effect, bellowing out commands with absolute authority. But he was also canny enough to know when to let up on the crew, when to flatter them, when to implore them, when to joke around with them. Slowly he won his new crewmates over.
The bottom line was that Bobby Moch was smart and he knew how to use his smarts. In fact, by the end of the 1936 season he’d have a Phi Beta Kappa key of his own to twirl on his finger, just like Al Ulbrickson.
• • •
In late February, as he sorted through the boys, Ulbrickson began attaching more significance to which boats he labeled number one, number two, and number three. Joe had dropped from the number one to the number two boat. On February 20, rowing hard in a heavy snow and a steady east wind, number two and number one came in about even. Joe’s hopes rose. But a week later Ulbrickson moved him down to the number three boat.
The weather continued to be atrocious. Mostly the boys rowed anyway. Cold, rain, sleet, hail, and snow they simply ignored. But there were days when the wind ripped up the surface of Lake Washington so badly that nobody could row on it without being swamped. Despite the weather, the time trials turned in by the top boats were still good, but they weren’t improving as rapidly as Ulbrickson had been hoping for at this point. He hadn’t yet found a boat that would walk away from the others. And with all the cold-weather rowing interspersed with days when they couldn’t row at all, the boys’ morale began to erode. “Too many gripers,” Ulbrickson scrawled in the logbook on February 29.
One exceptionally stormy afternoon in early March, when the boys were lounging morosely about the shell house, George Pocock tapped Joe on the shoulder and asked him to come up into the loft. He had a few thoughts he wanted to share with him. In the shop Pocock leaned over one side of a new shell and began to apply varnish to its upturned hull. Joe pulled a sawhorse to the other side of the shell and sat down on it, facing the older man.
Pocock began by saying he’d been watching Joe row for a while now, that he was a fine oarsman. He’d noted a few technical faults—that Joe was breaking his arms at the elbows a little too early in the stroke and not catching the water as cleanly as he would if he kept his hands moving at the same speed that the water was moving under the boat. But that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about.
He told Joe that there were times when he seemed to think he was the only fellow in the boat, as if it was up to him to row the boat across the finish line all by himself. When a man rowed like that, he said, he was bound to attack the water rather than to work with it, and worse, he was bound not to let his crew help him row.
He suggested that Joe think of a well-rowed race as a symphony, and himself as just one player in the orchestra. If one fellow in an orchestra was playing out of tune, or playing at a different tempo, the whole piece would naturally be ruined. That’s the way it was with rowing. What mattered more than how hard a man rowed was how well everything he did in the boat harmonized with what the other fellows were doing. And a man couldn’t harmonize with his crewmates unless he opened his heart to them. He had to care about his crew. It wasn’t just the rowing but his crewmates that he had to give himself up to, even if it meant getting his feelings hurt.
Pocock paused and looked up at Joe. “If you don’t like some fellow in the boat, Joe, you have to learn to like him. It has to matter to you whether he wins the race, not just whether you do.”
He told Joe to be careful not to miss his chance. He reminded him that he’d already learned to row past pain, past exhaustion, past the voice that told him it couldn’t be done. That meant he had an opportunity to do things most men would never have a chance to do. And he concluded with a remark that Joe would never forget. “Joe, when you really start trusting those other boys, you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond anything you’ve ever imagined. Sometimes, you will feel as if you have rowed right off the planet and are rowing among the stars.”
• • •
The next day was a Sunday, and as he had every weekend for weeks, Joe took Joyce and drove over to the lot on Lake Washington where his father was building his new house. The basement portion was nearly complete, and with the upstairs portion under way Harry had moved into the basement with his children. It was more like a cave than a house, with one large garage-style door for an entrance and only one small window facing the lake. But Harry had lugged in a woodstove, and it was at least warm and dry inside.
Joe and his father spent the morning hauling lumber from the road down to the construction site in a driving rain, then hoisting it up to the level of what would become the main floor of the house. Joyce entertained the kids inside, playing card games and making fudge and cocoa on the woodstove. She and Joe were worried about all four of them—they were still having a hard time adjusting to the loss of their mother. With Harry working on the house full-time, they weren’t receiving much in the way of attention. They were frequently assaulted by terrifying dreams, Rose and Polly often cried when left alone, and although they had all remained in school, their grades were suffering. Joe had promised each of them a dime for every A they brought home. Now Joyce was trying to think of motherly things she could do with them.
Joe at Harry’s new house on Lake Washington
Playing mother to Thula’s children was easy and natural to Joyce in almost all regards. She saw grief-stricken children in desperate need, and every instinct within her impelled her to sweep them into her arms and nurture them. That’s what she had done from the first time she had seen them after Thula’s death. The resentment and anger she still felt toward Thula she kept locked away deep down inside, safely out of view of the children. What was harder for Joyce, though, was to know what to do and what to feel about Joe’s father. They got along well enough on the surface. Harry treated her pleasantly, even warmly, and she tried to reciprocate. But inside, Joyce still seethed. She could not forget or forgive Harry for his failure to stand behind Joe for all those years, for his weakness, for letting Thula cast Joe aside as if he were nothing more than a stray dog. And the more she brooded on it the more it made her angry.
By late that afternoon, Joe and his father had moved all the lumber into position, and with the rain falling harder than ever, Harry started to retreat into the house. Joe shouted after him, “I’ll be inside soon, Pop,” and walked out onto the dock at Fred’s house next door, looking out over the heaving gray-and-white folds of the lake, pondering the near future.
The finish line for the Pacific Coast Regatta in April was a little less than a mile up the lake from there. Would he be in the varsity boat when it passed this dock? He figured he probably wouldn’t. Gusts of wind buffeted him; rainwater poured down his face. He didn’t care. He stared at the water, pondering what Pocock had imparted the day before, running the boatbuilder’s words over in his mind.
For Joe, who had spent the last six years doggedly making his own way in the world, who had forged his identity on stoic self-reliance, nothing was more frightening than allowing himself to depend on others. People let you down. People leave you behind. Depending on people, trusting them—it’s what gets you hurt. But trust seemed to be at the heart of what Pocock was asking. Harmonize with the other fellows, Pocock said. There was a kind of absolute truth in that, something he needed to come to terms with.
He stood on the dock for a long time, gazing at the lake, oblivious to the rain, thoughts assembling themselves, connecting with other thoughts and drawing together in new ways. Harmony was something he understood as a musician. He and Harry Secor had worked together to stalk the giant chinook salmon of the Dungeness River. He had watched and marveled at Charlie McDonald’s horses, Fritz and Dick, squatting and pulling together, moving enormous cottonwood trees as if they were matchsticks, the animals heaving and pulling in unison, like one creature. Charlie had told him that they would pull until their harnesses broke or their hearts burst. On the cliff face of the Grand Coulee, Joe and the men he had worked with had looked out for each other as they dodged rocks falling
from above. In the evenings and on weekends, he and Johnny White and Chuck Day prowled B Street together, seeking adventure instead of advantage over one another.
Joe turned and peered through a curtain of rain at the house his father was building. Just behind the house, a freight train lumbered past on the railroad tracks that the observation train would follow during the California race. Inside, the kids and Joyce and his father were all under one roof, sitting in front of the fire right now, waiting for him to come in out of the rain. And as he stood in the rain, Joe’s feelings began to shift—moving around like notes on a musical staff, bits and pieces of new themes starting to fall into place.
When he returned to the warm cave his father had constructed, Joe toweled his hair dry, unpacked his banjo, and pulled a chair up in front of the woodstove. He gathered the kids around him. He tuned the banjo carefully, fiddling with knobs and plucking at steel strings. Then he cleared his throat, cracked open a big white smile, and began to sing. One by one, the kids and Joyce and Harry all joined in.
• • •
By March 19, Al Ulbrickson figured he had found his best bet for an Olympic boat. He still had it pegged as the second boat on his chalkboard, but the boys in it were beginning to edge the first boat consistently, and Ulbrickson was quietly putting his final selections into this boat.
At bow he had Roger Morris. At number two, Chuck Day. At number three was one of Tom Bolles’s freshmen from the previous year, Gordy Adam, the dairy-farm kid from up on the Nooksack River near the Canadian border. Gordy had attended a two-room country schoolhouse, then Mount Baker High in the small town of Deming. Then he’d spent five brutal months fishing for salmon on the Bering Sea, up in Alaska, to put together enough money to start at the university. He was a quiet young man. So quiet that in the previous year’s race against California he’d rowed the whole two miles with his thumb cut to the bone and never mentioned it to anyone. In honor of that, Royal Brougham had begun to refer to him now as Gordy “Courage” Adam.
At number four Ulbrickson had lithe, good-looking Johnny White. Big, rangy Stub McMillin was at number five. Shorty Hunt was at number six. At number seven was another of Tom Bolles’s former freshmen, Merton Hatch. At the stroke position was a fourth member of last year’s freshman crew: poker-faced Don Hume.
It was an unusual move to put a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the critical stroke position, but Hume had proven so sensational as a freshman that many were already saying he might turn out to be Washington’s best stroke since Ulbrickson himself had rowed at that position, maybe even better. He hailed from Anacortes, then a gritty lumber and fish-canning port fifty miles north of Seattle. In high school he’d been the consummate all-around athlete—a star in football, basketball, and track—and an honor student. He was also an accomplished pianist, a devotee of Fats Waller, and capable of pulling off anything from swing tunes to Mendelssohn. When he sat down at a piano, he always drew a crowd. After the crash, his father lost his job at a pulp mill and moved to Olympia in search of work. Don stayed behind in Anacortes, lodging with family friends and eventually finding work in a lumber mill.
Walking the cobbled beach on the channel between Anacortes and Guemes Island one day, he came across an abandoned and dilapidated thirteen-foot clinker-built rowboat. He refurbished it, took it down to the water, and discovered that he loved rowing. Loved it, in fact, more than anything he had ever done. For a year following his graduation from high school, he rowed obsessively—up and down the channel on foggy days and on long voyages out among the San Juan Islands on sunny days. When the job at the lumber mill gave out and he decided to join his parents in Olympia, he rowed all the way there—a six-day voyage that covered nearly a hundred miles of water. That fall he moved to Seattle, registered as a geology major at the university, and then made a beeline for the shell house, where Tom Bolles and Al Ulbrickson quickly discovered that they had an extraordinary athlete on their hands.
Hume pulled as smooth as silk, and with the precise, mechanical regularity of a metronome. He seemed to have an innate, deep-seated sense of rhythm. But more than that, his mastery of his oar, his steady reliability, and his rock-solid sureness were so apparent that every other boy in the boat could sense them immediately and thus easily fall into synch with Hume regardless of water conditions or the state of a race. He was key.
In the stern of Ulbrickson’s star boat, wearing the megaphone, was, inevitably, Bobby Moch.
Joe was in the third boat. And it looked as if he’d be staying there. So far he hadn’t even made the presumed JV boat, and so it looked as if he would not be rowing in the Cal race or beyond. But then, on March 21, he walked into the shell house and found his name on the chalkboard, sitting at seat number seven in boat number two, the boat everyone was talking about as the best bet for the varsity slot. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t know if Pocock had talked to Ulbrickson, or if Merton Hatch had simply messed up in some spectacular way, or if Ulbrickson simply needed someone else at number seven for the day. Whatever the reason, this was his chance.
• • •
Joe knew what he had to do, and he found doing it surprisingly easy. From the moment he stepped into the shell that afternoon, he felt at home. He liked these boys. He didn’t know Gordy Adam and Don Hume well, but both made a point of welcoming him aboard. His oldest, most reliable shell house friend, Roger Morris, sitting up front in the bow, gave him a wave and shouted the length of the boat, “Hey, Joe, I see you finally found the right boat!” His buddies from Grand Coulee, Chuck Day and Johnny White, were sitting up near the front too. As he strapped his shoes to the footboard and began to lace his feet into the shoes, Stub McMillin, his face alight, said, “OK, this boat is going to fly now, boys.” Shorty Hunt slapped him on the back and whispered, “Got your back, Joe.”
Joe rowed that day as he had never been able to row before—as Pocock had told him to row, giving himself up to the crew’s effort entirely, rowing as if he were an extension of the man in front of him and the man behind him, following Hume’s stroke flawlessly, transmitting it back to Shorty behind him in one continuous flow of muscle and wood. It felt to Joe like a transformation, as if some kind of magic had come over him. The nearest thing to it he could remember was the night as a freshman when he had found himself out on Lake Union with the lights of Seattle twinkling on the water and the breaths of his crewmates synchronized with his in white plumes in the dark, cold air. Now, as he climbed out of the boat in the twilight, he realized that the transformation wasn’t so much that he was trying to do what Pocock had said as that this was a bunch of boys with whom he could do it. He just trusted them. In the end, it was that simple. Ulbrickson wrote in the logbook, “Changed Rantz and Hatch and it helped a lot.”
That turned out to be an understatement of considerable magnitude. It was the last change Ulbrickson had to make. Over the next few days, the boat began to fly, just as Stub McMillin had said it would.
On March 22 it led all the other boats from start to finish. On March 23 it won by an astonishing seven lengths in one race and a commanding three or four in a second. On the morning of March 27, in a heavy late spring snowstorm, it came in three lengths ahead. That afternoon, rowing a two-thousand-meter sprint, Don Hume took the stroke rate up to a punishing forty, the boys fell in behind him flawlessly, and the boat flashed across the finish line well ahead of the others again. On March 28, with light snow still falling, Ulbrickson officially elevated the boat to varsity status. He wouldn’t announce it to the press for a few more days, but the man had made the decision of his career. This was the crew with which he would attempt to go to the Berlin Olympics.
That afternoon George Pocock personally christened the new shell in which the boys would row in the trials. As Joe and his crewmates held the shell aloft, Pocock poured a jarful of mysterious fluid over its bow and pronounced, “I christen this boat Husky Clipper. May it have success in all the waters it speeds over. Especially in Berlin.” As the boys began to carry t
he boat down the ramp to the water, some of them crinkled their noses, trying to make out the odd scent of the fluid on the bow. Pocock chuckled. “Sauerkraut juice. To get it used to Germany.” He grinned.
On April 4, Ulbrickson held one final three-mile time trial before officially announcing the boatings for the Pacific Coast Regatta. Two miles into the trial, Bobby Moch kicked the beat up to thirty-two and settled in there. The three-mile course record was then 16:33.4, set by the Washington varsity that Joe had watched from the ferry in 1934. Now Joe and his crewmates came in at 16:20, and they did it sitting upright at the end of the race, breathing easy, feeling good. Every time they climbed into the Husky Clipper together, they just seemed to get better.
There was a straightforward reason for what was happening. The boys in the Clipper had been winnowed down by punishing competition, and in the winnowing a kind of common character had issued forth: they were all skilled, they were all tough, they were all fiercely determined, but they were also all good-hearted. Every one of them had come from humble origins or been humbled by the ravages of the hard times in which they had grown up. Each in his own way, they had all learned that nothing could be taken for granted in life, that for all their strength and good looks and youth, forces were at work in the world that were greater than they. The challenges they had faced together had taught them humility—the need to subsume their individual egos for the sake of the boat as a whole—and humility was the common gateway through which they were able now to come together and begin to do what they had not been able to do before.
• • •
But before the Olympic trials at Princeton, Al Ulbrickson faced another daunting series of challenges: First the Pacific Coast Regatta with California on Lake Washington. Win all three races there and, Ulbrickson figured, he might just convince the people of Seattle to again finance sending all three boats to Poughkeepsie for the national championships in June. Then—win or lose in Poughkeepsie—he would take the varsity to Princeton in July. Prevail there and it would mean a trip to Berlin, another qualifying race or two, and finally the gold medal race against the best crews in the world. It was a tall order, but every time Al Ulbrickson watched his new varsity crew take to the water his confidence that he could pull it off grew.
In Berkeley, Ky Ebright was, if anything, probably even more confident than Al Ulbrickson, both about the upcoming regatta in Seattle and about his Olympic prospects. He had almost certainly read about the 16:20 three-mile time trial Ulbrickson’s varsity had turned in, but the news couldn’t have fazed him. His boys had already turned in a stunning three-mile time of 15:34 on the estuary. The shell had been running with the tide, but, still, the difference was nearly a minute. On April 8 he ran another time trial in slack water. His varsity came in at 16:15, still five seconds better than Ulbrickson’s crew. Guarding against complacency, Ebright allowed himself, when his crew reached the dock, only a gruff “You looked good out there for a change.” The fact of the matter, though, was that Ebright had every reason to feel good about how things were shaping up for 1936, and he hadn’t seen anything coming out of Seattle that would change his mind.
He wasn’t taking any chances, though. In fact he was throwing everything he had into starting the Olympic year off right by beating Washington in Seattle. He’d begun the season by writing the names of each of his oarsmen on scraps of paper and throwing them into a hat—the Poughkeepsie champions right along with all the other sophomore, junior, and senior contenders. Then he’d pulled names out one at a time to determine his initial boatings. The point was that none of his boys could rely on past performance to gain a seat in the varsity boat. Each of them would have to earn it all over again.
Things had shaped up nicely since then. The endless California sun had allowed him to work his boys at his own pace, culminating in a series of three-mile pulls on the estuary that had left them well conditioned and in top form. When he’d tried them at the shorter distance, they’d done just as well. Given that, and his shellacking of Washington in both Poughkeepsie and Long Beach the previous summer, he figured he was well positioned to take the longer races at Washington and Poughkeepsie and then move on to dominate the shorter races at the Olympic trials and Berlin.
In the last few weeks, he’d reinstituted a tradition he’d employed before big races since his 1932 Olympic triumph—the varsity training table. Any boy who had worked his way into the top two varsity boats was entitled to sit down with his crewmates for a free diner at Stephens Union on the Berkeley campus. Given the hard times, it gave his boys a powerful incentive to make it into one of those top boats. It also gave Ebright the ability to control the nutritional value of what his boys were tucking into. The training-table fare was hearty—rich in protein and calcium in particular. Most nights that meant a large, juicy steak and as much milk as a boy could drink.
There was no budget for a training table in Seattle. But Al Ulbrickson was just as concerned as Ebright that his boys be well nourished going into racing season. Ulbrickson’s prescription was considerably less enjoyable than a steak. Every afternoon the Washington boys were compelled to choke down first a glass of a chalky-tasting pink calcium solution, then a glass of Knox Sparkling Gelatine. The gelatin sometimes proved tricky, depending on how and when it had been mixed. A fellow had to get it down his gullet quickly before it began to solidify, or he would gag on it. Later that year, after reading an article about Ulbrickson’s nutritional regimen, and contemplating his boys’ success, a horse trainer named Tom Smith would go in search of hay with a high calcium content for a racehorse named Seabiscuit.
• • •
Ky Ebright and his boys arrived in Seattle late on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 14, and checked into the Edmond Meany Hotel. Earlier in the day, Ulbrickson had sent his boys out in water so rough that they had not rowed in its like since the day in 1932 when Cal had defeated Washington by eighteen lengths and Washington had barely made it across the finish line before sinking.
But when the Cal boys showed up at the Montlake Cut on Wednesday morning, the sun was out in full force and the water was glass smooth. As they carried their shells down the ramp to the water, the national champion California boys were an intimidating sight. Seattle reporters marveled at how sun-bronzed they looked when seen side by side with the pallid boys from Washington. And if any of the writers assembled on the ramp that day harbored any doubt that Ky Ebright was taking the Washington threat seriously, those doubts were put to rest directly. Ebright himself promptly strapped on a megaphone, climbed into the coxswain’s seat of his varsity boat, the California Clipper, and began barking commands as he took the boat out for an eight-mile pull far down Lake Washington, well out of sight of the Washington coaching staff.
For the next two days, neither Ulbrickson nor Ebright staged time trials, or if they did, they kept the results to themselves. Both coaches continued to issue the customary gloomy assessments of their boys’ chances. Ebright yawned that his varsity was nothing to write home about—“a good average outfit,” he called them. Ulbrickson summoned up a deeper level of despair, calling the Bears the clear favorites before lamenting, “We have been handicapped this year by inclement weather.” Then he flat out lied: “The boys are not exceptional.”
• • •
Saturday, April 18, was a lovely day on which to watch a crew race, a hard day on which to row one. The skies were flawlessly blue. Temperatures promised to climb into the low seventies by race time. By midmorning, a steady flow of warm air from the south had ruffled the blue surface of Lake Washington. With weather like this, the regatta promised to draw throngs of people to the beaches at the north end of the lake.
Joe had come up with a scheme for profiting from the arrival of these throngs in his father’s new neighborhood. He and Harry had bought a hundred pounds of unshelled peanuts in two burlap sacks. The night before, Joyce, Harry, Rose, Mike, Polly, and Harry Junior had stayed up late, transferring the peanuts to paper sacks, planning to sell them to th
e race fans. Now they had hundreds of sacks ready to go, and as soon as people began to show up, in the early afternoon, Joyce and the kids fanned out along the beaches, hawking peanuts for ten cents a sack.
As in 1934, at 1:00 p.m. a ferry—this year the MV Chippewa—departed the University of Washington’s Oceanographic Dock with a full load of students and the school’s marching band. The Chippewa was elegantly appointed for a ferryboat. Many of her passengers, in fact, said that boarding her felt like boarding a North Atlantic liner, with Philippine mahogany paneling throughout the main cabin, a men’s smoking room, a ladies’ lounge, a full-service galley, red-leather padded seats, and a glassed-in observation room up front. She was often chartered for special moonlight cruises, during which an elaborate loudspeaker system piped live music from the observation room throughout the ship. The Washington marching band now took up a position in the observation room, switched on the microphones, and began to play dance music. As they had two years before, young men in slacks and shirtsleeves and young women in flouncy summer dresses danced out of the cabin and onto the decks.
As the Chippewa headed north, up the lake toward the finish line at Sheridan Beach, a navy cruiser and nearly four hundred other vessels flying purple and gold pennants joined her. By now the wind out of the south had stiffened considerably. Black smoke and white steam pouring from the larger vessels’ stacks streamed briskly northward, and whitecaps began to dance at the north end of the lake, where the wind was piling the water up against the shore.
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics Page 20