The year 1935

The year 1935 is the book’s Part Four, titled The Parts That Really Matter. Its place in the narrative joins two kinds of labor: Joe Rantz’s summer work at the Grand Coulee dam site and the Washington crew’s demanding preparation for the next racing season. Around those immediate efforts, the book sets a longer history of rowing’s national prestige and the struggle of western public universities to win recognition in a sport long dominated by Eastern institutions.

A Year in the Book’s Structure

1935 follows the book’s section on 1934 and marks a change of emphasis toward the work and relationships that sustain the crew. The year is not presented as an isolated calendar entry: the narrative connects Joe’s search for work and summer employment with the Washington rowers’ fall training, then looks ahead to the longer push after the Christmas break. The season’s progression makes effort itself a central measure, whether it is exerted against rock at the dam site or against the water in a racing shell.

Collegiate Rowing and the Western Challenge

The background to 1935 is a collegiate sport with a large national audience. In the 1920s and 1930s, crew drew extensive press coverage and crowds, and prominent oarsmen received attention alongside stars of baseball and football. Eastern private schools modeled rowing on elite British institutions and supplied oarsmen to universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. At the annual Intercollegiate Rowing Association regatta at Poughkeepsie, as many as 125,000 spectators attended in 1929, while millions more followed the races by radio.

Western rowing had gained a public of its own through the rivalry between the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington. Both schools drew tens of thousands to their April regattas, but their coaches received far less pay than Eastern coaches, and neither program had money for recruiting or substantial wealthy patrons. The East’s status had a visible effect on western crews at Poughkeepsie: when Washington first competed there in 1913, it placed third, surprising spectators accustomed to Eastern dominance. A decade later, Washington narrowly won the 1923 varsity race, its first Intercollegiate Rowing Association victory. That earlier breakthrough forms part of the inheritance against which the 1935 crew’s ambitions are understood.

Joe Rantz at the Dam Site

During the summer, Joe worked on the dam project at Grand Coulee. For eight hours a day he operated a seventy-five-pound jackhammer while suspended by rope against the canyon wall. The crews were removing loose overburden to reach the granite bedrock that would support the dam, then shaping the granite to fit the future structure. The scale of the work was industrial: roughly two thousand feet of steel wore away each day across the jackhammers and pneumatic drills in the canyon.

The job depended on cooperation among the workers on the ropes. Those working beside Joe watched for falling rock, warned people below, and looked for seams that offered better places to work. He valued the practical camaraderie and the physical demands of the work; by the end of a day he was exhausted and thirsty, but the labor also recalled the exertion of rowing on Lake Washington. The parallel links his summer employment to the discipline of the boat without making the two kinds of effort identical: one helped construct a dam, while the other required a crew to move together in competition.

Fall Training and the Next Season

The Washington rowers’ fall preparation tested their strength in cold weather. In training, they practiced from half-slide and quarter-slide positions, alternated sprints with ten- or twelve-mile rows, and followed Al Ulbrickson’s launch across the lake. The cold could make it difficult to feel the oars; after practice the rowers had to clear ice from the oarlocks before carrying their shells back to the boathouse.

On November 25, Ulbrickson held a 2,000-meter competition under full racing conditions to assess the crews before training resumed after Christmas. He instructed the coxswains not to raise the stroke rate above twenty-six, reasoning that a lower rate would reveal where the boats’ power lay. The boat built around four of the previous year’s freshmen won by three lengths in 6:43. Joe’s boat finished third. Ulbrickson told reporters that the lineup was stronger than it had been in the spring of 1935 and that three fast boats might be in contention in January. The result offered encouragement, but it also made clear that Joe’s crew still had ground to make up.

Significance

The book presents 1935 as a year of preparation rather than a single defining victory. The growing importance of western collegiate rowing gives the crew’s competition a public and institutional setting; the Grand Coulee job shows Joe undertaking demanding work beyond the water; and the November race turns the team’s internal hierarchy into a concrete result. Together, these strands make the year a test of sustained effort, with the next season still ahead.