Seattle rowing and labor-conflict city comes into focus as a place seeking recognition beyond the Pacific Coast. The Washington crew’s ascent gives Seattle both a public stage and a rare common cause: victories that had once seemed remote become a source of local pride, sustained by newspapers, radio, civic organizers, and neighbors who help send the rowers toward the 1936 Olympics.

A city looking for recognition

When Royal Brougham arrived at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1910, the University of Washington crew was still a small, rough-edged program: its boys rowed Lake Washington in leaky shells under the direction of Hiram Conibear, whose methods struck outsiders as eccentric. The program improved, but its standing remained largely regional. Brougham, a tenacious reporter and a gifted promoter of the city, saw rowing as a way to make Seattle appear more sophisticated and to attract notice well beyond the West Coast.

The opportunity mattered because collegiate rowing commanded a much larger public following than its later reputation might suggest. In the 1920s and 1930s, it competed with baseball and college football for press attention and crowds. Eastern schools, shaped by the model of Eton College, treated rowing as a gentleman’s sport and sent oarsmen to institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Millions followed crews through training and racing seasons; even a coxswain’s sore throat could become news, and devoted fans collected crew trading cards.

Western interest grew around the long-running rivalry between the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Washington. Their annual April regattas drew tens of thousands of students, alumni, and local residents, and California crews had twice won Olympic gold. Yet western programs had little recruitment money, few wealthy patrons, and coaches paid far less than their eastern counterparts. The center of collegiate rowing still lay among eastern universities and the United States Naval Academy. Brougham hoped that it might move west to Seattle, while recognizing that California could claim that distinction instead.

A difficult path into the national sporting story

The Intercollegiate Rowing Association regatta at Poughkeepsie had a history reaching back to the earliest spectacles of American rowing. Eastern colleges dominated for much of the early twentieth century. Stanford’s first appearance in 1912 ended in sixth place; Washington’s first eastern campaign, under Conibear in 1913, produced a surprising third. Western crews returned only occasionally over the following decade. Transporting rowers and delicate racing shells across the country was expensive, and the western visitors encountered curiosity mixed with condescension from eastern spectators and reporters accustomed to seeing the sons of political and industrial elites.

Washington’s 1923 victory at Poughkeepsie began to alter that perception. In a close finish against Navy, coxswain Don Grant raised a red flag cut from a Cornell banner to signal the final push. Stroke oar Dow Walling, despite a leg swollen by three enormous boils, lifted the rate and helped secure the West’s first Intercollegiate Rowing Association victory. The astonished reporters’ questions—where Seattle was, whether the boys were lumberjacks—made plain how unfamiliar the city remained to the eastern audience. The crew answered with grins and miniature totem poles, turning the assumptions surrounding their western origins into part of their public identity.

In the years that followed, Washington’s victories helped give Seattle a sporting presence its other teams had rarely achieved. The city’s football tradition included a remarkable run of sixty-three games without defeat from 1907 to 1917, but the team played mostly on the West Coast and reached the Rose Bowl only twice. Baseball had remained a minor-league affair; after fire destroyed Dugdale Park in 1932, the Seattle Indians played at a dirt-and-stone field where crews struggled to clear rocks from the ground. Seattle’s professional hockey team, the Metropolitans, had won the Stanley Cup in 1917, becoming the first American team to do so, but folded after losing its arena lease in 1924. Against that history, the rowing program’s California sweep, Poughkeepsie successes, and talk of Olympic competition offered a new kind of visibility.

Victories become a civic possession

The crews’ rise mattered in ordinary life as well as in sports pages. Residents could read about the boys in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the morning and The Seattle Times in the evening, then talk about them with a barber who followed the same races. People wrote to relatives back east about the victories. Length by length, the rowers began to put Seattle on the map, and the prospect of further success made that pride feel immediate rather than retrospective.

The effect reached across class and geography. The book places the crew’s following among mill towns on the Olympic Peninsula, dairy farms near the Cascades, Victorian homes on Capitol Hill, and the drafty Washington shell house on the Montlake Cut. When Washington qualified for the Olympics, parents hurried to Western Union offices to send congratulations to sons in the East; newspapermen worked on headlines, and bartenders served drinks on the house. At Harry Rantz’s nearly finished home on Lake Washington, Joyce and the children cheered beside the radio. Harry said nothing at first, then found a large American flag and hung it above the set. Joyce was glad for Joe, though the qualification meant he would not return until the end of the summer.

This civic identification was especially powerful because the oarsmen were not heirs who could readily pay their own way. When Olympic officials told Washington’s leaders that the crew would have to finance its trip to Berlin, the city’s support became practical as well as emotional. The demand was five thousand dollars by the end of the week, or the second-place crew from Penn would take Washington’s place. The university had already struggled to raise the money to send the boys east for the races; the rowers themselves had no funds to contribute.

Fundraising and the journey toward Berlin

Royal Brougham, George Varnell, and Al Ulbrickson moved quickly to publicize the crisis. In Seattle, Ray Eckman’s assistant Carl Kilgore began calling civic leaders; by ten that night they had a preliminary plan for a campaign headquartered at the Washington Athletic Club. The next morning, students sold fifty-cent lapel tags, radio announcers appealed for donations, and Pacific Telephone and Telegraph general manager I. F. Dix took charge. Telegrams went to chambers of commerce throughout the state, and more than a thousand letters went to American Legion posts and other civic and fraternal organizations.

Contributions arrived from donors of sharply different means. The Seattle Times gave five hundred dollars to start the drive; the Hide-Away Beer Parlor sent five dollars, Standard Oil fifty, an anonymous donor one, and Cecil Blogg of Tacoma five. The hometowns of the rowers added their own gifts: Montesano and Bellingham each sent fifty dollars, Olympia contributed $299.25, and Sequim sent seventy-five. Volunteers sold $1,523 in tags on the first day. By the end of the second, a certified five-thousand-dollar check had been airmailed to Ulbrickson. The campaign transformed civic enthusiasm into the concrete sum required to keep the crew’s Olympic chance alive.

The episode also linked Seattle’s local identity to a wider dispute over who could participate in elite rowing. At the Henley Royal Regatta, the Australian crew—policemen from New South Wales—was barred under a rule excluding people who worked for wages as mechanics, artisans, or laborers. The incident exposed the class boundary embedded in a tradition presented as gentlemanly sport. Washington’s working-class rowers likewise lacked private wealth, making the citywide campaign essential to their international participation. Their route to Berlin depended not only on performance in the shell, but on whether a community could assemble money that the national Olympic organizations had not secured.

A shared audience across distance

Seattle’s connection to the crew was increasingly mediated by newspapers and radio. When the boys prepared to sail for Germany aboard the SS Manhattan, more than ten thousand people gathered at Pier 60 in New York to watch the American athletes depart. Back home, the Olympic campaign had already made the Washington crew familiar far beyond the city: the race results were national news, while Seattle residents had followed the team closely through local coverage and fundraising.

As the Olympic final approached, Seattleites bought Philco 61F Olympic Special radios for $49.95, each equipped with a shortwave tuner and aerial kit for broadcasts from Berlin. At the Rantz home, there was no money for a new international set. Harry relied on the older Philco he had bought for the California race and checked that it could receive the National Broadcasting Company broadcast on KOMO. Before the race, the kitchen became a family listening room: Joyce and the children joined Harry over oatmeal, trying to steady their nerves. At 9:15 a.m., commentator Bill Slater’s voice crackled across KOMO from Berlin. Joyce placed on top of the radio a delicate four-leaf clover Joe had given her, preserved between the pages of a small book, and began to listen.

The scene distills Seattle’s transformation into a rowing city. The athletes were far away, but the city’s investment was present in the money raised, the radios installed, the papers read, and the families gathered around the broadcast. Rowing gave Seattle not merely a team to admire but a way to recognize itself as part of a national and international event.