The Seattle Times

The Seattle Times is presented as a civic and sporting institution whose role in the Washington crew’s 1936 Olympic campaign extended beyond reporting: it helped publicize the team, contributed to the emergency fund that enabled its trip to Berlin, and sent reporter George Varnell to witness the climactic race. Through the paper, the crew’s success became both a contest on the water and a shared Seattle event, carried by headlines, fundraising, and the charged attention of the press.

A newspaper in a rowing public

In the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate rowing drew crowds and press attention on a scale that could rival baseball and college football. Major regattas received national coverage, while western interest gathered around the annual contest between the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley. Tens of thousands of students, alumni, and local spectators followed the rivalry, even as western programs operated with less money and recognition than their eastern counterparts. In that growing audience, a Seattle newspaper had an opportunity to make rowing matter not only to the crews but to the city around them.

The sport’s prestige was inseparable from its social boundaries. Eastern rowing traditions were associated with elite schools and universities, while western crews had to establish themselves against assumptions about their regional and class backgrounds. The Seattle Times’s coverage belongs to this wider contest over recognition: Washington’s victories could give a western public university, and the city supporting it, a place in a sport long dominated by eastern institutions.

Reporting becomes mobilization

When the Washington crew’s Olympic prospects met a sudden funding shortage, the press helped turn a private financial crisis into a civic campaign. After a meeting about the money needed to reach Berlin, Al Ulbrickson joined Royal Brougham and Varnell in preparing headlines and special columns for the next day’s editions of The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The stories were to be wired to Seattle, where local leaders could use the news to organize a response.

The campaign quickly took shape through a network of civic leaders, students, alumni, businesses, radio appeals, and hometown donors. The Seattle Times supplied $500 as an early contribution. That sum stood among gifts of widely varying size, from a dollar given anonymously to donations from towns associated with individual rowers. Volunteers also sold thousands of fifty-cent tags; by the end of the first day, those sales had brought in $1,523. On the second day, a $5,000 certified check was sent to Ulbrickson. The newspaper’s contribution was thus part of a broader collective effort that converted publicity into practical support for the team’s journey.

Varnell at the race

The Seattle Times’s presence in the Olympic story was also embodied by Varnell, who watched the final from the press car as Washington and California drove toward the finish. With the crowd rising around the boats, the press car became a scene of barely contained excitement: Varnell shoved his press credentials into his mouth and began chewing them. The gesture made the reporter part of the spectacle he was there to cover, as professional composure gave way to the force of the race.

The episode reflects the scale of the event as a mediated experience. The contest was watched by spectators at the course, but it also reached people far away through radio and newspapers. In Seattle, listeners gathered around radios for the Berlin broadcast; in the press car, reporters and coaches reacted to the race unfolding before them. The Seattle Times connected those distant and immediate audiences through the work of its correspondent and the paper’s place in the city’s campaign for the crew.

Coverage, interruption, and public memory

The newspaper’s role in the campaign did not guarantee that every account of the victory would appear in print. After the race, Brougham hurried to the press room to write what he considered the sports story of his career. At the same time, a news writers’ guild had established picket lines around the Seattle Post-Intelligencer offices, preventing that paper from publishing an edition the following morning. Brougham’s story would not appear there. The account distinguishes this interruption from The Seattle Times, which had shared the earlier fundraising publicity and had Varnell at the race; the strike described in the scene was directed at the Post-Intelligencer.

Across these episodes, The Seattle Times functions as more than a passive record of athletic achievement. Its reporting helped make the funding crisis visible, its money helped answer it, and its reporter’s reaction registered the emotional intensity of the final. The crew’s achievement acquired civic reach through this interplay of competition, journalism, and public participation.