The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

by Daniel James Brown

  At 2:15 p.m. an observation train left University Station and made its way to 125th Street for the start of the two-mile freshman race. By now, the largest crowd ever to witness a crew race in the Northwest had assembled along the racecourse.

  Tom Bolles followed his freshman crew out to the starting line in his launch. Once again he believed he had an outstanding bunch in his shell, but as is always the case for freshman coaches, he had no reliable way to assess his boys’ true capabilities until he saw them racing against a major rival.

  They did not disappoint. When the freshman race went off promptly at 3:00 p.m., it looked as if it would be a close race. Cal leapt out into the lead, but the conditions made for tough rowing. Waves were quartering across the racecourse now, constantly threatening to throw the boats off keel. It was treacherously easy to catch nothing but air between waves or to dig too deeply into a wave and catch a crab. At the quarter-mile mark the number seven man in the Cal boat did just that, and all four oars on the starboard side came almost to a halt while they reset. When they got going again, the number three man caught another crab. In the meantime Washington had quickly grabbed a substantial lead, and then settled down to build on it. When they crossed the finish line four and a half lengths ahead, their official time was recorded as 10:11.2. That would have eclipsed the 11:24.8 course record set by Joe and his freshmen crewmates in 1934 by well more than a minute. Four other, unofficial, timekeepers reported a more reasonable time of 10:42, and the figure was revised. But it was still a new course record by a wide margin, and Tom Bolles remained undefeated on Lake Washington. Before the day was out the East Coast schools, particularly Harvard, would take note of that. Bolles’s days at Washington were numbered.

  The JV race began at 3:45 p.m., and for all intents and purposes it was over a hundred yards down the line. Four of the boys in the Washington boat were veterans of Joe’s all-sophomore crew of the year before: Bud Schacht, George Lund, Delos Schoch, and Chuck Hartman. These were boys who knew how to row in rough water, and how to win. They took the lead easily at the start, widened it at each quarter-mile buoy, and crossed the line almost six lengths ahead of California. Their time, 16:14.2, beat the record set by Cal by almost a full minute.

  On the dock at Fred Rantz’s house, Harry and his kids and Joyce sat eating peanuts and tossing the shells into the lake. The sales that morning had been disappointing. They were going to be eating peanuts for a long while. Harry peered down the lake toward Sand Point with a pair of binoculars. The Philco radio in the house—a luxury he had bought secondhand for the occasion—was turned all the way up so they would be able to hear the NBC broadcast of the varsity race on KOMO when it began.

  Joyce dangled her legs over the edge of the dock. At the north end of the lake, a silver airplane circled the area of the finish line. She peered down into the water, past the floating peanut shells. She felt unsettled.

  Early that morning she had cut Joe’s hair as he sat perched on a chair in his little room at the YMCA, a towel fastened around his neck with a clothespin. It was a ritual Joyce performed once a month, and she always looked forward to it. It offered her a chance to be close to Joe, to chat with him privately, away from the eyes and ears of others, and it always seemed to please Joe, to relax him.

  That morning, though, as she worked methodically, combing his blond hair up, measuring it carefully by eye, using the comb as a cutting guide and snipping the hair at just the right length to create the crew cut he favored, Joe had been fidgety in the chair. Finally she asked him what was wrong. He’d hesitated, struggling for words, but as she remembered later, the gist of it was that there was something about this race, this boat, that was different. He couldn’t really explain it; he just knew he didn’t want to let this bunch of boys down.

  • • •

  At 4:15 p.m., as the two varsity crews paddled out to the starting line, the NBC Red Network went on the air with coast-to-coast prerace coverage. The tailwind had stiffened further, slicing up the length of the lake now, piling more rough water into heaps of whitecaps at the north end. So far all four boats on the course that day had come in well ahead of the previous course records, even the losing boats. The long, upright bodies of the oarsmen were catching the wind, acting essentially as sails, hurrying the shells down the course. It was clear now that, absent an unforeseen disaster, somebody was about to set a new varsity record as well.

  At the start line, the Husky Clipper bobbed in the swells. Roger Morris and Gordy Adam, up front, struggled to keep the bow of the boat pointed due north under the relentless push of the quartering waves. Bobby Moch raised his hand to indicate his crew was ready to row. Over in the Cal boat, coxswain Tommy Maxwell did the same.

  In the coaching launches idling in the water behind the shells, Al Ulbrickson and Ky Ebright were decidedly nervous. The fact was that neither of them knew quite what they were facing in the other boat. Both coaches had excellent crews and knew it; neither was quite sure about the other man’s crew. The boys in the California boat weighed a total of 1,557 pounds; the boys in the Washington boat weighed 1,561, just four pounds heavier. Both boats had savvy coxswains and powerful, experienced oarsmen. Both boats were state-of-the-art shells—Pocock’s latest and greatest, sleek splinters of cedar, the Husky Clipper and the California Clipper. Both boats were sixty-two feet long and, within a pound or two, weighed the same. Both featured sleek cedar skins, five-thirty-seconds of an inch thick. Both had elegant yellow cedar washboards, ash frames, Sitka-spruce gunnels, fore and after decking made of silk impregnated with varnish. Most important, both featured Pocock’s trademark camber, the slight curvature that gave them compression, spring, and liveliness in the water. It was hard to see a clear advantage. It would simply come down to watermanship, and guts.

  • • •

  When the starter shouted, “Row!” both boats bolted off the line like nervous racehorses held too long in the starting gate. Both crews started off rowing hard and high, at thirty-five or thirty-six. In the Cal boat, the big stroke, Gene Berkenkamp, who had mowed Washington down in Poughkeepsie and Long Beach the year before, quickly powered his crew to a short lead. For three-quarters of a mile, the two crews rowed in lockstep, both furiously hacking at the choppy water. In the Washington boat, Don Hume was matching Berkenkamp’s stroke rate but making no progress in pulling even with him.

  Then Bobby Moch began to make use of those three pounds of brains. He did what was counterintuitive but smart—what was manifestly hard to do but he knew was the right thing to do. With his opponent out in front of him, rowing in the midthirties and maintaining a lead, he told Hume to lower the stroke count. Hume dropped it to twenty-nine.

  Almost immediately the boys in the Washington boat found their swing. Don Hume set the model, taking huge, smooth, deep pulls. Joe and the rest of the boys fell in behind him. Very slowly, seat by seat, the Husky Clipper began to regain water on the California Clipper. By the one-mile mark, the two boats were even and Washington was starting to edge out ahead.

  In the Cal boat, Tommy Maxwell, shocked, glanced over at Washington and immediately called out, “Give me ten big ones!” Bobby Moch heard him, glanced back at him, but refused to take the bait. Gene Berkenkamp and the rest of the Cal boys leaned into their oars and took the prescribed ten extra-hard pulls. Bobby Moch hunched down in the stern, looked Don Hume in the eyes, and growled at him to keep it steady at twenty-nine. When Cal had finished their big ten, they had not appreciably narrowed Washington’s small lead.

  With the wind in their faces, both crews were fairly flying down the course now, with spray breaking over the bow of their shells as they skipped from wave to wave, the blades of their oars slicing in and out of the chop. Cal had dropped its rate to thirty-two and then thirty-one after the big ten, but at twenty-nine the Washington boat continued to inch ahead. Tommy Maxwell called for another big ten. Again Moch held his fire and let the challenge go unanswered, and again Washington held her position, the Husky Clipper’s bow pe
rhaps eight feet ahead of Cal’s bow now.

  In Washington’s number seven seat, a realization flickered through Joe’s awareness—the boat was drawing abreast of his father’s house on the west side of the lake. He was tempted to sneak a peek over his shoulder, to see if he could catch a glimpse of Joyce. But he didn’t. He kept his mind in the boat.

  The observation train was, at that moment, just rumbling behind Harry Rantz’s house, the smoke from its diesel engines streaming out ahead of it in the brisk wind. Next door, on Fred’s dock, Joyce and the kids were on their feet, jumping up and down and waving as they saw the nose of Joe’s boat out ahead. Harry stood beside them, his old binoculars locked on the boat, a grin on his weathered face.

  Coming up to the two-mile buoy, the California shell rolled slightly off keel; a moment later it happened again. Twice a pair of boys on the starboard side failed to make clean releases from the water, and each time it happened it broke their rhythm and slowed them down. Washington moved out to a three-quarter-length lead. Tommy Maxwell, in trouble now, called on his boys to give him more. Berkenkamp took the rate back up to thirty-five, then thirty-six. Bobby Moch continued to ignore him.

  Finally, with a half mile to go, Moch bellowed at Hume to pick it up. Hume took the crew up to thirty-two, as high as he dared to go in the choppy water, and as high as he needed to go. The Husky Clipper surged forward, as George Varnell reported in the Seattle Times the next day, “like a thing alive.” The boys now had open water between them and the California Clipper, and in the last half mile they accelerated in a way that no shell had ever accelerated on Lake Washington. As they flew down the last few hundred yards, their eight taut bodies rocked back and forth like pendulums, in perfect synchronicity. Their white blades flashed above the water like the wings of seabirds flying in formation. With every perfectly executed stroke, the expanse between them and the now exhausted Cal boys widened. In airplanes circling overhead, press photographers struggled to keep both boats in the frame of a single shot. Hundreds of boat whistles shrieked. The locomotive on the observation train wailed. Students on the Chippewa screamed. And a long, sustained roar went up from the tens of thousands standing along Sheridan Beach as the Husky Clipper crossed the line three lengths ahead of the California Clipper.

  The California crew valiantly rowed on as hard as they could nevertheless. Once again both boats beat the previous course record, but Washington beat it by a good deal more, coming in at 15:56.4, a commanding 37 seconds ahead of the mark.

  Al Ulbrickson sat quietly in the launch at the finish line, listening to the band on the Chippewa play “Bow Down to Washington.” Watching his boys paddle over to the Cal boat to collect their jerseys, he had much to take stock of. His varsity had beaten a very good California crew, the defending national champions, and they had done it in difficult circumstances. They had rowed, as he would himself remark to reporters later that afternoon, “better than they had ever rowed.” It was clear that they were, in fact, something far out of the ordinary, but it was too early to say whether the magic would hold. Two years running now, his varsity had beaten Ebright’s in the Pacific Coast Regatta only to turn around and lose in Poughkeepsie. Who was to say that this bunch wouldn’t do the same? And this year the Olympic trials loomed just beyond Poughkeepsie, not to mention what lay beyond that.

  Ulbrickson remained steadfastly and resolutely dour. The Sunday papers in Seattle the next morning, though, were full of excited talk of Berlin. Many who had watched events on the lake closely thought they had seen something beyond merely a good crew race. Clarence Dirks, writing for the Seattle Times, mixing his metaphors with abandon, was the first to put his finger on it: “It would be useless to try to segregate outstanding members of Washington’s varsity shell, just as it would be impossible to try to pick a certain note in a beautifully composed song. All were merged into one smoothly working machine; they were, in fact, a poem of motion, a symphony of swinging blades.”

  Poughkeepsie at night

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  To be of championship caliber, a crew must have total confidence in each other, able to drive with abandon, confident that no man will get the full weight of the pull. . . . The 1936 crew, with Hume at stroke, rowed with abandon, beautifully timed. Having complete confidence in one another they would bound on the stroke with one powerful cut; then ghost forward to the next stroke with the boat running true and hardly a perceptible slowdown. They were a classic example of eight-oar rowing at its very best.

  —George Yeoman Pocock

  Two days later, on April 20, Adolf Hitler turned forty-seven. In Berlin thousands of celebrants gathered to watch and to cheer as Hitler reviewed a procession of more than fifteen hundred tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces rumbling through the city’s massive park, the Tiergarten. The crowds along Charlottenburger Chaussee were so thick that people in the back rows had to use rented periscopes to see what was happening up front. Joseph Goebbels’s little girls, wearing long white dresses and white headbands, presented Hitler with a bouquet of flowers. The Reich League of German Officials gave Hitler a copy of Mein Kampf that had been transcribed by hand onto parchment in a medieval script. With its iron bindings, the tome weighed seventy-five pounds.

  But a month earlier, Hitler had already received an even greater gift, and it had been given him by those who would soon become his mortal foes. On the morning of March 7, thirty thousand German troops had rolled into the demilitarized Rhineland, in open defiance of both the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact to which Germany was a signatory. It was by far the most brazen thing Hitler had yet attempted, his biggest gamble, and a major step toward the catastrophe that was soon to envelop the world. For the next two days, Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of the Nazi leadership waited anxiously for the world to react. They knew that Germany did not yet have sufficient military strength to survive a war with either France or Britain, let alone the two of them combined. The next forty-eight hours, Hitler later confessed, were the tensest of his life.

  He needn’t have worried. In England, foreign secretary Anthony Eden said he “deeply regretted” the news, and then set about pressuring the French not to overreact. They didn’t. They did nothing at all. A relieved Joseph Goebbels sat down and wrote, “The Fuehrer is immensely happy . . . England remains passive. France won’t act alone. Italy is disappointed and America is uninterested.”

  Hitler now understood with absolute clarity the feeble resolve of the powers to his west. However, the reoccupation of the Rhineland had not come without some cost. Though there had been no military reaction, there had been a public relations uproar in many foreign capitals. Increasing numbers of people in Europe and the United States were beginning to talk again about Germany, as they had during the First World War, when it had generally been seen as a nation of “Huns,” of lawless barbarians. Hitler knew it would be much easier for the West to mobilize against a nation of barbarians than a civilized nation. He needed a PR win—not at home, where the reoccupation of the Rhineland had been immensely popular—but in London and Paris and New York.

  The Nazi leadership was now convinced that the upcoming Olympic Games, in August, would provide the perfect opportunity for a masquerade. Germany would present herself to the world as an unusually clean, efficient, modern, technologically savvy, cultured, vigorous, reasonable, and hospitable nation. From street sweepers to hoteliers to government clerks, thousands of Germans now went ardently to work to make sure that, come August, the world would see Germany’s best face.

  In the Ministry of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels set about constructing an alternate reality in the German press, temporarily sanitizing it of anti-Semitic references, spinning out elaborate fictions about Germany’s peaceful intentions, promoting Germany in glowing terms as welcoming to all the peoples of the world. In plush new offices at the Geyer printing labs in southern Berlin, Leni Riefenstahl began putting to work the 2.8 million reichsmarks the Nazi government had secretly funneled to her throu
gh the Ministry of Propaganda for the purpose of producing her film about the upcoming games: Olympia. The secrecy, dating back to the previous October, was designed to conceal from the International Olympic Committee the political and ideological source of the film’s funding. Indeed for the rest of her life Riefenstahl would continue to insist that the film was merely an artistic sports documentary. But in fact, from its genesis Olympia was a political and ideological production.

  By deliberately conflating wholesome images of grace and beauty and youthful vigor with the iconography and ideology of the Nazis, Riefenstahl would cunningly portray the new German state as something ideal—the perfect end product of a highly refined civilization descended directly from the ancient Greeks. The film would not just reflect but in many ways define the still nascent but increasingly twisted Nazi mythos.

  • • •

  Following the sweep of California on Lake Washington, Al Ulbrickson gave the varsity boys two weeks off to attend to their coursework and get their personal affairs in order before beginning the final push for Berlin. Once they left for Poughkeepsie, Ulbrickson reminded them, they might not—if all went well—be returning to Seattle until September. There was much to do.

  When they returned to the shell house on May 4, he set them to low-stroke work, still trying to smooth out the last few technical glitches. They rowed raggedly for the first few days back on the water, until they found their swing again. But find it they did, and they promptly began to power past the other shells on the lake. But on May 18, the shadow of academic disaster fell over the crew. Ulbrickson learned that despite the break, four of his varsity boys still had incompletes and were just days away from being declared ineligible. He was furious. Back in January he had warned the boys, “We can’t tarry with scholastic laggards . . . any who fall behind are just out, that’s all.” Now he dragged Chuck Day, Stub McMillin, Don Hume, and Shorty Hunt into his office, slammed the door shut, and gave them hell. “You can be the best individual oarsmen in the country, but you will be of no service or use to this squad unless you whip up your class efforts. . . . That means study!” Ulbrickson was still fuming as the boys trooped out of the office. Everything was suddenly at risk. The worst of it was that while most of them just had to turn in some overdue work, Don Hume had to flat out ace a final examination to remain eligible. If there was one boy Ulbrickson couldn’t afford to lose, it was Don Hume.

  The boys, though, were having the times of their lives. On or off the water, they were almost always together now. They ate together, studied together, and played together. Most of them had joined the Varsity Boat Club and lived in the club’s rented house on Seventeenth Avenue, a block north of the campus, though Joe remained in the basement of the YMCA. On weekend evenings they gathered around the old upright piano in the club’s parlor and sang for hours as Don Hume tore through jazz tunes, show tunes, blues, and ragtime. Sometimes Roger Morris pulled out his saxophone and joined in. Sometimes Johnny White got out his violin and played along fiddle-style. And almost always Joe got out his banjo or his guitar and joined in as well. Nobody laughed at him anymore; nobody dreamed of laughing at him.

  Don Hume aced his exam. The others finished their incompletes. And by the end of May, the boys were again turning in phenomenal times on the water. On June 6, Ulbrickson took the varsity and JV out for one final four-mile trial. He told Bobby Moch to hold the varsity back behind the JV for the first two miles. But as they moved down the lake, even rowing at a leisurely twenty-six, the varsity could not manage to stay behind their very good counterparts in the JV boat. They kept edging out in front simply on the power of their long, slow strokes. When Moch finally turned them loose in the final mile, they exploded into a seven-length lead, and they were still pulling away as they crossed the finish line.

  That was all Al Ulbrickson needed to see. Training was essentially over until they got onto the Hudson. He told the boys to start packing their things and to pack as if they were going to Berlin.

  That same evening, in Berkeley, Ky Ebright and the California boys climbed aboard an eastbound train, heading for Poughkeepsie. Ebright was radiating pessimism. Asked if he had been brushing up on his German, Ebright shot back, “I don’t expect to have to have any knowledge of the language.” When he was reminded that he had been just as sour about his prospects before both the 1928 and 1932 Olympics, he replied curtly, “This time it’s different.” But once again the doom and gloom was mostly pro forma. Ebright had made some lineup changes since his boys’ loss on Lake Washington, and the new outfit had turned in outstanding time trials on the estuary. He knew his loss in the three-mile race on Lake Washington didn’t necessarily tell him anything about the four-mile race on the Hudson, not any more than it had last year. At the very least, Ebright must have believed his boys would be in the thick of things in Poughkeepsie. Washington would likely fade at the end, as they had the year before. And even if Washington somehow prevailed, the Olympic trials to follow in Princeton would reset the stage. Washington had yet to show they could win a two-thousand-meter sprint. With any luck, Ebright would be coming home by way of Berlin with both a national title and a third consecutive gold medal. So said the Bay Area press, so said much of the national press, and, one has to believe, so thought Ky Ebright.

  • • •

  Four days later, at eight o’clock on the evening of June 10, with red lights flashing and sirens wailing, a police escort led a convoy of cars carrying the Washington crews and coaches down Greek Row, past cheering students, then through downtown Seattle, en route to Union Station. The boys were flying high, and so were the coaches. As instructed, they had prepared for the trip with the assumption that they would not be returning until September. Some of them had even begun to make plans to tour Europe after the Olympics—a heady proposition for boys from Seattle—though none of them was quite sure what he was going to do for money if that happened. Johnny White had a grand total of fourteen dollars in his pocket. George Pocock had written to his father, Aaron, saying that he might be stopping by to pay him a visit in London. Bobby Moch had asked his father for the addresses of his relatives in Switzerland and Alsace-Lorraine, so he could visit them. His father, Gaston, had hesitated, looking suddenly stricken for reasons Bobby could not fathom, but finally said he would send him the addresses later, if the crew really went to Europe.

  At the station, as they had in previous years, the marching band played fight songs, cheerleaders danced, the coaches made brief speeches, flashbulbs popped, and newsreel cameras whirred as the boys climbed onto the train. This year the station was packed, not just with students and newsmen, but also with parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, next-door neighbors, and utter strangers. Maybe the city was finally about to be put on the map. If so, everyone wanted to bear witness to the coronation. As Royal Brougham climbed onto the train, he noted that he had never seen a crew leave town “with as much cheerful determination and optimism. These lads feel it in their bones. . . . They’re practically shaking hands with Hitler right now.”

  But Brougham was worried. He had seen all this before, and he had seen the sad consequences of dashed hopes in Seattle the previous year. He sat down at a typewriter in his coach and pounded out the concluding lines for his morning column. Don’t forget, he warned his readers, about “the haunting specter of that last mile.” For now, he left unstated his even deeper concern about the two-thousand-meter sprint at the Olympic trials.

  As the train coughed, lurched, and began to pull away, boys hanging from the windows shouted farewells: “Good-bye, Mom!” “I’ll write from Berlin.” Joe hung out a window as well, searching. Then, in a far corner, he found her. Joyce was standing with his father and the kids, jumping up and down, holding high over her head a sign on which she had painted a large, green four-leaf clover.

  • • •

  As the train rolled eastward, the boys kicked back, feeling free and easy. The weather was warm but not stifling, and they lolled in their berths fo
r as long as they wanted, played blackjack and poker, and revived their old tradition of lobbing water balloons at random cows and sleeping dogs along the way. The first morning out, Al Ulbrickson gave them happy news. He announced that he wanted each of them to put on three or four pounds before they reached Poughkeepsie. The dining car was all theirs—no restrictions. The boys all but stampeded forward. Joe could hardly believe it. He ordered a steak, then another, this time with a side of ice cream.

  As the boys ate, Al Ulbrickson, Tom Bolles, and George Pocock convened a strategy session in their coach. They were well aware of what Ky Ebright was thinking, what Royal Brougham was fretting about, and what many in the eastern press were saying: Washington would come up short again in the last few hundred feet of the four-mile varsity race. Whatever else happened, they were determined that they would not lose the race in that way this year. So they came up with a race plan. Ulbrickson had always liked to come from behind, to save something for the end of the race, but in the past he’d always tried to get a strong start, stay close to the leaders throughout, and then defeat them with a killing sprint at the end. The new plan stuck close to that basic strategy, but with a twist. They would leave the starting line with just enough of a surge to get some momentum behind the boat but then drop immediately to a low stroke rate of twenty-eight or twenty-nine. What’s more, they’d keep it low no matter what the other boats were doing, so long as they stayed within roughly two lengths of the field. Ideally, they would stay low for a full mile and a half, then take it up to thirty-one until they got to the two-mile mark. At two miles Bobby Moch would tell Don Hume to gun it and start taking down the leaders, who would by now be starting to tire. The deliberately slow start was risky. It meant they’d likely