Joe Rantz—Roger Morris

Joe Rantz and Roger Morris’s friendship began on the Washington crew and endured long after the team’s racing years. Its clearest measure came late in life: they could spend time together, in person or by phone, saying almost nothing and needing only each other’s company.

Beginnings and a Shared Crew

Roger was the first of Joe’s friends on crew. After the boys went their separate ways following the 1937 Poughkeepsie Regatta, they kept finding their way back to one another. The book describes the former teammates as close for the rest of their lives, bound by shared memories and deep mutual respect; their friendship outlasted the season of competition that had first brought them together.

Their continued closeness belonged to a wider pattern of attachment among the former crew. The men met at least once a year, usually twice, sometimes as the original nine and increasingly with spouses and growing families. They gathered for backyard barbecues and informal potlucks, played badminton and Ping-Pong, threw footballs, and horsed around in swimming pools. The friendship between Joe and Roger thus persisted both within the crew’s collective reunions and in a more particular companionship of their own.

Keeping the Connection

The crew’s anniversaries made its shared past tangible. In 1946, ten years after the Olympic season, the men took the Husky Clipper out on Lake Washington again; in 1956 they rowed together once more. By the 1966 anniversary, Chuck Day had died. At the fortieth-anniversary row in 1976, the eight surviving crewmen gathered at the Conibear Shellhouse, posed with their oars, and climbed into the Husky Clipper. Age had changed their bodies, but the row remained crisp and efficient, a continuing expression of the discipline they had once shared.

Joe and Roger’s friendship also took a quieter form than reunion and ceremony. In their last years, they often got together in person or spoke by phone and did almost nothing: they hardly spoke, but sat quietly together. At Roger’s memorial, Judy Willman recalled this simple habit. The absence of conversation was not presented as distance; it was evidence that the two men did not need words to make their closeness felt.

Endurance and Loss

Joe died in 2007. Roger, described as the first of Joe’s friends on crew and the last man standing, died on July 22, 2009. His death closed the account of a friendship that had persisted through decades of separate lives, annual gatherings, and the gradual loss of their fellow rowers. The relationship’s final image is not a race or a formal tribute, but two old friends sitting together in quiet company.