National Broadcasting Company

The National Broadcasting Company is the broadcast network through which the book’s rowing competitions reach audiences well beyond the racecourse. Its coast-to-coast coverage and the relay of a commentator’s voice from Berlin make radio part of the contests’ public life: races happen on the water, but they are also followed by listeners gathered around receivers across the country.

Radio and the Growth of Collegiate Rowing

In the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate crew drew a large public following, receiving press attention and attracting crowds on a scale comparable to baseball and college football. Radio extended that attention beyond the spectators who could travel to a regatta. Millions followed the annual racing season, and millions more listened to radio coverage of the Intercollegiate Rowing Association’s storied regatta at Poughkeepsie. The National Broadcasting Company appears within this established media culture, where rowing was already a nationally watched and heard sport.

That audience gave broadcasts significance beyond the reporting of results. The annual contest between the University of Washington and the University of California drew tens of thousands of students, alumni, and citizens in the West, while the center of collegiate rowing’s prestige remained in the East. Radio could carry the sport’s races beyond their local crowds, making athletic achievement available to people who could not stand along the course. In the narrative, the National Broadcasting Company’s coverage belongs to this wider transformation of collegiate crew into a public spectacle.

A Voice at the Racecourse

At Poughkeepsie, as rain fell and spectators struggled to distinguish the boats, Royal Brougham began calling the race while hunched over a National Broadcasting Company microphone. The microphone places the reporter between the physical contest and its distant audience: the crews rowed through difficult conditions, while the broadcast gave listeners a narrated way to follow the unfolding race. The contest was not only a test of speed on the water but also an event being transmitted beyond the riverbank.

The network’s role becomes more explicit during the varsity contest on Lake Washington. At 4:15 p.m., as the two varsity crews paddled toward the starting line, the National Broadcasting Company Red Network went on the air with coast-to-coast prerace coverage. The wind had strengthened, the water was rough, and the oarsmen’s bodies caught the wind like sails, driving the shells ahead of previous course-record pace. The coverage began as anticipation gathered around a race in which both crews might set a record. The broadcast thus brought the race’s setting and stakes to a geographically dispersed audience before the starting signal.

Berlin in American Homes

For the Olympic final in Berlin, radio connected the distant course to listeners preparing for the broadcast in the United States. As race time approached, stores in Seattle rowing and labor-conflict city sold Philco 61F Olympic Special cabinet radios, each equipped with a shortwave tuner and a special aerial kit intended to receive both the standard broadcast on the National Broadcasting Company and shortwave programs in several languages from Berlin. Sales representatives delivered and installed the final sets ordered the previous night.

The radio’s arrival in a household could be more modest than the purpose-built new sets. At Harry Rantz’s nearly finished house on Lake Washington, the family relied on an older Philco that he expected would receive the National Broadcasting Company broadcast through KOMO Radio. He tested it before dawn, then waited with his family as they ate breakfast and tried to steady their nerves. The scene sets household anticipation against the mass market for new receivers: the contest drew people to the radio whether their equipment was new or already owned.

At 9:15 a.m., Bill Slater’s voice began crackling over KOMO Radio’s airwaves in Seattle, relayed from Berlin. Joyce placed a pressed four-leaf clover Joe had given her on top of the radio, pulled up a chair, and began listening. The detail makes the broadcast a point of contact between the distant race and the people emotionally invested in it. Across the United States, millions were also turning their radio dials; the narration places their attention alongside the Olympic stakes already sharpened by Jesse Owens’s performances.

A Shared Event, Not a Printed Story

The National Broadcasting Company’s broadcasts made rowing available through sound to listeners far from the course, while the book repeatedly sets this mediated audience beside the physical spectacle of racing. At Poughkeepsie, Brougham called from the river; for the Olympic final, Slater’s voice crossed the distance from Berlin by way of KOMO Radio. The change of setting did not break the connection: in both cases, a voice carried the competition into homes and to people unable to watch from the shore.

The book also distinguishes radio’s reach from the fortunes of print. After the Washington crew had won in Berlin, Brougham rushed to write the sports story of his career, but a news-writers’ strike had placed picket lines around the Seattle Post-Intelligencer offices, and his story would not appear in the morning edition. Radio and newspapers therefore occupy different positions in the account: the race had already been narrated to distant listeners, while the written report met an immediate barrier to publication.