The two boats swung around the bend side by side and surged into view of the fans on the bridge. An armada of launches and pleasure craft was following them. Observers in those boats, studying the boys through binoculars, thought both crews looked tired.
California made a move, starting to sprint, going up to forty strokes per minute and charging forward again, back into the lead. The Cal fans erupted in cheers. Their boys were out in front by a quarter of a length and bearing down on the finish line. But George Morry did what he had been told to do. Ulbrickson had instructed him to keep the stroke rate as low as he could for as long as he possibly could. With his boys still rowing at thirty-four, Morry resisted the temptation to call for a higher rate, even as Cal maintained its frantic forty and the Fruitvale Avenue Bridge began to loom up ahead of them. Stroke rate is one thing and power is another. Morry knew he still had plenty of power at his disposal. He figured that by now Cal almost certainly didn’t. He leaned forward and called out, “Gimme ten big ones!” The Washington boys dug hard. The boat leapt forward. At the end of ten strokes, the bows of the boats were dead even again. With the bridge and the finish line closing on them, Morry screamed again, “Gimme ten more!” Joe and Shorty and Roger and everyone with an oar in his hands threw everything he had into the last few pulls. In the coaching launch directly behind his boys, Al Ulbrickson held his breath. The boats shot under the bridge side by side.
A blue flag and a white flag dropped from the bridge simultaneously. The fans fell suddenly silent, confused. Someone in one of the following boats shouted, “Washington by a foot!” The Husky fans roared. Then a voice on the official loudspeaker boomed out, “California by two feet.” Now the Cal fans roared. The radio broadcasters huddling under the shelter hesitated, then beamed the news out to the nation: “California Wins.” The same message rattled out over the newswires. On the bridge, the Washington fans were adamant, pointing angrily at the water, gesticulating. Their boys had surged ahead at the end—anyone could see that. California fans who had been leaning over the railing as the boats passed below insisted that the nose of the Cal boat had gone under the bridge first, by three feet at least. The pandemonium increased. Long minutes passed. And then, suddenly, the voice on the loudspeaker crackled back to life: “Judges of the finish announce officially that Washington won by six feet.” An enormous moan arose from the California fans en masse. In Seattle a news flash from Oakland interrupted regular radio programming, and people who had been sitting dejectedly by the radio stood up and slapped each other on the back and shook hands.
It turned out that neither crew, nor any of the official judges, had ever really had any doubt about the outcome. They just had trouble getting to the loudspeaker through the throng of people on the bridge. What most spectators had not realized was that the bridge ran across the estuary at a slight angle. The finish line, on the other hand, ran straight across the water, just about intersecting the bridge on the California side of the racecourse but intersecting the Washington side several yards short of the bridge. The nose of the California boat had indeed passed under the bridge first, but by then the first six feet of the Washington boat was already well over the line. When Ulbrickson got back to the hotel that night, he jotted a simple commentary in the logbook: “Quite a day.”
• • •
The train ride home was jubilant. The hard feelings of the long fall and winter were forgotten; everyone had come out a winner. Tom Bolles was sure now he had a freshman crew at least equal to that of the previous year. The junior varsity had made their point, at least for now. The sophomores were the Pacific Coast varsity champions. Together they had swept California from its home water. Anything now seemed possible.
The day following the race it was front-page news in Seattle, a banner headline in the Seattle Times trumpeting, “Husky Crews Make Clean Sweep.” On April 18 the city held its version of a ticker-tape parade to honor the crews, as well as a girls’ swim team that had just returned from Chicago with a handful of medals and six national records and Jack Medica, a superstar swimmer who had himself just returned from victories in the East. Eighty members of the Husky marching band led the procession up Second Avenue and Pike Street as confetti and scraps of paper mixed with a steady, cold rain drifting down from clouds high above. Behind the band, in a flower-bedecked car, Mayor Smith rode with Al Ulbrickson and Tom Bolles, waving at the cheering crowd that lined the street four- and five-deep. Medica and the girls’ swim team rode in a second car. Then came the main attraction—a long logging truck draped in flowers and green foliage carrying the varsity crew and their shell. The boys wore white sweaters with big purple Ws emblazoned on them. Each held a twelve-foot-long oar upright. As it crawled through downtown, the float looked something like an enormous green reptile with a sleek cedar spine and eight wavering spruce quills. From time to time, a relative or friend of one of the boys called out a greeting from the sidewalk or ran out into the street for a quick handshake. Joyce was at work, but Joe scanned the faces in the crowd, looking for his father or his half siblings, but they were nowhere to be seen.
The procession made its way to the Washington Athletic Club on Union Street. There the boys were ushered into a smoky room packed with hundreds of Seattle’s leading citizens, each of whom had paid seventy-five cents to attend a special luncheon and get an up-close look at the returning heroes. Royal Brougham was the master of ceremonies, and the proceedings were broadcast live on radio.
The mayor, Tom Bolles, and Al Ulbrickson each gave brief talks. Ulbrickson heaped praise on all three crews and ended by saying, to cheers, “With support like this we’ll win at Poughkeepsie and then it will be on to Berlin and the Olympics.” The dean of the university spoke, as did the president of the chamber of commerce. Pretty much everyone who was anyone in town wanted in on the act. Then the boys from all three boats were called up onto the stage. They were introduced, one at a time, each to long, sustained applause.
When it was Joe’s turn, he stood for a moment looking out over the scene before him. White light poured into the room from tall windows flanked by heavy velvet curtains. Enormous crystal chandeliers hung shimmering from high, ornately plastered ceilings. The beaming faces of large-bellied men in three-piece suits and matronly-looking women bedecked with jewelry gazed up at him. They sat at tables spread with crisp white linen tablecloths and gleaming silverware and crystal stemware and platters heaped with hot food. Waiters in white coats and black bow ties scurried among the tables, carrying trays with still more food.
As Joe raised a hand to acknowledge the wave of applause rising to greet him, he found himself struggling desperately to keep back tears. He had never let himself dream of standing in a place like this, surrounded by people like these. It startled him but at the same time it also filled him with gratitude, and as he stood at the front of the room that day acknowledging the applause, he felt a sudden surge of something unfamiliar—a sense of pride that was deeper and more heartfelt than any he had ever felt before. Now it was on to Poughkeepsie again, and then maybe even Berlin. Everything finally seemed to be starting to turn golden.
Rowing into the Montlake Cut
CHAPTER TEN
A boat is a sensitive thing, an eight-oared shell, and if it isn’t let go free, it doesn’t work for you.
—George Yeoman Pocock
In an age when Americans enjoy dozens of cable sports channels, when professional athletes often command annual salaries in the tens of millions of dollars, and when the entire nation all but shuts down for a virtual national holiday on Super Bowl Sunday, it’s hard to fully appreciate how important the rising prominence of the University of Washington’s crew was to the people of Seattle in 1935. Seattle was a city that had long been considered, and was sometimes prone to consider itself, a backwater in many regards, and not least in the world of sports. The university’s football team had historically been a winning proposition, with an astonishing accomplishment to
its credit—a record sixty-three consecutive games without a defeat between 1907 and 1917. During that streak, under coach Gil Dobie, Washington scored 1,930 points to its opponents’ 118. But it must be noted that Dobie’s adherence to the rules may have been a wee bit lax. On one occasion he was reputed to have fit a pair of his smaller players with iron shoulder pads, an equipment adjustment that gave the fellows a seemingly uncanny ability to take down much bigger men. At any rate, the Washington Sun Dodgers (rebranded the Huskies at the suggestion of the 1922 crew) played almost entirely on the West Coast and had made it to the national stage of the Rose Bowl only twice, once tying Navy and once losing to Alabama.
Seattle baseball had never really made it onto a national stage at all. There had been a succession of professional ball teams in town since May 24, 1890, when the Seattle Reds took on the Spokane Falls Spokanes. In the years that followed, the city had seen baseball teams variously called the Seattles, the Klondikers, the Rainmakers, the Braves, the Giants, the Rainiers, the Siwashes, the Indians, and, at one unfortunate juncture, the Seattle Clamdiggers. But all these were minor league teams that played only in local and regional contests. And baseball in Seattle had recently experienced a major setback—one of many more to come—when the wooden stands at the Indians’ ballpark, Dugdale Park, burned to the ground in July 1932. The team had moved to Civic Field, a high school football stadium. But the field had no grass, was little more than a rectangle of dirt and stones. During and between games, grounds crews scurried about with gunnysacks picking up as many rocks as possible, to keep the players from tripping over them when racing for a fly ball or flaying themselves alive when sliding into a base. It proved to be a hopeless cause and an endless task. One of the high schoolers who played there, Edo Vanni—later the manager of the Rainiers—said of the field, “If a horse got stranded out there, he would have starved to death. It was nothing but rocks.” For decades, baseball fans in Seattle had to choose an eastern team to root for if they wanted a stake in the big leagues.
Seattle sports had once risen briefly to international prominence, in 1917, when the city’s professional hockey team, the Metropolitans, became the first American team to win the Stanley Cup, defeating the Montreal Canadiens. But the Metropolitans ordinarily played only in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, and when the owner of their arena did not renew their lease in 1924, the team folded.
Given this meager sports heritage, the Washington crews’ victories gave Seattleites something they hadn’t had in a long time—something, in fact, that they had never really had. With the sweep in California, recent victories in Poughkeepsie, and now talk even of future victories in the Olympics, any Seattleite could suddenly stick out his chest and crow a bit. He could write to friends and relations back east about it. He could read about it in the Post-Intelligencer in the morning and then enjoy reading about it again in the Seattle Times in the evening. He could talk to the barber about it when getting a haircut and know that the barber cared about it as much as he did. Those boys in their boats were—length by length and victory by victory—suddenly beginning to put Seattle on the map, and they were likely to do more of it in the near future. Everyone in town believed that now, and it pulled them together and made them feel better about themselves in a deeply troubled time.
• • •
If they lingered too long over the front page of the Times or the Post-Intelligencer, though, Seattleites could not avoid seeing harbingers of other troubles to come.
On April 14, the day after the Pacific Coast Regatta on the Oakland Estuary, the dust storms of the past several years were suddenly eclipsed by a single catastrophe that is still remembered in the Plains states as Black Sunday. In only a few hours’ time, cold, dry winds howling out of the north scoured from dry fields more than two times the amount of soil that had been excavated from the Panama Canal and lifted it eight thousand feet into the sky. Across much of five states, late afternoon sunlight gave way to utter darkness. The dust particles the wind carried generated so much static electricity in the air that barbed-wire fences glowed in the midday darkness. Farmers at work in their fields crumpled to their hands and knees and groped aimlessly about, unable to find their way to their own doorsteps. Cars careened off roads and into ditches, where their occupants clutched cloths to their faces, struggled to breathe, gagged, and coughed up dirt. Sometimes they abandoned their cars and staggered up to the houses of strangers and pounded on their front doors, begging for and receiving shelter.
The next day, Kansas City AP bureau chief Ed Stanley inserted the phrase “the dust bowl” into a wire service account of the devastation, and a new term entered the American lexicon. Over the next few months, as the extent of the devastation settled in, the trickle of ragged refugees that Joe Rantz had witnessed heading west the previous summer became a torrent. Within a few years, two and a half million Americans would pull up stakes and head west into an uncertain future—rootless, dispossessed, bereft of the simple comfort and dignity of having a place to call home.
For months, things had been looking up in America. Job offerings had begun to appear again in the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer as they had in hundreds of newspapers across the country; men like Harry Rantz had finally begun to find meaningful work. But the winds of April 14 suddenly blew away the slowly accumulating hopes of millions. Within weeks, the Post-Intelligencer was warning the locals to expect company, and competition for those jobs, soon. “Great Migration Westward About to Begin: Homeseekers Look Upon Northwest as Promised Land,” read a Post-Intelligencer headline on May 4. Employment agencies in Seattle received inquiries about the availability of jobs—any kind of job, no matter how low paying—from as far away as Missouri and Arkansas. Most of the migrants were farmers, and real estate offices were flooded with inquiries about the availability of cheap acreage near Seattle. Eager agents answered the inquiries with assurances that there was plenty of inexpensive land available. But they seldom mentioned that around the Puget Sound acreage generally came with stumps—hundreds of stumps per acre—each of which had to be pulled or dug or dynamited out of the earth; nor did they mention that the underlying soil was glacial till, hard-packed clay interlaced with stones; nor that the climate was cool and gray, not suited for growing the kinds of crops that had long sustained the people of the American Midwest.
At the same time, the drumbeat of ominous headlines emanating from Europe had begun to grow steadily louder and more insistent that spring. Four weeks’ worth of headlines from the Seattle Times alone were reason enough for worry: “Death Penalty for Pacifists Is Decreed as Germany Girds” (April 19); “Nazis Jail Aged Nuns, Monks in New Attack on Christianity” (April 27); “German Move to Build U-Boats Rouses Anxiety in Great Britain” (April 28); “Britain to Match Nazi Planes; Calls on Hitler to Fix Limits” (May 2); “Hitler Warned by Britain Not to Militarize Rhineland Zone” (May 7); “Nazis Have New Weapon: 60-Knot Boat” (May 17); “Hitler Police Jail U.S. Citizen” (May 18). The dark news was difficult to ignore. But not impossible. The vast majority of Americans, in Seattle and elsewhere, did exactly that. The affairs of Europe still seemed a million miles away, and that’s exactly where most people wanted to keep them.
• • •
On the first day of training for Poughkeepsie, Ulbrickson surprised a gaggle of sportswriters at the shell house by announcing that the sophomores weren’t necessarily going to keep their varsity status in Poughkeepsie, despite their win in Oakland. He pointed out that there were older boys in the junior varsity boat with a lot of experience and talent. Some of them deserved a shot at a national varsity championship before they graduated. Insofar as it went, Ulbrickson was probably entirely sincere on that point. He had in fact felt bad about disappointing the older boys in Oakland, especially in light of the fact that they had won the final trials on the estuary after he had broken his word to them. But there was something else. He was well aware that the older boys had utterly dominated their co
mpetition in Oakland. The sophomores, on the other hand, had won by the narrowest of margins, and they had caused their coach a good deal of heartburn while he waited for the official results. That hadn’t helped their cause at all.
Joe and the other sophomores couldn’t believe it. They hadn’t just beaten another crew on the estuary; they’d beaten Cal’s varsity, the defending national champions. They’d reached beyond themselves to defeat older and much more experienced boys, the same crew that Ebright would presumably take to Poughkeepsie. Yet suddenly their varsity status was back on the line again. Furious, they resolved to put the JV boys in their place as soon as they got out on the water.
Instead they thoroughly sabotaged themselves and their cause. On May 9, Ulbrickson held another head-to-head contest between the two boats. Riding along in Ulbrickson’s launch was an important guest: J. Lyman Bingham of the Amateur Athletic Union, a close associate of Avery Brundage, the president of both the AAU and the American Olympic Committee. When Ulbrickson shouted the start command through his megaphone—“Ready all . . . Row!”—the JV boat, with Bobby Moch in the stern, pulled away from the sophomores promptly, easily, and decisively. Ulbrickson gunned the motor on the launch, ran the two boats down, and bellowed, “Way enough!” He lined them up again, and called another start. Again, the JV pulled away decisively. Bingham turned to Ulbrickson and asked, dryly, “Which did you say was the varsity? Maybe I’m watching the wrong crew.” Ulbrickson was flummoxed.
Over the next several weeks Ulbrickson raced the two boats against each other again and again. Occasionally the sophomores won, but usually they lost. They rowed well when left on their own, but the moment they got a glimpse of the older boys they fell apart completely. Months of taunting had gotten under their skins.