Washington State

Washington State gives the book’s rowing story both its people and its public stakes: the 1936 Olympic champions came from the state, and their success was received as a collective achievement by communities stretching from Seattle to small towns and farms. The state’s importance lies in the contrast it embodies: western crews built their standing against eastern prestige and limited resources, while the eventual Olympic campaign drew support from a broad public that recognized the rowers as its own.

A western rowing landscape

In the 1920s and 1930s, collegiate rowing could command audiences and press attention comparable to baseball and football. Yet the sport’s institutional center remained in the East, where elite private schools modeled themselves on British traditions and sent oarsmen to universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Western crews had begun attracting their own devoted followings, but recognition and resources remained uneven. The Washington and California programs, both at large public universities, were the principal western rivals, and their annual April races could bring out tens of thousands of students, alumni, and local spectators.

The rivalry between the University of Washington and the University of California, Berkeley, dated to 1903. Both programs had struggled for funding and recognition, even on their own campuses, before achieving occasional success against eastern crews. California crews had won Olympic gold twice, but western rowing still had little of the patronage and recruiting money available to eastern programs. Their coaches were paid a fraction of eastern salaries, and the western schools mostly competed against each other. For Washington State, then, rowing represented more than a local pastime: it offered a way for a western institution and its home region to contest the East’s assumption of sporting centrality.

The state’s crews meet the East

Washington’s first appearance at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association regatta at Poughkeepsie came in 1913, when Hiram Conibear took a varsity crew east. The team did not win, but its third-place finish startled eastern spectators accustomed to seeing the sons of political and industrial elites rather than farmers, fishermen, and lumberjacks in racing shells. The response captured a recurring tension in the book: western crews could earn respect on the water while remaining outsiders in a sport shaped by eastern class traditions.

That breakthrough did not immediately bring regular access. California, Stanford, and Washington returned only occasionally during the following decade. Transporting crews and delicate racing shells across the country was expensive, and western rowers encountered condescension as well as curiosity. Washington’s 1923 return produced a sharper reversal. Under head coach Russell Callow, its varsity pulled away from the field and reached the finish alongside Navy. When the crowd drowned out his commands, coxswain Don Grant raised a red flag cut from a Cornell banner to signal the final effort. Stroke oar Dow Walling, rowing with a leg badly swollen by three boils, drove the pace higher, and Washington narrowly secured the West’s first IRA victory. The result established that a Washington crew could defeat eastern rivals at their own celebrated regatta, although the costs and social barriers to competing remained.

A home made visible

The book connects Washington State to the rowers through working landscapes and small-town life, not just through university sport. Joe Rantz came from Sequim, where his father had established an auto repair and tire shop and bought a stump farm. As a boy, Joe helped repair cars, worked with carburetors, and learned to vulcanize rubber. The Olympic crew’s origins likewise linked it to a working western population: the nine young men who won the 1936 Olympic eight-oared race were described as coming from Washington and as farm boys, fishermen, and loggers.

When the crew qualified for the Olympics, that identity became a statewide occasion. People cheered in mill towns on the Olympic Peninsula, on dairy farms near the Cascades, in Seattle homes, and at the University of Washington’s drafty shell house on the Montlake Cut. Parents hurried to Western Union offices to send congratulations to their sons back east; newspapers rushed to prepare headlines, and bartenders served drinks on the house. The victory in the selection race meant that Washington’s rowers would go to the Olympics and that Seattle would appear on the world stage. The book thus presents the crew’s achievement as a change in the state’s public standing as well as a sporting result.

A statewide campaign for Berlin

The Olympic opportunity brought the state’s civic networks into practical action. When the crew’s travel funds appeared uncertain, Al Ulbrickson kept the shortage from worrying the athletes while Washington supporters organized a public drive. Coeds carried tin cans door to door; students sold fifty-cent lapel tags; radio announcers appealed for contributions; and telegrams went to chambers of commerce across the state. More than a thousand letters were sent to American Legion posts and other civic and fraternal organizations. The response joined university loyalty to local pride, turning support for the crew into a dispersed statewide effort.

The contributions came in amounts that made the campaign’s breadth visible. The Seattle Times started the fund with $500; smaller gifts included $5 from the Hide-Away Beer Parlor and $1 from an anonymous donor. Hometown communities contributed too: Montesano gave $50 for Bobby Moch, Bellingham gave $50 for Gordy Adam, Olympia gave $299.25 for Don Hume, and Sequim sent $75 for Joe Rantz. Volunteers sold $1,523 worth of tags on the first day, and by the second day a $5,000 certified check had been airmailed to Ulbrickson. The amounts differed, but together they enabled the Washington crew to proceed toward Berlin.

Significance and contrast

Washington State’s role in the book is therefore both geographic and relational. The state supplied the crew’s origins, the rivalry that helped sharpen its ambitions, and the hometown and civic support that answered the costs of Olympic competition. The contrast with rowing’s elite traditions is especially pointed: the Washington rowers came from working backgrounds in a sport long associated with privileged eastern institutions. The book also places that contrast beside Henley’s rule excluding people employed as mechanics, artisans, or laborers, a reminder that access to rowing could be shaped by class as well as by athletic ability. Against that history, the cheering communities and the statewide fundraising campaign make the 1936 team’s achievement legible as more than a victory by eight rowers and a coxswain: it was a moment when a western state’s people could see their crew carry their claim to recognition beyond the region.