In Seattle, Joe’s half siblings whooped and hollered and cheered and tumbled about the house, tossing seat cushions and pillows in the air. Harry stood, in the middle of the chaos, applauding. Joyce sat in an easy chair, crying unabashedly, rapturously. Eventually, with tears still streaming down her face, she rose to turn off the radio. She carefully returned the clover to her book, hugged her father-in-law-to-be for the first time ever, and started making sandwiches.
The medal ceremony, Bobby Moch on the podium
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Where is the spiritual value of rowing? . . . The losing of self entirely to the cooperative effort of the crew as a whole.
—George Yeoman Pocock
When they were sure that they had won, the boys rowed slowly past the grandstands to polite applause. Al Ulbrickson and George Pocock scrambled down from their balcony and began to shove their way through the crowds on the lawn in front of Haus West, desperately trying to get to their boys. Royal Brougham bolted for the press room and began to pound out the sports story of his career, pouring his heart into it, searching his soul for language that could begin to do justice to what he had just seen, unaware that the news writers’ guild back in Seattle had just thrown picket lines up around the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s offices. There would be no edition of the Post-Intelligencer in the morning, and his story would never see print. As Leni Riefenstahl’s cameras continued to capture it all, the boys pulled up to the float in front of Haus West. A few Nazi officers watched idly as an Olympic official reached down and shook Bobby Moch’s hand and presented Don Hume with an enormous laurel wreath, so large it looked as if it was designed to be worn by a horse rather than a man. Hume, embarrassed and not quite sure what he was supposed to do with it, lowered the wreath momentarily over his head, smiled sheepishly, and then handed it back to Joe, who did the same and handed it back to Shorty Hunt, and so on, all the way to Roger Morris in the bow. Al Ulbrickson arrived on the float breathless, crouched down by the boat, and found himself characteristically unable to find words. Finally, feigning indifference, he pointed to the wreath and grumbled to Roger Morris, “Where’d you get the hay?” Roger motioned over his shoulder with his thumb and said, “Picked it up downstream.”
The boys climbed out of the shell and stood at attention while a German band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then they shook some hands, hoisted the Husky Clipper onto their shoulders, and carried it back to the shell house, looking for all the world, in their dirty sweatshirts and mismatched shorts, as if they’d just come in from a workout on Lake Washington. A reporter from United Press buttonholed Al Ulbrickson on the way into the shell house and asked him what he thought of his boys. This time Ulbrickson found his voice. They were, he said unambiguously, “the finest I ever saw seated in a shell. And I’ve seen some corking boatloads.”
• • •
Early the next morning, they returned to Grünau, where Leni Riefenstahl’s crew and international newsreel photographers were clamoring to film them. Riefenstahl had already captured good footage of the gold medal race, both from boats and from shore, but she wanted close-ups from the points of view of the victorious coxswain and the stroke. The boys agreed to row with a cameraman sitting first in Hume’s seat, then in Bobby Moch’s seat. The Italian and German crews made similar accommodations for her. The results were spectacular. The eight-oared rowing sequence is still among the most dramatic action scenes in Olympia. Riefenstahl cleverly intercut long shots of the progress of the boats with close-ups of Bobby Moch and the other coxswains barking commands point-blank into the camera. These, in turn, are intercut with close-ups of the stroke oarsmen grimacing with effort as they rock rhythmically back and forth, leaning into the camera and then back away again.
When the filming was over, the boys prepared the Husky Clipper for shipment back to Seattle, put on their Olympic dress uniforms again, and headed to the Reichssportfeld one more time, where they watched the gold medal soccer match between Austria and Italy. After the match, the boys took to the field themselves, to receive their medals. As they lined up next to the German and Italian crews, Olympic officials went down the American line, hanging gold medals around the boys’ necks and placing small laurel wreaths on their heads. Then Bobby Moch, the shortest among them, stepped up onto the highest platform on the podium. One of the boys behind him wisecracked, “You just wanted to win this thing so you could be taller than us for once, didn’t you?” Someone handed Moch a sapling oak tree in a pot. Their names suddenly appeared on the enormous, forty-three-foot-wide announcement board at the eastern end of the stadium. “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play, and the American flag slowly ascended a flagstaff behind the announcement board. As Joe watched the flag rise with his hand over his heart, he was surprised to find that tears had crept into the corners of his eyes. On the podium Moch choked up too. So did Stub McMillin. By the time it was over, they were all fighting back tears, even Al Ulbrickson, the Dour Dane himself.
• • •
That night the boys went out on the town, all except for Joe. At some point they got themselves into some kind of trouble, documented only obscurely in Chuck Day’s journal: “Talked ourselves out of a coupla places . . . cops, etc.” By four thirty that morning, they were stumbling through central Berlin, singing “Bow Down to Washington,” their arms draped over one another’s shoulders. It was ten thirty in the morning before they finally returned to Köpenick, nursing massive hangovers.
At the police academy, they found that Joe had been lying awake there all night. He had spent much of the night simply staring at his gold medal, contemplating it as it hung on the end of his bunk. As much as he had wanted it, and as much as he understood what it would mean to everyone back home and to the rest of the world, during the night he had come to realize that the medal wasn’t the most important thing he would take home from Germany.
Immediately after the race, even as he sat gasping for air in the Husky Clipper while it drifted down the Langer See beyond the finish line, an expansive sense of calm had enveloped him. In the last desperate few hundred meters of the race, in the searing pain and bewildering noise of that final furious sprint, there had come a singular moment when Joe realized with startling clarity that there was nothing more he could do to win the race, beyond what he was already doing. Except for one thing. He could finally abandon all doubt, trust absolutely without reservation that he and the boy in front of him and the boys behind him would all do precisely what they needed to do at precisely the instant they needed to do it. He had known in that instant that there could be no hesitation, no shred of indecision. He had had no choice but to throw himself into each stroke as if he were throwing himself off of a cliff into a void, with unquestioned faith that the others would be there to save him from catching the whole weight of the shell on his blade. And he had done it. Over and over, forty-four times per minute, he had hurled himself blindly into his future, not just believing but knowing that the other boys would be there for him, all of them, moment by precious moment.
In the white-hot emotional furnace of those final meters at Grünau, Joe and the boys had finally forged the prize they had sought all season, the prize Joe had sought nearly all his life.
Now he felt whole. He was ready to go home.
Joe with his young family
EPILOGUE
Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They’re the three things that stay with you your whole life. Without them civilization is out of whack. And that’s why an oarsman, when he goes out in life, he can fight it, he can handle life. That’s what he gets from rowing.
—George Yeoman Pocock
All over Seattle—in cozy restaurants downtown, in smoky neighborhood bars in Wallingford, in clattering coffee shops out in Ballard, in grocery store lines from Everett to Tacoma—people just couldn’t stop talking about it. For the next few weeks, crowds packed into movie theaters to witness for themselves, on new
sreels, what their boys had done in Berlin.
On their way home, the boys stopped in New York, where they rode through the city’s canyons in open-top cars as swirls of paper—ticker tape, pages torn from old phone books, shreds of newspaper—spiraled down from skyscrapers. Joe Rantz, from Sequim, Washington, stood blond, lithe, and grinning, holding high over his head a rowing jersey—on its front, a black eagle and a swastika, and running around the back, a slash of blood red.
By the middle of September, Joe was home, living at the new house on Lake Washington, sleeping in the bedroom his father had built for him right next to his own. Joe delivered the oak sapling that the boys had been awarded in Berlin to the university, and a groundskeeper planted it near the shell house. Then Joe set about trying to make a few dollars before school began.
Don Hume also hurried quickly home, worried, like Joe, about making enough money to stay in school for another year. Stub McMillin visited Mount Vernon, New York, for a few days, where relatives prepared a shoe box full of sandwiches and fruit to tide him over on the long train ride home. Johnny White and Gordy Adam went first to Philadelphia, to visit Johnny’s relatives, then on to Detroit to pick up a new Plymouth Johnny’s father had ordered and drive it home. Shorty Hunt returned in time to be honored in a ceremony at the annual Puyallup Fair in his hometown. Roger Morris, Chuck Day, and Bobby Moch didn’t arrive back in Seattle until early October, after a six-week grand tour of Europe.
George and Frances Pocock and Al and Hazel Ulbrickson stopped in England on the way home. Pocock was able to check up on his father—now much reduced in circumstances and ravaged by old age—for the first time in twenty-three years. At Eton College, Pocock had found two of the men with whom he had worked as a boy—Froggy Windsor and Bosh Barrett—still at work in the old boat shop. The two embraced him heartily and then brought out the first shell that Pocock had ever built—the Norwegian pine and mahogany single in which he had won fifty pounds at Putney twenty-seven years before—still in fine shape and now a favorite of the Eton boys. Pocock promptly took to the Thames in it, proudly sculling back and forth in the shadow of Windsor Castle as Frances recorded the scene on a home movie camera.
By mid-October, everyone was back in Seattle and it was time to turn out for the 1936–37 crew season. Bobby Moch had graduated magna cum laude and signed on as an assistant crew coach under Al Ulbrickson. Everybody else was back in the boat.
• • •
The following spring, on the morning of April 17, 1937, the San Francisco Chronicle featured dueling headlines: “Seabiscuit Goes Today!” and “California Faces Washington Crew Today.” That afternoon, Seabiscuit won the ten-thousand-dollar added Marchbank Handicap race at Tanforan Racetrack in San Bruno by three lengths. Just across the bay, the boys from Washington defeated California on the Oakland Estuary by a commanding five lengths. Seabiscuit was near the beginning of his career; many of the boys were nearing the end of theirs. But not before leaving one more mark on rowing history. On June 22 they rowed again for the national title in Poughkeepsie. The Washington freshmen had already won their race. So had the junior varsity. When the gun went off, the boys stormed down the river, blowing past Navy at the two-mile mark, leaving them and five other crews in their wake, winning by four lengths, setting a new course record, and accomplishing what eastern sportswriters a few hours before had been proclaiming impossible—a second consecutive sweep of the Poughkeepsie Regatta.
After the race, the sagest and most ancient among Al Ulbrickson’s peers, old Jim Ten Eyck of Syracuse, finally said flat out what he’d been thinking about the Washington varsity boat for some time: “It’s the greatest eight I ever saw, and I never expect to see another like it.” Coming from a man who had watched crews come and go since 1861, it was quite a statement.
Poughkeepsie was the last race for Roger Morris, Shorty Hunt, and Joe Rantz. By Royal Brougham’s calculations, done that night on a bar napkin, in four years of college rowing, each of them had rowed approximately 4,344 miles, far enough to take him from Seattle to Japan. Along the way, each had taken roughly 469,000 strokes with his oar, all in preparation for only 28 miles of actual collegiate racing. In those four years, and over the course of those 28 miles, the three of them—Joe, Shorty, and Roger—had never once been defeated.
Royal Brougham watched the boys from a distance as they left their shell house in Poughkeepsie the next day and wrote, “The eight oarsmen quietly shook hands, departed on different paths, and the crew that is hailed as the finest rowing combination of all time passed into history.”
• • •
Within days of the closing ceremony of the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis renewed their persecution of German Jews and others to whom they believed they were superior, with a savage and unrelenting vengeance. The anti-Semitic signs were rehung; the brutality and terror resumed and intensified. In December, Hermann Göring met secretly with a number of German industrialists in Berlin and said privately what he could not yet say in public: “We are already on the threshold of mobilization, and we are already at war. All that is lacking is the actual shooting.”
The larger world knew nothing of this. The illusion surrounding the Olympic Games was complete, the deception masterful. Joseph Goebbels had artfully accomplished what all good propagandists must, convincing the world that their version of reality was reasonable and their opponents’ version biased. In doing that, Goebbels had not only created a compelling vision of the new Germany but also undercut the Nazis’ opponents in the West—whether they were American Jews in New York City or members of Parliament in London or anxious Parisians—making all of them seem shrill, hysterical, and misinformed. As thousands of Americans returned home from the games that fall, many of them felt as one quoted in a German propaganda publication did: “As for this man Hitler. . . . Well I believe we should all like to take him back to America with us and have him organize there just as he has done in Germany.”
Hitler and Goebbels congratulate Leni Riefenstahl at the premiere of Olympia
Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia premiered in Berlin on April 20, 1938, in a lavish extravaganza at the UFA-Palast am Zoo. Hitler and the entire Nazi elite were there, along with ambassadors and envoys from more than forty nations, including the United States and Great Britain. Military leaders and film stars and athletes were there, among the latter, Max Schmeling. The Berlin Philharmonic provided the music. Riefenstahl entered the room to wild applause and was cheered roundly after the screening of the film. Berlin adored it. It would go on to win plaudits around the world as Riefenstahl launched herself into a giddy European tour, followed by an American tour that took her all the way to Hollywood.
The day after the premiere, Joseph Goebbels awarded Riefenstahl a hundred-thousand-reichsmark bonus. That same day Hitler met with General Wilhelm Keitel to discuss preliminary plans for seizing and occupying the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.
• • •
By September 1939, the illusion of a civilized Nazi state had utterly fallen away. Hitler had rolled into Poland, and the most catastrophic war in world history was under way. In the next five years, it would take the lives of between fifty and sixty million people—so many that the exact number would never be known. The war did not reach America until the end of 1941, but when it did it swept up the boys who had rowed in Berlin, as it did the whole nation. All of them would survive the war—some were too tall to serve and many of them had recently earned engineering degrees. Those degrees made them too valuable to the Boeing Airplane Company and other companies essential to the war effort to put them in tanks or foxholes.
Joe graduated from Washington in 1939, after making up two years’ worth of chemistry labs that he had missed during his rowing career. Joyce graduated Phi Beta Kappa the same day as Joe, and they were married at eight o’clock that evening. With his degree in chemical engineering, Joe went to work first for the Union Oil Company in Rodeo, California, and then ret
urned to Seattle to work for Boeing in 1941. At Boeing he soon found himself helping to design elements of the B-17 for the war effort and later worked on the laminar flow “clean room” technology that NASA would use in the space program. With a steady job, Joe bought a house in Lake Forest Park, not far from the finish line of the Washington-California crew races. He and Joyce would live there for the rest of their lives.
Over the years, Joe and Joyce raised five children—Fred, Judy, Jerry, Barb, and Jenny. In all those years, Joyce never forgot what Joe had gone through in his early years, and she never wavered from a vow she had made to herself early in their relationship: come what may, she would make sure he never went through anything like it again, would never again be abandoned, would always have a warm and loving home.
In his later years, after he retired from Boeing, Joe immersed himself in his old passion for working with cedar. He hiked deep into the northwest woods, climbed up steep mountain inclines, and scrambled over jumbles of fallen trees, hauling with him a chainsaw, a peavey, a splitting maul, and assorted iron wedges jammed into his pockets, in search of salvageable wood. When he found what he was looking for, he thrilled as he had as a boy at finding things others had overlooked or left behind, things with essential value. He wrestled the logs down from the mountains and brought them back to his workshop, where he crafted them by hand into shakes and posts and rails and other useful items, and established a small and successful business fulfilling orders for his cedar products. As he moved into his ninth decade, his daughter Judy and occasionally other family members went along with him to lend a hand, and to watch out for him.