Stub McMillin

Stub McMillin moves from janitor’s work at the shell house to the number-five seat in Washington’s Olympic boat, carrying the discipline of a working student into a crew built on mutual reliance. His friendship with Joe Rantz begins when they recognize in one another the strain of earning their way through college; by the Olympic final, that quiet bond has become part of a team willing to insist that its sick stroke oar, Don Hume, must race with them. McMillin’s later life follows the same practical pattern: when money threatens to end his education, help from Seattle’s Rainier Club enables him to continue.

Identity and Background

McMillin was a big, rangy rower who had been the number five man in Washington’s junior varsity boat. He had grown up on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle rowing and labor-conflict city and was nearly as poor as Rantz. College depended on constant work: he mowed lawns, delivered newspapers, swept floors, and took whatever other jobs he could find. In the intervals between rowing, studying, and sleeping, he worked to keep himself clothed and fed. The account gives no portrait of an easy student life; its defining condition is the narrow balance between labor and the effort to remain in school.

That economic circumstance distinguished him from the inherited image of collegiate rowing as a gentleman’s sport. In the 1920s and 1930s, crew attracted extensive press attention and large crowds, while elite eastern institutions modeled their rowing traditions on British schools such as Eton. The Poughkeepsie regatta had become a major national sporting event, yet western rowers from working backgrounds had often met curiosity and condescension when they traveled east. McMillin’s presence in Washington’s crew belongs to that broader contrast: he was not rowing as an ornamental extension of privilege but while working through college, with his hours and security limited by the need to earn money.

Work at the Shell House and Friendship with Joe Rantz

Before the season’s seat competition began, tensions between Washington’s boats had eased. Rantz spent time at the shell house with McMillin and other rowers, doing calisthenics, tossing a football, and taking shells out for informal rows. The men avoided talking about the coming season. Their casual fellowship mattered because, the previous year, Rantz and McMillin had not been close; the hard feelings between the boats had given Rantz little reason to know him.

One evening, after the others had gone home or to their part-time jobs, Rantz came out of the steam room in a towel and saw McMillin sweeping the shell house and emptying trash cans. Rantz realized that McMillin had become the building’s janitor. The sight of him doing that work stirred a sense of affinity. Rantz approached, offered his hand, and told McMillin that he too worked nights as a janitor, at the YMCA—a fact he had kept from his rowing companions. The exchange changed the terms of their acquaintance: neither had to pretend that financial hardship was someone else’s problem.

Rantz soon found it comfortable to be around McMillin and felt able to speak more openly about his own circumstances. He began staying late almost every day, sweeping alongside McMillin and helping finish the work sooner so McMillin could go home and study. Their connection was made through labor as much as conversation. At the shell house, the distinction between one man’s work and another’s assistance gave way to a modest, reciprocal practice: Rantz helped McMillin complete the job, and the shared burden made his own poverty less isolating.

The Number-Five Seat and the Crew’s Trust

By March 19, Al Ulbrickson had identified a boat that was beginning to edge ahead of the one he had ranked first. McMillin was placed at number five, between Johnny White at number four and Shorty Hunt at number six. Two days later, Rantz—still in the third boat and not yet in the presumed junior varsity crew—found his name on the chalkboard at number seven in this second boat, then regarded as the best possibility for the varsity place. The unexpected change gave him an opening, but the welcome he received made the difference between merely being assigned a seat and feeling he belonged in it.

As Rantz got into the shell, McMillin’s face lit up. He urged the crew that the boat would fly, while Hunt slapped Rantz on the back and promised support. The welcome was concrete and immediate: Rantz was not left to prove himself among strangers. He rowed by following Hume’s stroke and giving himself over to the collective effort, transmitting the movement through the men around him. For Rantz, the change was not simply the result of applying advice; it was possible because he trusted the boys in this boat. McMillin’s greeting and encouragement were among the gestures that made that trust tangible.

The crew’s shared rhythm recurs in the account of their long Poughkeepsie race. With Washington several lengths behind and its prospects appearing poor, the rowers entered a state of intense attention to one another’s movements. McMillin, still in the number-five seat, realized with astonishment that after three miles he was breathing through his nose. The detail registers the strange economy of the crew’s concentration: effort remained immense, but the men were so joined in the work that the race did not feel like a succession of isolated acts of pain. In the closing stretch, McMillin wanted to look toward the rival boat but did not dare. He kept his eyes on the back of Rantz’s neck and pulled with his whole heart, acting on the next stroke rather than trying to see the result in advance.

The Olympic Final

In the final at Lake Carnegie, Washington had to recover from a poor start. McMillin and Gordy Adam washed out their oars four or five strokes into the race, briefly unsettling the boat and checking the momentum the crew was trying to build. The failure was a momentary technical mistake, not an abandonment: on the following stroke, all eight oars caught the water together. Later, while the rowers waited at the starting stalls in the heat, they sat bare-chested with their oars ready and tried to settle their breathing and minds. Bobby Moch touched Tom Bolles’s lucky fedora beneath his seat, carrying the crew’s ritual of luck into the start.

On the morning of the final, Hume’s fever had risen again, and Ulbrickson initially decided that he could not row. The crew saw his absence as a threat to more than the lineup. At breakfast, they argued that Hume was essential to the boat’s rhythm and to Moch’s ability to communicate with the stroke. McMillin, now the team captain, cleared his throat and spoke for the others. Rantz then offered that if Hume were put in the boat, the crew would carry him across the finish line and he could simply ride along. The appeal joined practical knowledge of the crew’s rhythm to a declaration of loyalty. Ulbrickson eventually called after the team to bring Hume with them.

During the race, that loyalty did not spare McMillin from pain or uncertainty. As the boat surged toward the bleachers, the crowd’s chant drowned out Moch’s commands. McMillin did not know what was happening and disliked the confusion; he flung an oath into the wind. The pressure of the final was not an abstract test of character but a breakdown in the crew’s usual means of hearing and coordinating. The men could no longer rely on shouted instructions alone. Yet they remained in the boat and kept rowing, each constrained by what he could perceive and sustained by the movements immediately around him.

At the medal ceremony, the crew’s victory brought McMillin to tears. With the gold medals hung around the Americans’ necks, laurel wreaths on their heads, and the national anthem playing as the flag rose, he joined Rantz and the others in fighting back tears. The scene gives the race an ending beyond its result: a group accustomed to concealing hardship in work and competition was overcome together, in public, by what they had achieved together.

After Germany and Narrative Significance

McMillin returned from Germany broke. Without outside help, he would have had to leave school, but Seattle’s Rainier Club raised $350 to carry him through the rest of his studies. The assistance changed the immediate outcome of the financial crisis without erasing the effort that had brought him there. His story thus echoes the pattern established at the shell house: education and rowing were sustained not by comfort, but by work and timely support.

Because his height disqualified him from military service, McMillin took over Moch’s job at MIT. For twelve years he coached there while also working as a lab engineer on classified research. He eventually returned to Seattle rowing and labor-conflict city, settled on Bainbridge Island, went to work for Boeing, and married. The brief account of his later life keeps its focus on practical transitions—school, coaching, engineering, employment—rather than turning him into a celebrity after the medal.

McMillin’s importance in the narrative lies in the way his working life and his rowing life meet. He sweeps the floor after hours, helps a fellow janitor, welcomes Rantz into a boat, speaks for Hume when the crew faces its defining race, and later accepts help that allows him to finish his education. These episodes do not make hardship disappear; they show how dependence on others can be a form of strength. The crew’s achievement rests not on nine separate displays of toughness but on a shared capacity to work, trust, and carry one another through.