New York Athletic Club

The New York Athletic Club is presented as a powerful athletic institution whose role in the Washington crew’s 1936 Olympic campaign was twofold: its Winged Footers raced against Washington for a place on the Olympic team, and its Long Island facilities later gave the Washington rowers a base for training before their journey to Berlin. In the book’s account, the club is at once a rival on the water and a provider of the space, equipment, and rowing access that helped make the Olympic campaign possible.

Facilities and Institutional Setting

The club’s retreat at Travers Island, just south of New Rochelle on Long Island Sound, occupied thirty manicured acres centered on a large clubhouse. Completed in 1888, the facility offered a formal dining room and oyster bar, billiards room, gymnasium, boathouse, and extensive athletic amenities, including a baseball diamond, bowling alley, boxing ring, tennis and squash courts, a running track, Turkish baths, and a swimming pool. Barbershop and valet services sat alongside the sports facilities, and the grounds also served as a venue for Westchester County society events. For rowers, the site’s practical advantage was easy access to excellent water on the Sound; for visitors from the fields, forests, and small towns of the Pacific Northwest, it also lay only a few miles from New York City.

That combination of sporting resources and social prestige placed the club within a wider world of American amateur rowing. The sport drew large crowds and national press attention, but its established centers of influence lay in the East, among elite universities and private clubs. Western programs had fewer resources, faced expensive journeys east, and encountered condescension as well as curiosity. The New York Athletic Club belonged to the institutional landscape Washington had to navigate, where access to equipment, training water, and competition could shape the opportunities available to a crew as surely as its performance could.

The Winged Footers and the Olympic Trials

The New York Athletic Club entered the 1936 Olympic rowing trials with a crew known as the Winged Footers. Six crews competed for the right to represent the United States in Berlin: Washington, California, Pennsylvania, Navy, Princeton, and the New York Athletic Club. The trials used preliminary heats on July 4, followed by a final among the top two crews from each heat the next day. Washington’s preliminary opponents were Princeton and the Winged Footers; the account describes neither as a genuine threat to Washington’s place in the final.

Washington opened its heat at a stroke rate of thirty-eight, then lowered the rate to thirty-four and thirty-two while continuing to extend its lead. The Winged Footers rowed at thirty-five and, near the finish, surged past Princeton to challenge Washington. At that point Bobby Moch had Don Hume raise Washington’s rate back to thirty-eight. The Husky Clipper accelerated away and crossed the line two and a half lengths ahead of the New York Athletic Club crew. Washington’s rowers had won with little apparent strain, but the margin did not erase the broader uncertainty surrounding the trials: California’s powerful sprinting performance in its own heat suggested that the decisive contest still lay ahead.

A Training Base on Long Island Sound

After Washington qualified, the New York Athletic Club invited the crew to use its training facilities at Travers Island. The invitation gave the rowers access to the club’s boathouse and to the Sound’s rowing water while they prepared for the crossing to Europe. For young men from working-class backgrounds, the setting was strikingly different from the resources and amenities available at an elite athletic retreat. The account emphasizes the contrast without suggesting that the club’s facilities changed who the rowers were or the work they had already done to reach the trials.

During a coast-to-coast heat wave, the crew also made afternoon trips to Huckleberry Island, a twelve-acre retreat a mile offshore from Travers Island. The boys swam, leapt from granite ledges, and lounged on flat slabs of rock. Joe Rantz wandered off to examine glacial striations in the granite, while Bobby Moch tried to organize activities and was repeatedly tackled and thrown into the water. The island gave the rowers a brief, informal respite before Al Ulbrickson stopped the swimming, believing that exercise apart from rowing developed the wrong muscles. The club’s Long Island setting thus served both as a practical training base and as the backdrop to a temporary release from the discipline of preparation.

Preparing the Shell for Berlin

On July 13, George Pocock supervised the loading of the sixty-two-foot Husky Clipper for the Washington crew’s departure aboard the SS Manhattan. The boat was taken by truck, under police escort, through New York City to Pier 60 on the Hudson River. At Travers Island, Pocock had carefully sanded the hull and applied successive coats of marine varnish, buffing the surface to produce the fastest bottom he could. The finish was not merely ornamental: Pocock expected fractions of a second to matter in Berlin.

The club’s contribution to the campaign therefore extended beyond hosting a competing crew. Its facilities made a period of East Coast training possible, and its location placed the Washington rowers within reach of the water, equipment, and transport arrangements needed before the voyage. The sequence also captures the unequal material circumstances of amateur rowing: a well-appointed private athletic retreat could support a crew preparing for international competition, while the Washington rowers themselves had arrived from a university and communities that had struggled to raise the money for their journey east.