Long Island Sound is the setting for the New York Athletic Club’s Travers Island facility and the nearby Huckleberry Island retreat, where the 1936 U.S. Olympic rowing crew trained and spent time together before sailing for Germany. In the book, the Sound links an elite athletic institution and its private recreation grounds with the final preparations of a crew whose national profile was rapidly rising.

Setting and Facilities

Travers Island lies on Long Island Sound, just south of New Rochelle. The New York Athletic Club completed its facility there in 1888, on thirty acres centered on a large clubhouse. The grounds combined a boathouse and athletic training equipment with a gymnasium, running track, tennis and squash courts, a swimming pool, Turkish baths, a baseball diamond, a bowling alley, a boxing ring, and trap-shooting facilities. A formal dining room, oyster bar, billiards room, barbershop, valet services, and broad lawns made it a country club as well as a venue for Westchester County society events.

The facility’s position on the Sound provided access to excellent rowing water. Its proximity to New York City also placed the Pacific Northwest crew close to the city’s attractions while they were based at Travers Island. The setting thus served two purposes: a place for athletic preparation and a point of contact with a world beyond the small towns and rural landscapes from which many of the rowers came.

The Crew at Huckleberry Island

During the heat wave of July 1936, the Olympic eight spent afternoons at Huckleberry Island, a twelve-acre retreat about a mile from Travers Island, reached by launch. The rowers used its granite coves and the Sound for swimming and relaxation. Their days there offered a contrast to the heat and bustle of Manhattan: the crew could swim, joke, and rest together away from the city.

The island’s scenes reveal different sides of the crew. Chuck Day smoked Lucky Strikes and cracked jokes, while Roger Morris made gruff remarks about Day’s smoking. Gordy Adam quietly sunbathed. Joe Rantz wandered off to examine glacial marks in the granite, and Bobby Moch tried to organize activities, only to be tackled and thrown into the water several times. Their ease together on the island contrasted with their discomfort amid Manhattan’s glamour. After three days, Al Ulbrickson stopped the swimming because he believed exercise other than rowing developed the wrong muscles for rowers.

Training Base and Point of Departure

Travers Island was also the crew’s staging ground before its journey to Germany. On July 13, George Pocock supervised the loading of the sixty-two-foot Husky Clipper onto a truck for the trip through New York City to Pier 60 on the Hudson River. In the days beforehand, Pocock had sanded the hull and applied and buffed successive coats of marine varnish, seeking the fastest racing surface possible for a contest in which fractions of a second could matter.

The Sound’s role in this passage is therefore both practical and transitional. Its waters offered the crew a place to row, while the nearby club and island provided space for training and brief respite. From that base, the carefully prepared shell and its crew moved onward from the Atlantic coast toward the Olympic competition in Berlin.