The following day, with John Roosevelt—a tall, good-looking kid with his hair slicked back and a warm, fetching smile—riding along in the launch, Ulbrickson held one final trial, just to see what to expect on race day. He started the older boys, his new varsity, at four miles. At the three-mile mark, Joe and the sophomores joined in. They quickly powered ahead of the varsity. At the two-mile mark, Tom Bolles’s exceptional freshmen joined in. For the rest of the way, the sophomores and the freshmen battled for first with a clearly exhausted varsity trailing both. At the end the freshmen came in half a length ahead of Joe and the sophomores, with both boats well ahead of the new varsity. George Pocock, surprised, said, “The sophomores looked like something today for the first time in weeks. It surely looked like a crew that is coming.” So far as we know, Al Ulbrickson said nothing—neither publicly nor to those closest to him—but he must have tossed and turned in his bunk that night. By now the die was cast, the programs had been printed, the older boys would still row as the varsity. But he couldn’t have liked what he had just seen.
On June 14, Ulbrickson invited Royal Brougham upstairs in the crew quarters to see something. For months, Brougham had been using his daily sports column, “The Morning After,” to sing the praises of the sophomores, sometimes at the expense of the older boys who now constituted the varsity. The older boys had taken it as a challenge. Now, in their dressing area, they had put up signs to keep themselves motivated: “Remember the Morning After!” and “Go Get Brougham’s Babies!” Furthermore, Ulbrickson told Brougham, Bobby Moch had a new mantra when he called for extra effort: “Take Ten for RB.” When Moch resorted to that one, Ulbrickson said, “the boys get so hot they have to wrap asbestos around their oar handles to keep the boat from burning up.”
What Ulbrickson likely didn’t know was that Bobby Moch had worked out an elaborate set of verbal codes to which only he and his crew knew the real meanings. Some of them were simply abbreviated versions of longer commands he sometimes called out in the boat. “SOS,” for instance, meant “slow on slides.” “OK” meant “keep the boat on keel.” Most, though, were coded because neither Moch nor his boys wanted the other crews or the coaches to know their exact meaning. “WTA” meant “wax their ass.” “BS” meant “beat the sophs.” And another, along the same lines, “BAB,” meant “beat Al’s babies.”
• • •
All was quiet at the Washington shell house on the morning of the regatta. Unlike football coaches, who often try to key their players up for a big game, rowing coaches sometimes take the opposite tack. Well-trained oarsmen, in Ulbrickson’s experience, were like high-strung racehorses. Once they were in motion, they’d bust their hearts to win. Their willpower was indomitable. But you didn’t want to bring them to the gate in a lather. He always kept things low key before a race, and the boys spent the morning dozing, playing cards, and shooting the bull.
As many as a hundred thousand people had been expected for the regatta, but by midafternoon only perhaps a third of that number had showed up. It was a miserably wet, blustery day, with rain slanting down out of dark skies in torrents—no kind of day for standing out in the elements and watching a race. A navy destroyer and a coast guard cutter, the 240-foot Tampa, were on hand, but fewer than a hundred smaller craft—sailboats, houseboats, and yachts—had made their way to the finish line, where they lay swaying and bobbing at anchor. Nearly everyone aboard them stayed belowdecks for as long as possible while waiting for the races to begin.
Late in the afternoon, they began to emerge onto their decks in peacoats and slickers. In Poughkeepsie a group of fans bought bright pink oilskin tablecloths and fashioned capes and hoods out of them. Another group raided a hardware store, bought a roll of tar paper, and contrived to make raincoats out of it. Gradually, dark masses of people huddled under umbrellas made their way down the steep descent from Main Street to the water, where they took up positions along the shore or waited in line to cross the river on ferries. The observation train began to fill up, though this year the open-sided cars were not as popular as the enclosed coaches, which promptly reached capacity. At the shell houses on both sides of the river, boys finished rigging their shells. Of the sixteen shells on the river that day, George Pocock had built fifteen.
A little before 4:00 p.m., in a driving rain, Tom Bolles’s freshmen paddled upriver to the stake boats and took their starting position, with Columbia on one side and California on the other. Tom Bolles and Al Ulbrickson climbed into the train’s press car, along with John Roosevelt, who had overnight become an enthusiastic Husky fan. Water was dripping from the brim of Bolles’s raggedy old good-luck hat. Since he had started wearing it on race days in 1930, he hadn’t lost a race.
It was even more miserable out on the water than onshore. The boats lined up, the starting gun fired, and the regatta—and Washington’s quest to sweep the Hudson—was under way almost before anyone realized it. Royal Brougham, hunched over an NBC microphone, began to call the race. Fans along the shoreline peered through the curtain of rain, struggling to distinguish one boat from another.
For thirty strokes, it was a race. Then, with Don Hume at stroke, big Gordy Adam in the middle of the boat, and the tenacious Johnny White up in seat number two all settling into their rhythms, the Washington freshmen began to pull ahead, easing out in front of the others as if effortlessly, stroke by stroke.
By the end of a half mile, it was all but decided. The rest of the way was a cakewalk. In the last mile, the Washington boat lengthened its lead a bit more with each stroke. During the last hundred yards, in the press car, Tom Bolles became agitated, then excited, and then, finally, by all accounts, “hysterical,” waving his soggy old hat in the air as his freshmen—an even better crew than the previous year’s, he had been saying for months—slid across the line, defeating California by four lengths.
• • •
By the time the 5:00 p.m. junior varsity race was set to go off, the rain had abated a bit, the downpour having given way to intermittent showers, but it was still windy and the water was still rough. As Joe paddled upriver toward the starting line, he, like his crewmates, had a lot to think about. Cal had not sent a JV boat to Poughkeepsie this year, but the eastern schools offered plenty of power and talent. Navy was a particular threat. The greatest danger, though, lay between the gunnels of his own shell. The defeats at the hands of the older boys had shaken his and the other boys’ self-confidence. For weeks now, the whole boat had been the subject of relentless second-guessing and humiliation. Everyone from Seattle to New York seemed to want to know one thing—what the hell had happened to them? Neither he nor anybody else in the boat could begin to answer the question. All they knew was that their easy belief in themselves after the victory in California had long since shattered and given way to a mixture of despair and anxiety, as well as a fierce determination bordering on rage—an all-consuming desire to salvage some degree of respect before the season ended. As they sat at the starting line, in the City of Seattle, rolling with the choppy waves, waiting for the crack of the starting gun, with rainwater running down their necks and backs and dripping from their noses, the real question was whether they had the maturity and discipline to keep their minds in the boat, or whether the rage and fear and uncertainty would unhinge them. They fidgeted in their seats, subtly adjusting their grips on the oars, shifting their weight, adjusting angles, trying to keep their muscles from knotting up and freezing in place. An uncertain wind buffeted their faces, forcing their eyes to narrow.
At the gun, they got off slowly, falling behind all three other boats: Navy, Syracuse, and Cornell. For half a mile, it looked as if they might, in fact, disintegrate as a crew, as they had done so often lately. Then something kicked in—something that had been missing for a long while. Somehow determination conquered despair. They began to pull in long, sweet, precisely synchronized strokes, rowing at a composed beat of thirty-three. By the end of the first mile, they had found their swing and surged into the lead. Cornell
crept up behind them and briefly threatened but then fell back. Navy made a bid, charging forward as they passed under the railroad bridge at the two-mile mark, but Wink Winslow called for more. The beat went up a notch, to thirty-four, then another notch, to thirty-five. The Navy boat hesitated and then began to fade.
For the remaining mile and a half, the sophomores settled in and rowed gorgeously—a long, sleek line of perfection—passing under the automobile bridge and finishing a comfortable two lengths ahead of Navy. A barrage of bombs went off on the bridge to signal their victory. Sitting at his radio microphone, Royal Brougham exulted at the triumph of his favorites. At the end of the three-mile race, he declared, the sophomores had looked to him just as they had at the end of the two-mile race the year before—as if they could keep on rowing right down the river to New York City and see the town without breaking a sweat.
In the press coach on the observation train, Al Ulbrickson watched silently. He remained thus, utterly impassive, as the train began to reverse course, backing four miles up the river for the beginning of the varsity race. Inside he could only have been churning. He stood now on the precipice of doing what no coach had ever done, winning all three Poughkeepsie races in eight-oared boats, fulfilling his promise to the people of Seattle, and coming home with a clean shot at going to Berlin.
• • •
As six o’clock and the start of the climactic race approached, the weather improved a bit more, though it continued to rain lightly and intermittently. More people abandoned the bars and hotel lobbies of Poughkeepsie and made their way down to the river. Rain or not, nobody in town that day wanted to miss out on seeing what sort of crew Ulbrickson had come up with that could displace his talented sophomores.
Seven varsity crews paddled to the starting line, to race for the national title, in a ghostly light mist. California had drawn the most favorable lane—lane number one, nearest the western bank of the river, where the current was least likely to affect a boat. Washington was right next door, in lane number two. Navy, Syracuse, Cornell, Columbia, and Pennsylvania stretched out across the river in lanes three through seven.
The referee called, “Ready all?” One by one, the coxswains shouted a few last-minute commands to their crews and then raised their hands. The starting gun fired. All seven boats lurched off the line together. Rowing stroke for stroke, they remained tightly bunched up for a hundred yards. Then Washington slowly edged out to a slight lead of about four feet. In the stern of his boat, the newly built Tamanawas, Bobby Moch told his crew to settle in. He was happy to find that they could hold their lead with the boys rowing at thirty-two. At a half mile, Washington continued to lead by about the same margin, with Syracuse just behind them and the midshipmen of Navy, on their outside, just a few feet behind Syracuse. Cornell and California were trailing badly.
Over the next half mile, Cornell slowly moved up on the outside, clawing its way into third position. But Washington expanded its lead over Syracuse. Cal still trailed the field. In his car on the observation train, Ky Ebright was worried. He leaned forward, peering through a pair of binoculars, studying the boats intently. He did not think his boys were staying close enough to make up the ground later. At a mile and a half, Washington was out in front by open water and stretching its lead. In the press car, the Seattle sportswriters and Washington fans began hooting and hollering now, led by, of all people, John Roosevelt, who had begun to chant, “Come on, Washington. Come on . . .” Fans on the docks and yachts in Poughkeepsie began to take up variations of the same chant as the boats came into view upriver. Surprising numbers of them seemed to want to see something historic here—that elusive sweep of the Hudson—even if it was a western crew that accomplished the feat. As they crossed the two-and-a-half-mile mark, Washington remained in the lead, though its advantage had shrunk to about ten feet. Al Ulbrickson watched closely from his seat in the press car amid the storm of chanting fans. He was still a mile and a half from doing what he desperately wanted to do, and he knew it. And he could see California and Cornell finally starting to move up on both sides of his boat. Navy and Syracuse were fading. It was going to be Washington, Cornell, or California.
Inch by inch the other two boats began to gain on Washington. Bobby Moch was riding the stern of the Tamanawas like a jockey now, leaning forward into the rain, urging the boat on, screaming for big tens, calling on the boys to take the stroke rate higher, then higher still. In the middle of the boat, big Jim McMillin was taking huge, powerful, smooth strokes. Up front Chuck Day, the number two man, was trying to finesse it, trying to keep the boat in perfect balance stroke after stroke even as Moch kept calling for more. But they were running out of steam, and California and Cornell just kept coming. By the time the three boats passed under the railroad bridge at mile three, Cornell had nosed out in front. Then Cal came up to match them. Slowly, agonizingly, Washington fell into third. Over the final mile, Cal and Cornell battled nose to nose, so close together that nobody could tell for sure who was ahead at any given moment. But everyone could tell that Washington had fallen two lengths behind.
As the leaders crossed the line, pandemonium ensued. On the automobile bridge, Mike Bogo, the three-hundred-pound Poughkeepsie barkeep in charge of setting off explosives to signal the lane number of the winner, detonated five bombs, for Cornell. Cal fans howled in outrage. Cornell fans rushed up the hill to the town’s principal bookie and demanded, and were paid, their winnings. Minutes later the official results were announced: Ky Ebright and California had won their third consecutive national varsity title, by one-third of a second. California fans rushed up the hill and demanded their winnings from the same bookie, who again paid out. He was now thirty thousand dollars in the hole, and soon officially out of business. Mike Bogo, dejected, later commented, “I don’t care who wins. I just like to bust them bombs.”
• • •
Cal hadn’t just won it—they’d done so in a near record time of eighteen minutes and fifty-two seconds, despite a stiff crosswind and heavy chop. The only crew ever to have turned in a faster time was Ebright’s own Olympic gold medal crew of 1928.
Al Ulbrickson never betrayed a glimmer of emotion. Before leaving the press car, he dutifully congratulated Ky Ebright and then gamely fielded the barrage of questions leveled at him. Royal Brougham fired the first and potentially most lethal: Had he made a critical mistake by demoting his sophomores? “No siree!” Ulbrickson boomed out. “The sophomores rowed a great race, but they would never have finished third in that varsity event. That was one of the fastest fields in the history of the regatta . . . we didn’t have the power or the poundage to beat those other fellows.” But the next morning, Brougham pointed out again in his column that “those walloping sophomores of mine” had looked mighty fresh to him at the end of three miles, the varsity not so much.
For Ulbrickson, there was one overriding, and dark, fact to be confronted: he had failed again to make good on his public promises. It was very much an open question whether he was going to get another chance.
On June 21 the Post-Intelligencer ran a banner headline in its sports section: “$10,000 Crew Offer to Be Made for Tom Bolles.” The accompanying story asserted that an unnamed eastern college had approached Bolles just hours after the freshman race. The salary—$164,000 in today’s dollars—was vastly more than Washington could match, as university officials in Seattle immediately made clear. That afternoon Bolles denied that he had been approached, but likely because he had already turned the offer down. The word on the street was that, rather than going east, Bolles would replace Ulbrickson in Seattle. Bolles was working on his master’s degree in history, and it seemed unlikely that he would want to leave the university until he finished it. One way or the other, it was apparent that the coaching situation at Washington was suddenly uncertain, and that while Bolles’s star had suddenly ascended, Ulbrickson’s had fallen just as abruptly. On June 23, Royal Brougham advised his readers to ignore the rumors, saying he had it on good authority tha
t Bolles had promised Ulbrickson he would never take the Washington job unless Ulbrickson had moved on to greener pastures first. But nobody outside of the university’s administration, including Al Ulbrickson, was really sure what was going on. Ulbrickson was sure of one thing, though: he figured he had worked too hard, brought the crew program too far, to be unceremoniously dumped. “I won’t wait until they fire me,” he confided to a friend. “I’ll quit first.”
The town of Grand Coulee, with B Street off to the right
CHAPTER ELEVEN
And the oarsman, too, when he has his mind trained at the university and his body fit, feels something. . . . I think oarsmen understand what I’m talking about. They get that way. I’ve seen oarsmen—actually I saw one man, who was so rarin’ to go, so fit and bright, I saw him try to run up a wall. Now isn’t that ridiculous? But he felt that good; he wanted to run up that wall.
—George Yeoman Pocock
Joe’s old Franklin labored and coughed and wheezed, crawling up the long, steep ascent to Blewett Pass, high in the Cascade Mountains. Snow still lingered in the shadows of the higher peaks, and the air was cool, but the Franklin was prone to overheating on steep grades. Joe was glad he had remembered to hang a canvas water bag in front of the radiator that morning, when he had thrown his banjo and his clothes in the backseat, said good-bye to Joyce for the summer, and driven out of Seattle, heading east, looking for work.
He made it over the pass and began to drop down through dry ponderosa pine forests to the apple and cherry orchards of Wenatchee, where magpies, black and white, flashed among the cherry trees, seeking ripe, red plunder. He crossed the Columbia River on a narrow steel span and climbed out of the river’s gorge to the gently rolling wheat fields of the Columbia Plateau. He drove eastward for miles on end, the road running relentlessly arrow straight, undulating over rolling jade-green fields of wheat.
Then he turned north and descended into the Washington scablands, a tortured landscape shaped by a series of cataclysms between twelve and fifteen thousand years ago. As the last ice age waned, a two-thousand-foot-high ice dam holding back a vast lake in Montana—later dubbed Lake Missoula by geologists—gave way not once but several times, unleashing a series of floods of unimaginable scope and ferocity. In the greatest of these, during a period of roughly forty-eight hours, 220 cubic kilometers of water rushed over much of what is now northern Idaho, eastern Washington, and the northern edge of Oregon, carrying more than ten times the flow of all the rivers in the world. A massive wall of water, mud, and rock—well over a thousand feet tall in places—exploded over the countryside, rumbling southwest toward the Pacific at speeds up to one hundred miles per hour, leveling whole mountains, sluicing away millions of tons of topsoil, and gouging deep scars called “coulees” in the underlying bedrock.
As Joe descended into the largest of these excavations, the Grand Coulee, he encountered a world that was in many ways alien and yet starkly beautiful—a world of broken rock, silver sagebrush, sparse desert grasses, windblown sand, and stunted pines. Under pale blue skies, he drove along the base of high, sheer basalt cliffs. Jackrabbits the size of small dogs loped awkwardly across the highway. Scrawny coyotes slunk away through the sagebrush. Blank-faced burrowing owls perched unblinking on fence posts, watching him pass. Nervous-looking ground squirrels sat on jagged rocks, one moment watching for rattlesnakes in the sagebrush below, the next moment cocking their heads to watch for hawks circling high above. Dust devils danced across the coulee floor. A stiff, dry, unrelenting wind blew up the fifty-mile length of the coulee, carrying the sweet scent of sage and the harsh, mineral smell of broken rock.
Joe drove up the coulee to the ramshackle boomtown of Grand Coulee, perched just above the Columbia River at the spot where the U.S. government had recently committed to building a dam so massive that by the time it was finished it would be the largest masonry structure built since the Great Pyramid at Giza, more than four thousand years before. He made his way down a steeply descending gravel road to the river, crossed the wide expanse of green water on a steel bridge, and parked in front of the National Reemployment Service building.
Thirty minutes later, he walked out of the office with a job. Most of the jobs remaining at the dam site, he had been told, were for common laborers, paying fifty cents an hour. But studying the application form, Joe had noticed that there were higher pay grades for certain jobs—especially for the men whose job it was to dangle from cliff faces in harnesses and pound away at the reluctant rock with jackhammers. The jackhammer job paid seventy-five cents an hour, so Joe had put a check next to that box and stepped into the examination room for his physical. Working with a jackhammer under those conditions required enough upper body strength to fight the punishing kickback of the machine, enough leg strength to keep the body pushed away from the cliff face all day, enough grace and athleticism to clamber around on the cliffs while dodging rocks falling from above, and enough self-assurance to climb over the edge of the cliff in the first place. By the time Joe had stripped down to his shorts and told the doctor that he rowed crew at the university, the job was his.
Now, in the long, lingering twilight of a late June Northwest evening, Joe sat on the hood of the Franklin, in front of the office, and studied the lay of the land before him. Across the gorge and slightly upstream, perched on a gravel bench on the west side, was the government-built town the clerk had told Joe was Engineer City—home to technical and supervisory personnel. The houses there were modest but neat, with patches of new lawn that seemed oddly green and out of place in the uniformly brown surroundings. Upstream a narrow suspension catwalk stretched fifteen hundred feet across the river, swaying slightly, like a cobweb in the evening breeze. Near it was another, sturdier, bridge built low to the water, carrying an enormous conveyor belt, which appeared to be transporting piles of rock and gravel from one side of the river to the other. A large cofferdam, made of sheets of steel, was being built on the west side of the river to divert the water away from the base of the cliffs there. The area behind the cofferdam swarmed with men and machines, all raising individual clouds of dust.
Steam shovels and electric shovels clawed at piles of loose rock; bulldozers pushed earth and rocks from one place to another; Caterpillar diesel tractors crawled back and forth, gouging out terraces; enormous Mack AP Super-Duty dump trucks labored up rough roads leading out of the canyon, carrying boulders the size of automobiles; front loaders scooped up more boulders and dropped them in side-dump trucks that carried them to conveyors; tall cranes swung steel sheets out over the water, where pile drivers emitting white puffs of steam sat on barges, pounding them into the riverbed. At the base of the cliffs, hundreds of men with sledgehammers and crowbars climbed over piles of fallen rock, loosening them for the front loaders. On the cliffs themselves, men suspended on ropes crawled and swung from one spot to another like so many black spiders. Studying them, Joe saw that they were drilling holes in the rock faces with jackhammers. A long, shrill whistle blew, and the jackhammer men scrambled quickly to the tops of their lines. The men with picks and crowbars scurried away from the base of the cliffs. The deep, hollow, concussive sound of an explosion boomed and blossomed across the canyon, reverberating against its rock walls as plumes of white rock dust shot from the face of the western cliffs, and a shower of rocks and boulders tumbled down onto the piles below.
Joe watched with deep fascination and considerable apprehension. He was not at all sure what he was getting into here. But he was dead set on finding out. On the long, undulating drive across the wheat fields up on the plateau, he had had a lot of time to think about where he was and where he was going.
Where he was, primarily, was flat broke again and more than a little discouraged. Not just about the perpetual problem of finding money but about the whole crew business. The year had taken an emotional toll on him. Demoted and promoted and demoted again, he’d started to think of himself as a kind of yo-yo in the hands of the coaches, or the Fates, he wasn’
t sure which—up one minute, down the next. The sense of purpose crew gave him brought with it the constant danger of failing and thereby losing the precious but fragile pride that his early successes had brought him.
And yet the notion of Olympic gold had begun to work its way into his psyche. A medal would be real and solid. Something nobody could deny or take away. It surprised him how much it had begun to mean to him. He figured maybe it had something to do with Thula. Or with his father. Certainly it had something to do with Joyce. At any rate, he felt more and more that he had to get to Berlin. Getting to Berlin, though, hinged on making the varsity crew. Making the varsity crew hinged first of all on paying for another year of school. And paying for school hinged on strapping on a harness and lowering himself over the edge of a cliff in the morning.
• • •
That same day Al Ulbrickson was licking his wounds again. Before leaving Poughkeepsie, he had agreed to meet Cal, Pennsylvania, Syracuse, Wisconsin, and UCLA in a one-off two-thousand-meter varsity matchup in Long Beach, California.
Two thousand meters was the Olympic distance, and in the wake of Poughkeepsie the national press was again asserting that California’s varsity was now all but certain to represent the United States in Berlin in 1936. Ulbrickson was bent on proving them wrong. He knew full well that a two-thousand-meter race was an entirely different matter from a four-mile slog at Poughkeepsie. It was extraordinarily challenging to put a crew on the water that could prevail at both distances. In theory, a well-coached crew had to do the same basic things at both distances: get off to a good start to build up momentum, back off as much as possible to conserve energy for the finish yet remain within striking distance all the while, then throw everything they had left into a sprint to the finish line. The difference was that in a two-thousand-meter race everything came at you much faster and harder. The amount of momentum acquired at the beginning mattered more, figuring out where to position yourself in the field for the middle was more difficult and more critical, and the final sprint was inevitably much more desperate. Though all distances required enormous amounts of brawn, the two-thousand-meter race required lightning-quick thinking as well. And that’s
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics Page 16