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 the 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.
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.
Th
at 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 perhaps 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 th
e 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.