Penn came in second; California, third. The New York Athletic Club’s shell finally more or less drifted across the finish line, three and three-quarter lengths behind the Washington boat, half her crew lying prone across their oars, having collapsed in the heat.
All over Washington State—in smoky little mill towns out on the Olympic Peninsula, on soggy dairy farms nestled up against the Cascades, in posh Victorian homes on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, and in the Huskies’ drafty shell house down on the Montlake Cut—people stood and cheered. Mothers and fathers rushed off to Western Union offices to send congratulations to their sons back east. Newspapermen frantically scrambled to compose headlines. Bartenders served rounds on the house. What had been a dream was a reality. Their boys were going to the Olympics. For the first time ever, Seattle was going to play on the world stage.
Sitting by the radio at Harry Rantz’s unfinished home on Lake Washington, Joyce and the kids cheered too. Harry said nothing but suddenly, beaming, he began rummaging around in a box, pulled out a large American flag, tacked it on the wall above the radio, and stood back to admire it. The kids ran off to tell their friends in the neighborhood the good news. Joyce, quietly jubilant, set about cleaning up the peanut shells the kids had let drop on the floor as they listened nervously to the race. A small sadness niggled at the back of her mind: this meant Joe would not be coming home until the end of the summer. But that was a trifle, she knew, and it was swept away by sheer joy as she began to contemplate the prospect of Joe, dressed in an Olympic uniform, climbing off a train in Seattle when he did finally come home in the fall.
Flashing broad, white grins, Joe and his crewmates paddled back to the Princeton shell house, tossed Bobby Moch in the water, fished him out, and then lined up for the press and newsreel photographers waiting for them on the float. Henry Penn Burke, chairman of the U.S. Olympic Rowing Committee, positioned himself next to Bobby Moch and extended a silver cup to him. As the newsreel cameras whirred, Moch, dripping wet and bare chested, held one of the cup’s handles and Burke, in a suit and tie, held the other. Then Burke began to speak. He spoke and he spoke and he spoke. The boys were tired, and it was blazing hot out on the float, and they wanted to hit the showers and start celebrating. Still Burke continued to talk. Finally Moch gave a little tug on the cup and it popped free from Burke’s hand. Burke kept right on talking. Eventually, with Moch clutching the cup, the boys just drifted away, leaving Burke alone on the float, still talking as the newsreel cameras continued to roll.
Al Ulbrickson also made a few, much briefer, remarks to the press. When asked how he accounted for his varsity’s success this year, he went straight to the heart of the matter: “Every man in the boat had absolute confidence in every one of his mates. . . . Why they won cannot be attributed to individuals, not even to stroke Don Hume. Heartfelt cooperation all spring was responsible for the victory.”
Ulbrickson was no poet. That was Pocock’s territory. But the comment was as close as he could come to capturing what was in his heart. He must have known, with a kind of certitude that he felt in his gut, that he finally had in his grasp what had eluded him for years. Everything had converged: the right oarsmen, with the right attitudes, the right personalities, the right skills; a perfect boat, sleek, balanced, and wickedly fast; a winning strategy at both long and short distances; a coxswain with the guts and smarts to make hard decisions and make them fast. It all added up to more than he could really put into words, maybe more than even a poet could—something beyond the sum of its parts, something mysterious and ineffable and gorgeous to behold. And he knew whom to thank for much of it.
Walking back to the Princeton Inn that evening with George Pocock, the two men holding their suit coats over their shoulders in the warm, humid twilight, Ulbrickson stopped suddenly, turned abruptly to Pocock, and extended his right hand. “Thanks, George, for your help,” he said. Pocock later remembered the moment: “Coming from Al,” he mused, “that was the equivalent of fireworks and a brass band.”
• • •
Later that night the boys were treated to the annual Loyal Shoudy banquet, where they found the traditional purple necktie and a five-dollar bill waiting at each place setting. But even as they dined and celebrated, disturbing rumors began to circulate in the hallways of the Princeton Inn.
By eight o’clock, the rumors were confirmed. After his windy speech on the float in front of the Princeton shell house, Henry Penn Burke had taken Al Ulbrickson, George Pocock, and Ray Eckman, the athletic director at Washington, into a room and given them, in effect, an ultimatum. If Washington wanted to go to Berlin, the boys were going to have to pay their own way. “You’ll have to pay your own freight, or else,” Burke said. “We just haven’t got the dough.” Burke, who was also, coincidentally, the chairman of and a major fundraiser for the Pennsylvania Athletic Club in Philadelphia, went on to say that he understood that Penn had plenty of money and as the second-place finisher they would naturally be glad to take Washington’s place in Berlin.
Similar dramas were playing out across America that week. The American Olympic Committee had come up short of funds. Swimmers, fencers, and dozens of other teams were being asked to finance or partially finance their fare to Berlin. But until this moment, neither the AOC nor the Olympic Rowing Committee had hinted that they would be unable to send the winning crew to the games. Caught unawares, Ulbrickson was stunned and livid. The university had already had to beg and scrape every dime it could from alumni and the citizens of Seattle just to send the boys east to Poughkeepsie and Princeton. And there was no chance any of these boys could contribute their own funds. These weren’t the heirs and scions of industry; these were working-class Americans. The whole thing stank. The Washingtonians were ready to storm out of the room, but Burke kept on talking. He pointed out that California had paid its own way in 1928, as well as 1932. Yale, he said, had no problem raising “private funds” in 1924. Surely somebody in Seattle could come up with the money.
Ulbrickson knew full well that money more or less grew on the trees at Yale, and that funds had been vastly easier to come by in 1928, before the Depression, than in 1936. In 1932, Ebright had been faced only with transporting his crew 350 miles, from Berkeley to Los Angeles. Icily Ulbrickson asked Burke how much he needed to come up with and how soon. Five thousand dollars by the end of the week, Burke replied. Otherwise, Penn would go.
After the meeting, Ulbrickson huddled with Royal Brougham and George Varnell, and within minutes they were composing headlines and writing special columns to be wired to the Post-Intelligencer and the Times for the next day’s editions. In Seattle, a few minutes later, phones began to ring. Ray Eckman called his assistant, Carl Kilgore, who in turn started making local calls. By 10:00 p.m. Seattle time, Kilgore had enlisted dozens of civic leaders and put a rough plan in place. In the morning they would open their headquarters at the Washington Athletic Club, name a chairman, and set up teams. In the meantime everyone began placing more calls. Al Ulbrickson tried not to alarm his athletes. This was exactly the kind of nonsense he didn’t want them fretting about. He told them as little as possible about the funding shortage, and they went to bed that night believing all would be well.
The next morning Shorty Hunt jotted off a short letter to his parents: “A dream come true! Oh boy, what lucky kids we are! Nobody can tell me we didn’t have Old Dame Luck perched on our shoulders.” Then he and the rest of the crew chowed down on cantaloupe and ice cream for breakfast before turning out to row in front of Fox Movietone’s newsreel cameras.
A few hours later, Seattleites awoke to alarming headlines and radio news bulletins. The entire town went to work. Coeds on summer break grabbed tin cans and began going door-to-door in their neighborhoods. Paul Coughlin, president of the alumni association, started placing calls to some of the university’s more prominent graduates. Thousands of lapel tags were quickly printed up, and students on campus for summer session began to sell the
m for fifty cents apiece in the hallways. Radio announcers broke into their morning programming to appeal for funds. Downtown, I. F. Dix, the general manager of Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, signed on as chairman of the campaign. In short order, telegrams began to rattle out of Dix’s office to the chambers of commerce of every city, town, and hamlet in the state. More than a thousand letters were mailed out to American Legion posts and other civic and fraternal organizations.
By afternoon the money and pledges had begun to pour in: a hefty $500 from the Seattle Times to get things started; $5 from the Hide-Away Beer Parlor; $50 from mighty Standard Oil; $1 from a donor who wished to remain anonymous; $5 from Cecil Blogg of Tacoma, one of Hiram Conibear’s coxswains. Money began to come in as well from the boys’ hometowns, where their accomplishments had been making local headlines for weeks: $50 from Bobby Moch’s Montesano; $50 from Bellingham, the nearest town of any size to the dairy farm on which Gordy Adam had grown up; $299.25 from Don Hume’s Olympia; $75 from Joe Rantz’s Sequim. By the end of the first day of the drive, volunteers had sold $1,523 worth of fifty-cent tags. At the end of the second day, T. F. Davies, chairman of the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, put a $5,000 certified check in an envelope and airmailed it to Al Ulbrickson.
By then Ulbrickson and the boys were blithely getting ready to sail for Germany on the SS Manhattan on July 14. Just hours after the meeting with Henry Penn Burke and his brief conversations with Royal Brougham and George Varnell that evening, Ulbrickson had put on his best poker face—which is to say his natural face—gone back to Burke and the AOC, and declared that as a matter of fact Washington did have the funds to pay its way to Berlin. Then, before anyone could raise any awkward questions about just how he’d managed to get his hands on five thousand dollars so quickly, he’d speedily accepted the invitation of the New York Athletic Club to use its training facilities, in a nearby suburb on Long Island Sound, and quickly slipped out of Princeton.
As the boys—now officially the U.S. eight-oared Olympic rowing team—settled in at Travers Island they were, largely unbeknownst to them, beginning to become national celebrities. Back home in Seattle, they were already full-blown superstars. Eastern coaches and sportswriters had been following them with increasing interest ever since their freshman victory at Poughkeepsie in 1934. And now, after watching those last twenty strokes at Princeton, newspapermen from across the country were starting to put down in print what many of them had first begun to think when they saw Joe and his crewmates emerge suddenly out of the twilight that evening in Poughkeepsie two weeks before. These young men just might be the greatest collegiate crew of all time.
• • •
Travers Island sat on Long Island Sound, just south of New Rochelle. The New York Athletic Club’s facility there, completed in 1888, sprawled over thirty neatly manicured acres at the center of which stood a posh, sprawling clubhouse. With a formal dining room and an oyster bar, a billiards room, a full-featured gymnasium, a boathouse, every conceivable sort of athletic training equipment, trap-shooting facilities, a baseball diamond, a bowling alley, a boxing ring, tennis courts, squash courts, a cinder running track, Turkish baths, a swimming pool, a barbershop, valet services, and wide, sweeping lawns, it was, for all practical purposes, a country club for amateur athletes, as well as a prominent venue for Westchester County society events. It afforded easy access to excellent rowing water on the sound. And, best of all, for boys from the fields, forests, and small towns of the Pacific Northwest, it was just a few miles from all the manifold mysteries and wonders of New York City.
The sweltering heat continued to build over the East Coast and over much of America that week, but the boys weren’t going to let a little heat keep them from taking a bite of the Big Apple. They visited Grant’s Tomb, tried to board the Queen Mary but were turned away, inspected Columbia’s campus, toured Rockefeller Center, walked up and down Broadway, and ate at Jack Dempsey’s. They trooped into Minsky’s Burlesque and came out with wide eyes and sheepish grins, though Johnny White confided his personal opinion in his journal: “It was foul.” They walked around Wall Street, recalling the hushed tones in which their parents had talked about the place in 1929.
They rode the subway out to Coney Island and found that hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers had beaten them there, fleeing the stifling heat of Manhattan even in the middle of the workweek. From the crowded boardwalk, as far as they could see up and down the shoreline, the beaches were a dark, seething mass of bodies packed together on the sand. They made their way through the throng, fascinated by the thousand voices of New York—Italian-speaking mothers and Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican boys, Yiddish-speaking grandfathers and Polish-speaking girls, giddy children calling out to one another in dozens of tongues and all varieties of English, their voices tinged with the inflections of the Bronx and Brooklyn and New Jersey. They shoveled down five-cent hot dogs at Nathan’s, ate cotton candy, guzzled ice-cold Coca-Colas. They rode on the 150-foot Wonder Wheel and the hair-raising Cyclone roller coaster. They wandered through the spires and turrets of Luna Park, rode more rides, gobbled peanuts, and guzzled more Cokes. By the time they headed back to the city, they were exhausted and not entirely impressed by Coney Island. “What a hole,” Chuck Day confided in his journal. “Dirty, crowded, gyp joints.” And he wasn’t much impressed by the hot, sweltering citizens of Greater New York either: “People in New York are all very tired looking, pale, & soft. The people seldom smile & don’t look healthy & full of vigor as out west.”
As they explored New York, they began to come, one by one, to a new realization about how things stood for them. In Times Square one afternoon, a tall, somewhat heavy man rushed up to Shorty, took a good look, and said, “You’re Shorty Hunt!” He looked at the other boys. “You fellows are the Washington crew, aren’t you?” When they assured him they were, he gushed that he had recognized Shorty from a picture in the newspaper. He was a former Columbia oarsman himself, he said, and after watching their recent exploits he had decided to send his son west for college so he too might become a great crewman. It was the first time any of them really began to understand that they were now America’s crew, not the University of Washington’s—that the W on their jerseys was about to be replaced with “USA.”
For Joe, the moment of epiphany came on the eighty-sixth floor of the new Empire State Building. None of the boys had ever ridden an elevator more than a few floors in a hotel, and the rapid ascent both thrilled and frightened them. “Ears popped, eyes bulged,” Shorty Hunt wrote home breathlessly that night.
Joe had never flown in an airplane, never seen a city from any higher vantage point than that afforded by his own six-foot-three frame. Now, standing on the observation deck, he looked out at the many spires of New York rising through a pall of smoke and steam and heat haze and did not know whether he found it beautiful or frightening.
He leaned over the low stone parapet and peered down at miniature cars and buses and swarms of tiny people scurrying along the streets. The city below him, Joe realized, murmured. The cacophony of honking horns and wailing sirens and rumbling streetcars that had assaulted his ears at street level were reduced up here to something gentler and more soothing, like the sonorous breathing of an enormous living thing. It was a much bigger, more connected, world than he had ever thought possible.
He dropped a nickel in a telescope for a better view of the Brooklyn Bridge, then swept across Lower Manhattan and out to the distant Statue of Liberty. In a few days, he would be sailing under her on his way to a place where as he understood it, liberty was not a given, where it seemed to be under some kind of assault. The realization that was settling on all the boys settled on Joe.
They were now representatives of something much larger than themselves—a way of life, a shared set of values. Liberty was perhaps the most fundamental of those values. But the things that held them together—trust in each other, mutual respect, humility, fair play, watching out for one ano
ther—those were also part of what America meant to all of them. And right along with a passion for liberty, those were the things they were about to take to Berlin and lay before the world when they took to the water at Grünau.
• • •
Sudden revelation paid Bobby Moch a visit as well. His came as he sat, in the shade under a tree in a wide-open field on Travers Island, opening an envelope. The envelope contained a letter from his father, the letter Bobby had requested, listing the addresses of the relatives he hoped to visit in Europe. But the envelope also contained a second, sealed, envelope labeled, “Read this in a private place.” Now, alarmed, sitting under the tree, Moch opened the second envelope and read its contents. By the time he had finished reading, tears were running down his face.
The news was innocuous enough by twenty-first-century standards, but in the context of social attitudes in America in the 1930s it came as a profound shock. When he met his relatives in Europe, Gaston Moch told his son, he was going to learn for the first time that he and his family were Jewish.
Bobby sat under the tree, brooding for a long while, not because he suddenly found himself a member of what was then still a much discriminated against minority, but because as he absorbed the news he realized for the first time the terrible pain his father must have carried silently within him for so many years. For decades, his father had felt that in order to make it in America it was necessary to conceal an essential element of his identity from his friends, his neighbors, and even his own children. Bobby had been brought up to believe that everyone should be treated according to his actions and his character, not according to stereotypes. It was his father himself who had taught him that. Now it came as a searing revelation that his father had not felt safe enough to live by that same simple proposition, that he had kept his heritage hidden painfully away, a secret to be ashamed of, even in America, even from his own beloved son.