Joe Rantz woke up feeling great. He made his way up to the promenade deck, where he found a riot of athleticism unfolding. Lithe gymnasts twirled on parallel bars and uneven bars and took long running leaps at pommel horses, trying to time their precise movements to coincide with the slow roll of the ship. Stout weight lifters hoisted enormous hunks of iron over their heads, quivering and swaying slightly beneath their loads. Boxers sparred in a makeshift ring, dancing to keep their feet under them. Fencers lunged. Sprinters jogged by, running slow laps, taking care not to turn an ankle. In the ship’s small saltwater swimming pool, coaches had tied rubber ropes to their swimmers, keeping them in place as they swam, and making sure they didn’t get sloshed onto the deck when particularly large waves rolled the boat. Rifle shots cracked from the stern as decathletes fired their weapons out over the empty ocean.
When the gong sounded for men’s breakfast, Joe went to his assigned table and was disappointed to find that athletes were permitted to order only from a special restricted menu, designed, apparently, to feed canaries or coxswains. He ate everything he could order and tried to order seconds but was denied. He left the room nearly as hungry as he had entered it. He resolved to talk to Ulbrickson about it.
On the boat to Berlin
Meanwhile he had a look around. Belowdecks he found a gymnasium full of exercise apparatus, a children’s playroom, barbershops, a manicure shop, and a beauty salon. He discovered a comfortable lounge in tourist class, complete with a screen for what were then still often called “talking pictures.” All of it seemed pretty swell to Joe. But when he ventured up on the first-class decks he found another world entirely.
The cabins there, paneled in exotic woods, were spacious, with built-in vanities, plush upholstered furniture, Persian rugs, bedside telephones, and private bathrooms with hot and cold freshwater showers. Joe wandered quietly on plush carpeting through a maze of corridors, leading to a full cocktail bar, then a cigar shop, then a writing room, and then a library with oak paneling and heavy beams. He found a smoking lounge with a wood-burning fireplace that stretched the width of the room and murals and carvings meant to suggest that the smoker had entered an Aztec temple. He found the Veranda Café, its walls painted with Venetian scenes and featuring a large elliptical dance floor. He found the Chinese Palm Court, complete with not only live palm trees but high white-plastered rococo ceilings, marble columns, delicate hand-painted Asian wall murals, and Chippendale furniture. He found the first-class dining room, with its own orchestra balcony, cove lighting behind recessed windows to create the illusion of perpetual daylight, and round dining tables, each draped with an elegant tablecloth and carrying its own Louis Seize–style brass lamp, all arranged under a domed ceiling painted with murals of mythological scenes like the feast of the Bacchanalia. And finally he found the Grand Salon, featuring its own theatrical stage and talking-picture screen, with more Persian rugs, formal divans and armchairs, fluted walnut pilasters, hand-carved molding, wide windows hung with velvet curtains, and another high, domed rococo plaster ceiling.
Joe tried to look inconspicuous, or as inconspicuous as a six-foot-three boy could look. He wasn’t, technically speaking, supposed to be wandering around in such places. The athletes were expected to remain in the tourist-class areas, except when exercising on the promenade deck during daylight hours. This was intended to be the province of the sort of people Joe had seen on the golf course at Princeton or on the manicured lawns of estates he had glimpsed up the Hudson. But Joe lingered, mesmerized by his peek at how the other half still lived.
When he returned to his cabin, he found something waiting for him that made him feel pretty classy himself. In New York the boys had been measured for their Olympic outfits, and now Joe found a double-breasted blue serge sports coat and matching blue slacks spread out on his bunk. The coat had the U.S. Olympic shield emblazoned on the breast and bright brass buttons, each with a miniature shield. There was a pair of white flannel slacks; a white straw boater with a blue hatband; a crisp white dress shirt; white socks with red, white, and blue edging; white leather shoes; and a blue-striped necktie. There was a blue sweat suit, with “USA” printed boldly across the chest. And there was a rowing uniform—white shorts and an elegant white jersey with a U.S. Olympic shield on the left breast and red, white, and blue ribbons stitched around the neck and down the front. For a boy who had worn the same rumpled sweater to rowing practice for a year, this was an astonishing collection of sartorial treasure.
The fabric of the jersey was smooth, almost like silk, and it shimmered in the afternoon light streaming in through his porthole when he held it up for a better look. He had never yet been beaten, had never been obliged to surrender a jersey to a rival oarsman. He had no intention of letting this jersey be the first. He was taking this one home.
• • •
Over the next few days, Don Hume and Roger Morris slowly recovered from their seasickness, and the boys began to roam the boat together. They found a rowing machine on deck and tried it out, posing on it for news photographers. Al Ulbrickson posed with them, but when the photographers were done he quickly chased the boys off the apparatus, saying, as he often did, that the only proper way to develop rowing muscles was by rowing in a real shell. As they wandered away, Roger Morris gave him a grin over his shoulder and said, “Heck, if you want us to row in a shell just lower the Clipper over the side and we’ll row the rest of the way over.”
When Ulbrickson wasn’t watching, they ran laps around the deck, worked out in the gym, played shuffleboard and Ping-Pong with other athletes, and got on a first-name basis with a few who already were or would soon be household names, among them Ralph Metcalfe, Jesse Owens, and Glenn Cunningham. Johnny White went prowling for girls and returned unhappy with the prospects. And, except for Don Hume, all of them began to put on weight.
Al Ulbrickson had talked to someone in the galley and someone on the AOC, making the case that a menu suitable for a thirteen-year-old gymnast might not be appropriate for a six-four oarsman, explaining that a boatload of skeletons was not likely to win any medals. The strict menu restrictions had promptly been lifted, and the boys began more or less living in the tourist-class dining salon. Free now to order anything from the menu as often as they wanted, except for sugary desserts or items excessively high in fat, they did just that, eating helping after helping of the main courses, just as they had on the train to Poughkeepsie. They were the first of the athletes to sit down and the last to get up. And no one—with the possible exception of Louis Zamperini, the long-distance runner from Torrance, California—out-ate Joe Rantz. Stub McMillin gave it a try, though. One morning he sneaked into the dining salon ahead of the rest of the crew. He ordered two stacks of hotcakes, slathered them with butter, drowned them with syrup, and was just about to dig in when Al Ulbrickson entered the room. Ulbrickson sat down, cocked an eye at the plate, slid it to his side of the table, and said, “Thanks a million, Jim, for fixing those for me,” and slowly devoured both stacks as McMillin glowered at him over a plate of dry toast.
After dinner each evening, there were more formal entertainments—a variety show, an amateur hour, mock trials and mock weddings, bingo games, checkers and chess tournaments, and a casino night during which the athletes wagered stage money. There were raucous sing-alongs and a captain’s ball, for which everyone was given balloons and noisemakers and party hats. There was a formal debate on the always contentious proposition that “the East is a better place to live than the West.” Talking pictures were shown in the tourist lounge for the athletes and in the Grand Salon for first-class passengers. The Washington boys didn’t think much of the class business, though, and they flouted it. They soon discovered that when five or six big oarsmen sat down in the Grand Salon, and they just happened to be Olympic athletes representing the United States of America, there wasn’t much anybody was going to do about it. So they took to visiting the upper decks for their movie viewing,
stopping each evening on their way into the Grand Salon to swipe one of the large platters of hors d’oeuvres and then passing it around as they watched the show.
• • •
It soon became clear that there were limits beyond which one could not transgress on the Manhattan. Eleanor Holm was twenty-two years old, beautiful, married, and a minor celebrity, having performed bit parts in several Warner Brothers movies. She was somewhat notorious for having sung “I’m an Old Cowhand” in a cabaret while wearing only a white cowboy hat, a white swimsuit, and high heels. She was also a very good swimmer and had won a gold medal at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. Now she was widely favored to win the hundred-meter backstroke in Berlin. On the second day out of New York, a group of journalists invited her up to the first-class decks for what turned out to be an all-night party, during which she drank a good deal of champagne, ate caviar, and entranced many of the writers, among them William Randolph Hearst Jr. By six o’clock the next morning, she was dead drunk and had to be carried back to her cabin in tourist class. When she came to, she was summoned into the presence of Avery Brundage, who read her the riot act and told her he would throw her off the team if she continued drinking. She did. Several nights later she again attended a party held by the hard-drinking news writers. This time the swim team’s chaperone, Ada Sackett, caught her in the act.
In the morning Sackett and the ship’s surgeon awoke a badly hungover Holm in her cabin. The surgeon took one look at her and pronounced her an alcoholic. Dee Boeckmann, coach of the women’s team, then marched a number of Holm’s teammates through the cabin, pointed at the pale, disheveled, and retching Holm, and expounded on the diabolical effects of alcohol. Later that day, Avery Brundage expelled Holm from the U.S. Olympic team.
Holm was devastated, and many of her fellow athletes were outraged. Some felt that Holm had been deliberately set up by the journalists in order to manufacture a story. Others felt that she had been dropped not so much for drinking as for defying Brundage. Although the athlete’s handbook prohibited drinking, Brundage had convened a meeting of the entire U.S. team on the first day out of New York and told them that the matter of “eating, smoking, and drinking” was one of individual judgment. And indeed Brundage later wrote that Holm had been removed partly for “insubordination.” More than two hundred of Holm’s fellow athletes signed a petition asking that she be reinstated. All of them knew that in fact alcohol was widely available and widely used belowdecks. In fact even as Holm and the writers were partying up in first class, Chuck Day and some of his mates were holding their own all-nighters down in tourist class, merrily mixing milk, Ovaltine, and alcohol. But discipline was sacrosanct for Brundage.
The Eleanor Holm story, as at least some of the journalists had calculated, made headlines for days back in the United States, and in the long run it did wonders for her career. In the wake of Prohibition, many Americans were sick and tired of hearing about the dangers of Demon Rum, and the press coverage was largely sympathetic to Holm. Alan Gould of the Associated Press promptly hired her to cover the Berlin Olympics as a reporter, though in fact her pieces would be ghostwritten. Within a few years, she would land roles in major feature films and appear on the cover of Time magazine. The story made headlines in Europe as well, and it caught the eye of Joseph Goebbels, who found himself decidedly in accord with Brundage’s thinking. “It wasn’t herself who mattered. It was the others—and discipline. For that, no sacrifice is too great, no matter how many tears are shed,” proclaimed a statement from the Ministry of Propaganda.
• • •
By the night of July 21, the boys could see the glimmer of lighthouses on the southwest coast of Ireland. At three the next morning, the Manhattan put into the small port of Cobh. From there she proceeded around the Cornish coast to Plymouth and then across the channel to Le Havre, where she arrived early on the morning of July 22. The boys were not allowed off the ship, but they spent much of the day at the railings on deck, watching French longshoremen load and unload cargo. This was the first good look at Europe any of them had ever had, and they were intrigued by simple details—the crumbling old buildings, Frenchwomen on bicycles carrying loaves of bread as long as their arms, boys in jaunty berets, men at work on the docks stopping periodically to drink some wine, in no apparent hurry to complete their tasks.
The U.S. Olympic team arrives in Berlin
That night they sailed up the channel with the lights of Calais blazing brightly to the east. By dinnertime on July 23, they were finally in Germany. At Cuxhaven a motor launch flying Nazi flags pulled alongside the ship to take off German news writers and photographers who had boarded at Le Havre. The Manhattan started up the Elbe River toward Hamburg just at dusk. The boys crowded onto the deck along with everyone else. They were edgy, anxious to get off the boat. Except for Don Hume, who seemed to again be fighting some kind of cold, they had put on five or six pounds each. They were starting to feel flabby, decidedly unathletic. They wanted to stretch their legs and arms and climb into a racing shell. They wanted to get a look at this Nazi state.
What they saw surprised them. Years later nearly all of them remembered the voyage up the Elbe that night as one of the highlights of the trip. The Manhattan’s crew had trained floodlights on the enormous white Olympic flag flying from the after mast, on the American flag on the foremast, and on the ship’s red, white, and blue funnels. As the ship made its way up the river, throngs of Germans rushed to docks and quays along the way to watch her pass. They waved, they shouted bits of broken English, and they cheered. The boys waved back and gave Indian whoops. The big liner passed smaller ships and pleasure craft flying swastikas from their sterns. Almost every boat they passed blinked its lights on and off or sounded its whistle or horn in greeting. They made their way past beer gardens illuminated by bright strings of electric lights, full of people singing gaily, dancing polkas, and hoisting steins of beer in their direction. Up on the sundeck, the first-class passengers drank champagne and sang as well. Everyone was starting to feel pretty good about being in Germany.
• • •
The next morning, in Hamburg, the boys awoke at five and struggled to unload the Husky Clipper from the Manhattan in a hard, driving rain. Dressed in their formal Olympic uniforms, they maneuvered the shell from one deck down to the next, trying to stay clear of lifeboat davits and guylines. George Pocock and Al Ulbrickson looked on anxiously. Eager German longshoremen tried to help, but Pocock chased them off, employing nearly the full extent of his German vocabulary, shouting, “Nein! No thanks! Danke!” afraid the longshoremen would put a hand or foot through the delicate skin of the shell. When they finally got the shell onto the dock, the boys trooped back onto the Manhattan, their serge coats soggy and their straw hats starting to droop, and waited for the formal disembarking.
When they marched back off the ship with the rest of the U.S. Olympic team an hour later, they made their way through a shed full of barrels and shipping crates into a high-ceilinged reception hall where hundreds of cheering Germans and an oompah band playing Sousa marches greeted them. They waved and smiled and climbed aboard buses and were driven through narrow streets to Hamburg’s Rathaus, its old city hall. There the city’s Bürgermeister, a staunch Nazi by the name of Carl Vincent Krogmann, delivered a long welcoming oration in German. Not understanding a word of it, the boys, as Shorty Hunt put it, “just sat and took it.” They perked up, though, when city officials began passing out free cigars, wine, beer, and orange juice.
By noon they were on a train to Berlin. When they arrived in the city’s palatial old Lehrter Station, just north of the Tiergarten, that afternoon, they were stunned by the reception that greeted them. As they clambered down from the train and formed columns with their teammates, another brass band struck up another Sousa march. Avery Brundage and Duke Adolf Friedrich Albrecht Heinrich of Mecklenburg exchanged kisses on the cheeks. Then the American athletes marched down the platform, past a
looming black locomotive with swastikas emblazoned on its sides. They entered another reception area, where thousands of Germans had packed the station to get a glimpse of them. Shorty Hunt was immediately taken aback at the scene: “It made you feel very much like a freak in a sideshow—pointing at you with their mouths open and saying something about zwei meter, meaning, of course, that we were two meters tall—over six feet.” Statuesque young men dressed in white led them through the crowd and onto open-top, mud-colored military buses flying American flags.
The bus procession made its way past the Reichstag building, through the Brandenburg Gate, and then eastward down the flag-draped Unter den Linden. Here tens of thousands of Germans—perhaps as many as a hundred thousand by some estimates—lined the route, cheering and waving Olympic, Nazi, and occasionally American flags, shouting greetings in German and English. With the roof of their bus rolled back, the Washington boys stood waist-high above the top, more or less gaping in astonishment but waving back enthusiastically as they began to absorb just how friendly the Berliners seemed to be. At the redbrick city hall, the Rotes Rathaus, Avery Brundage accepted the keys to the city and made a brief speech. After the long battle over the boycott issue, Brundage was clearly thrilled to be here. Basking in the applause of his German hosts, he exulted: “No nation since ancient Greece has captured the true Olympic spirit as has Germany.”
As Brundage spoke, Joe and his crewmates warily eyed the large number of sober German dignitaries lined up behind him. The boys were exhausted. They’d begun the day at five that morning on the Manhattan. They didn’t really want to hear any more speeches they couldn’t understand. Mercifully, when Brundage stopped speaking the athletes were ushered back outside, where a light rain was falling and the crowds had begun to disperse. Most of the athletes boarded buses heading west to the new Olympic village in Charlottenburg, but the American oarsmen climbed onto two buses bound for the little village of Köpenick southwest of Berlin.