour wind whipping in off San Francisco Bay, pushing salt spray in their faces for the first time. Except for the tas
te of salt in the water, they felt right at home. They had brought a bit of Seattle south with them. Cal was nowhere to be seen. They rowed the length of the estuary and out along the mudflats on the east shore of the bay. The silver towers of the partially completed Bay Bridge rose dramatically from the water before them, elegant spires stretching with surprising grace across the bay toward Treasure Island and San Francisco. Out in the open bay, though, the chop was even heavier, heavy enough to threaten to swamp the boats. Ulbrickson turned them around.
On the way out, it had seemed to him that the junior varsity boat was moving better than the sophomores. On the way back in, the sophomores seemed to be going better than the junior varsity. Everyone waited for Ulbrickson to stage the decisive time trial that he had promised before leaving Seattle. Nobody in either shell talked much to anybody in the other.
Meanwhile Al Ulbrickson and Ky Ebright performed their practiced dance, the dance of doom. Each tried to outdo the other in gloomy prognostications for the upcoming regatta. Ulbrickson announced that his boys were too heavy, badly out of shape as a result of all the canceled workouts in Seattle. He’d hoped but failed to “boil them down” to fighting trim by now. Rate them “for the dark horses that they are,” he said. “My boys are not ready for a race. They started out to row three miles yesterday and they were sitting on their tongues at the end of the first mile. We’ve never had less work and poorer conditions.” Reporters, though, noted that the boys had looked pretty darned fit when they’d stepped off the train. When asked why he’d showed up with a boatload of sophomores, Ulbrickson looked at the reporter balefully and said, “They’re the best we’ve got.” Ebright, trying to swing perceptions the other way, said less, but was more direct when he said anything. Talking to the New York Times, he claimed flat out, “California has a chance, but I think Washington will win.” And added, “Our chances are not so hot. Our varsity is undoubtedly slower than last year’s shell, and is inexperienced entirely in racing.” He continued to remain oddly silent about his own boys.
Ky Ebright
On April 10, Ulbrickson finally staged the formal time trial that was to determine who would race as the varsity. Joe and his sophomore crewmates came in almost a length behind the JV. They slumped in their shell in despair and disbelief. The boys in the JV boat were jubilant. Al Ulbrickson went back to the hotel and scrawled in his logbook, “In a hell of a fix now.” But he still didn’t announce a varsity boating.
On the morning of April 12, the same thing happened, but now Ulbrickson tried one more trick. The sophomores had come south with a new, still-unchristened shell. But they had taken an immediate dislike to it. They had been complaining since they arrived that it just didn’t swing for them. So Ulbrickson sent them out one more time, this time in their old shell, the one in which they had won so convincingly at Poughkeepsie, the City of Seattle. They rowed beautifully and matched the JV’s time. “The old boat made them feel right at home,” Ulbrickson noted in his logbook.
After dinner at the Hotel Oakland that night, he dropped the bomb on the JV. He was going to race the sophomores as the varsity despite their repeated defeats. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t do this, but I can’t help it.” The JV boys walked out of the room enraged, stormed out into the dark, and tried to walk off their anger on the streets of Oakland. Explaining the reversal to the Associated Press, Ulbrickson broke cover, abandoned the dance of doom, and said simply what he believed in his heart about the sophomores. They were, he declared, “potentially the best crew I have ever coached.” But in his logbook that night he wrote, miserably, “Hell of a position to be in the day before the race.”
• • •
Race day, April 13, was again rainy, and a stiff headwind blew out of the south, up the length of the Oakland Estuary. The estuary was not what anyone might call pristine rowing water even on the best of days. A long, narrow slot of water between Oakland and Alameda Island, it was essentially a marine highway through an already aging industrial landscape. Spanned by several steel bridges, the racecourse made a slight curve at Union Point, just before the finish line at the Fruitvale Avenue Bridge. Crumbling brick warehouses, oil storage tanks, rusting cranes, and gritty factories lined both sides of the waterway. Tied up along its shores was every conceivable kind of watercraft—Chinese junks, tugboats, rickety houseboats, old schooners, and barges heaped with jumbles of industrial cargo. The water itself was turgid, gray-green even on sunny days, oil slicked, and reeking of diesel fuel and seaweed. Right next to Cal’s shell house a four-inch pipe discharged raw sewage directly into the water.
It was a challenging landscape in which to find a place to watch a crew race, but by midafternoon on April 13 nearly forty thousand spectators had assembled under umbrellas in empty lots, on scattered docks, on warehouse rooftops, and on small craft moored along the racecourse. By far the greatest concentration of fans was at the finish line, on the Fruitvale Avenue Bridge. There thousands of California fans dressed in blue and gold mingled on the span with hundreds of Washington loyalists in purple and gold, everyone jostling to get a good view of the water. Radio announcers sat huddled under a shelter near the bridge, ready to broadcast the results around the nation.
At 3:55 p.m., the regatta got started with the two-mile freshman race. Don Hume, Washington’s stroke, was just a few days out of the infirmary and still recovering from severe tonsillitis, but you wouldn’t have known it by watching the race. The Washington freshmen jumped out early to a half-length lead. At the halfway mark, they led by a full length, with both crews rowing at thirty-two. As they came around the bend and into the final stretch, the Cal freshmen tried to rally, edging their rate up to thirty-four. Washington upped its rate to match Cal’s. With both boats rowing at the same rate, Hume’s stroke made all the difference. In the last quarter mile, Hume rowed so smoothly, so powerfully, and so efficiently that, with the boys behind him falling in synch, the Washington boat powered still farther ahead and crossed the line three lengths ahead of California. Officials on the bridge dropped a white flag to signify a win for the white blades of Washington.
The junior varsity race was, for the suddenly demoted older boys from Washington, all about making a point. And about opening up the future. At 4:10 p.m., still seething over Ulbrickson’s reversal, they brought their boat up to the starting line at the foot of Webster Street, just south of Jack London Square and three miles from the finish. When the start was called, California jumped out in front and then settled in at thirty-two. With Bobby Moch calling the cadence and big Stub McMillin in the engine room, Washington slowly and methodically pulled even and then began to edge ahead. By the halfway mark, they had open water between themselves and the Cal boat.
Then they started rowing in earnest. Moch barked at them to raise the stroke, and then barked again. They dug hard. With every stroke they began to punish Cal, and Ulbrickson, and the sophomores, and anyone else who might doubt them, unleashing months’ worth of frustration, demolishing the course, hurling their backs into the oncoming wind and rain. Bobby Moch had a habit of calling for big tens by attaching someone’s name to the call—to give it more emotional impact. Sometimes it was “Give me ten for Al,” or “Give me ten for Mr. Pocock.” Now he shouted through his megaphone, “Give me ten big ones for Joe Beasley!” Nobody in the boat, including Moch apparently, had ever heard of Joe Beasley, but he was having fun now. They gave him ten big ones. Then he screamed, “And give me ten big ones for those sophomores!” The boat exploded forward. As they came around the bend and within sight of the crowd on the bridge, they were five lengths ahead. As they shot across the line and under the bridge, they were eight lengths ahead and still pulling away.
When it came time for the varsity race, the Cal fans finally got something to cheer about.
As Joe and the sophomore varsity paddled to their starting position, they figured that they pretty much had to win now, after what the JV had just done, not just to jus
tify Ulbrickson’s faith in them, but to keep their Olympic aspirations alive. From now on, in fact, they figured they had to win every race or it would be all over for them. Over the next sixteen minutes, they did everything they could to make sure it wasn’t all over. After the race, the San Francisco Chronicle’s tough-as-nails sports editor, Bill Leiser, said simply, “It was a great battle. The best race I ever saw on the estuary.”
Cal had been practicing fast starts all week, but neither boat was quite ready at the start. Once they were away, Washington leapt out to an early lead. Cal responded, quickly and decisively, raising its rate and pulling even, then moving quickly out in front by half a length. Both boats settled in and held their positions for the next mile and a half, with Washington’s blades dipping in and out of the water almost stroke for stroke with Cal’s at a steady thirty strokes per minute. As they approached Government Island and the halfway mark, California slowly increased its rate and stretched its lead out to a full length. George Morry, in the coxswain’s seat, called for more, and the Washington rate went up to thirty-two, but Morry held it there as Cal went up to thirty-four and a half, refusing to yield to the temptation to panic or bolt. Ever so slowly, Washington began to claw its way back, inch by inch, still keeping the rate low but starting to gain on sheer power. By the time they reached the south end of the island, the Cal lead had been whittled down to a quarter of a length. Then they were bow to bow. Approaching the bend in the course, Washington slowly nosed out ahead of the California boat. Washington went up to thirty-four now, Cal to a punishing thirty-eight.