Travers Island was the New York Athletic Club’s expansive sporting estate on Long Island Sound, just south of New Rochelle. In 1936 it offered the Washington Huskies rowing team a place to train before the Berlin Olympics—and a striking threshold between the boys’ small-town Pacific Northwest lives and the elite world surrounding international rowing. Its manicured grounds and country-club amenities made the crew’s arrival a study in contrasts; beneath one of its trees, Bobby Moch also learned a closely guarded truth about his family.

An elite rowing setting

Travers Island belonged to a sport with a large public following and a long-established social hierarchy. Collegiate rowing drew crowds and extensive press coverage, while prestigious eastern institutions helped shape the image of the oarsman as a gentleman athlete. The annual regatta at Poughkeepsie had become a major national sporting event, drawing as many as 125,000 spectators in 1929, with millions more listening by radio.

Western crews had made their way into that eastern arena at a cost. Transporting athletes and delicate racing shells across the country was expensive, and western teams were often met with condescension as well as curiosity. Their successes challenged the assumption that the center of American collegiate rowing belonged only in the East. Against that background, the New York Athletic Club’s island facility was more than convenient water access: it placed the Washington crew inside a conspicuously affluent version of the amateur sporting world.

A base secured in a funding crisis

The crew’s arrival followed an abrupt threat to its Olympic hopes. At Princeton, Henry Penn Burke told Al Ulbrickson that Washington would have to pay its own way to Berlin, or the second-place team, Penn, could take its place. The request was for $5,000 by the end of the week. The Washington rowers were working-class students, and the university had already strained to finance their trip east for the races at Poughkeepsie and Princeton.

Back home, a rapid fundraising campaign gathered contributions from businesses, students, civic groups, and the rowers’ communities. Volunteers sold $1,523 worth of fifty-cent tags on the first day; by the end of the second, a $5,000 certified check had been airmailed to Ulbrickson. Before that money was formally in hand, he returned to Burke and the American Olympic Committee and announced that Washington could pay its way. He then accepted the New York Athletic Club’s invitation to use its training facilities and left Princeton. By July 14, the crew was preparing to sail for Germany aboard the SS Manhattan.

At Travers Island, the rowers were settling in as members of the United States Olympic rowing team. Their performance at Princeton had begun to turn national attention toward them: sportswriters were increasingly considering whether this crew might be among the greatest collegiate crews ever. The island thus served not only as a training stop but as the setting in which a successful college crew entered a larger public identity, even as the cost of sending it abroad had exposed how precarious its resources remained.

Club grounds and the nearby city

The New York Athletic Club’s facility, completed in 1888, covered thirty neatly kept acres centered on a large clubhouse. Its offerings included a formal dining room and oyster bar, a billiards room, a gymnasium, a boathouse and athletic training equipment, as well as trap-shooting grounds, a baseball diamond, a bowling alley, a boxing ring, tennis and squash courts, and a cinder track. Turkish baths, a swimming pool, a barbershop, valet services, and broad lawns completed the amenities. The grounds also hosted Westchester County society events and offered easy access to good rowing water on Long Island Sound.

For boys from Pacific Northwest fields, forests, and small towns, the island was only a few miles from New York City. The heat did not keep them from exploring: they visited Grant’s Tomb, tried unsuccessfully to board the Queen Mary, inspected Columbia University’s campus, toured Rockefeller Center, and walked along Broadway. They also went to Minsky’s Burlesque; Johnny White recorded his judgment of the show in his journal. Their excursions made the island a practical base for training and a gateway to a city whose scale and diversions were new to them.

A revelation beneath a tree

Travers Island’s significance was not confined to the crew’s public preparation. Bobby Moch sat in the shade beneath a tree in an open field and opened a letter from his father, Gaston Moch, listing relatives Bobby hoped to visit in Europe. Inside was a second, sealed envelope instructing him to read it in private. Its contents told him that meeting those relatives would be the first time he learned that he and his family were Jewish.

The revelation changed how Bobby understood his father’s silence. He recognized that Gaston had concealed his heritage not only from neighbors and friends but from his own children, believing that concealment was necessary to make a life in America. The news therefore brought Bobby’s attention to the pain his father had carried, rather than simply introducing him to a label for himself. In the larger story of the crew’s journey toward Germany, the island holds together two very different forms of preparation: the collective training of athletes about to represent their country, and one young man’s private encounter with a family history his father had kept hidden.