The Boys in the Boat (Young Readers Adaptation) Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2015

  This work is based on The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, by Daniel James Brown, copyright © 2013 by Blue Bear Endeavors, LLC, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © 2013, 2015 by Blue Bear Endeavors, LLC

  Photo credits appear here.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Brown, Daniel, 1951–

  The boys in the boat : the true story of an American team’s epic journey to win gold at the 1936 Olympics / Daniel James Brown.

  pages cm

  “A young readers adaptation of The Boys in the Boat.”

  ISBN 978-0-698-19759-6

  1. Rowing—United States—History—Juvenile literature. 2. Rowers—United States— Biography—Juvenile literature. 3. University of Washington—Rowing—History—Juvenile literature. 4. Olympic Games (11th : 1936 : Berlin, Germany)—Juvenile literature. I. Title.

  GV796.B764 2015

  797.12’30973—dc23

  2015006199

  Version_3

  For

  Gordon Adam

  Chuck Day

  Don Hume

  George “Shorty” Hunt

  Jim “Stub” McMillin

  Bob Moch

  Roger Morris

  Joe Rantz

  John White Jr.

  and all those other bright, shining boys of the 1930s—

  our fathers, our grandfathers, our uncles, our old friends

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Who’s Who

  A Note from the Author

  Prologue

  1. Only Nine Seats

  2. A Dream Life Shattered

  3. A Thousand and One Small Things

  4. Life in Exile

  5. Making the Climb

  6. Another Chance at a Home

  7. A Rare and Sacred Thing

  8. Going It Alone

  9. Part of a Single Thing

  10. A Broken Machine

  11. The Makings of Something Exceptional

  12. Almost Without Pain

  13. Stay Out of Our Life

  14. Driven Nearly to Madness

  15. Battle in California

  16. Rage, Fear, and Uncertainty

  17. Difficult and Dangerous Work

  18. The Parts That Really Matter

  19. A Truth to Come to Terms With

  20. Finding Their Swing

  21. Save, Save, Save

  22. Here’s Where We Take California

  23. Rowing for Liberty

  24. Fighting, Fuming, and Coming Together

  25. A Game of Cat and Mouse

  26. In the Race of Their Lives

  Epilogue

  Timeline of Events

  The Art of Rowing

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  WHO’S WHO

  FAMILY

  Joe Rantz: Abandoned throughout his childhood, he quit trusting people until he found rowing, which forced him to put his faith in his crew.

  Harry Rantz: A mechanic and inventor, he left his son Joe to live on his own, then reconciled with him later in life.

  Thula Rantz: Harry’s second wife and stepmother to Joe, she once had hopes of becoming a famous musician.

  Joyce Simdars: The teenage girl who sang along with Joe in the back of their school bus, she became the joy of his life and, eventually, his wife.

  THE BOAT

  Roger Morris, Bow: Quiet, strong Roger Morris was one of Joe’s first friends at the University of Washington.

  Chuck Day, Seat Two: A quick-tempered prankster built of pure muscle, he worked with Joe at the Grand Coulee Dam.

  Gordy Adam, Seat Three: A former salmon fisherman who grew up on a dairy farm, he earned the nickname “Courage” because he rowed one race with his thumb cut to the bone.

  Johnny White, Seat Four: Shorter than Joe, but thin and strong, he graduated from high school two years early. In the summer of ’35, he toiled at the Grand Coulee Dam with Joe and Chuck.

  Jim “Stub” McMillin, Seat Five: A six-foot-five beanpole who never gave up on a race, he worked his way through college, just like Joe.

  George “Shorty” Hunt, Seat Six: The chatty former high school sports star would eventually be named one of Washington’s greatest oarsmen.

  Joe Rantz, Seat Seven: Although he’d never rowed before college, the years he spent logging, digging ditches, and building roads built the muscles that made him a powerful force in the boat.

  Don Hume, Stroke: A curly-haired kid who never showed pain, he was nearly too sick to stand before the Olympics, but he still helped lead the boys to victory.

  Bobby Moch, Coxswain: The brains and strategic genius of the boat, he helped the crew find its swing in a series of come-from-behind victories.

  COACHES

  Al Ulbrickson: A well-dressed former champion oarsman himself, the varsity coach achieved his lifelong dream when the boys took gold in Berlin.

  George Pocock: The British boatbuilder designed and built the boys their winning shell, and also gave Joe and the coaches valuable advice about the nature of the sport.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Ever since The Boys in the Boat was first published, I have been traveling around the country talking to people about the story. When I first started, I quickly noticed that most of the people in my audiences were quite old. Some of them, in fact, were old enough to remember the events at the heart of the story, even though those events took place almost eighty years ago.

  But lately something interesting has begun to happen. More and more young people have begun to show up at my book talks. Often these younger people join with the older people, coming up to the front of the room to have their books signed. Frequently they pause at the signing table just to tell me how much they enjoyed the story and what it means to them personally. It sometimes seems strange to me to have a ninety-year-old grandma and a twelve-year-old student standing next to each other in front of me at the signing table. But listening to what both groups of readers have to say about the story, I have begun to understand. Some things are timeless.

  At first glance, this may seem to be a story about a time and place that is very different from the time and place you live in. After all, the young men at the center of this story dressed very differently than you and your friends do. They talked differently. They drove cars that look now as if they belong in museums. They sang songs that sound corny to our modern ears. They thought a radio was a marvel of modern technology. They lived through world events that now seem almost like ancient history.

  But here’s the thing. The boys in the boat were just that: boys. The problems they wrestle
d with were the same that you and your friends likely wrestle with today: family problems, making the team, succeeding at school, fitting in with other kids, learning whom you can and can’t trust, finding a way to make some money, figuring out how you feel about the opposite sex, deciding who and what you want to be a few years down the road. Under the surface, they really weren’t all that different.

  None of that, though, is really what the young people who come up to me at book events want to talk about. What they recognize in the story—and what they want to share with me—is the sheer excitement of being young, having a goal, striving to accomplish that goal, and making it happen, just as the boys in the boat did. Sometimes they talk about their volleyball team winning the regionals. Sometimes they talk about making first violin in the school orchestra. Sometimes they talk about wanting to be the first in their family to go to college. Sometimes they talk about falling short of their goal but being inspired by the book to try again.

  It is easy for those of us who are older and count ourselves wise to forget that it is the young who most often move the world forward. It is the young who have the boundless energy, passion, optimism, courage, and idealism to try to do what we elders might say is impossible. That’s what the boys in the boat attempted to do in this story. That’s why, eighty years later at my book-signing table, old men and women come to me with tears in their eyes, proudly remembering when they were young and full of fire. And it’s why standing right next to them are young men and women with beaming faces, bearing tales of their own brave attempts at the near impossible.

  So as you read this book, I hope you will keep in mind that at its heart this is a story about growing up, about wrestling with hope and doubt, about dreaming big, about going for the gold. In that sense, it’s really a story about you.

  Dawn row on Lake Washington.

  Prologue

  This book is a true story. It was born on a cold, drizzly, late spring day, several years ago, when I climbed over a split-rail cedar fence and made my way to the modest house where Joe Rantz lay dying.

  Joe was my neighbor Judy’s father, and she had asked me to come down and meet him. I knew only two things about him when I knocked on her door that day. I knew that in his midseventies he had single-handedly hauled a number of cedar logs down a mountain, cut and split them by hand, then built the nearly half-mile-long pasture fence I had just climbed over. And I knew that he had been one of nine young men from the state of Washington who shocked both the sports world and Adolf Hitler by winning a gold medal in rowing at the 1936 Olympics.

  When Judy opened the door and ushered me into her cozy living room, Joe was stretched out in a recliner with his feet up, all six foot three of him. He had a thin white beard, and his eyes were puffy. An oxygen tank stood nearby. Rain flecked a window that looked out into the wet woods. A fire was popping and hissing in the woodstove. Jazz tunes from the 1930s and 1940s were playing quietly on the stereo.

  Judy introduced me, and Joe offered me an extraordinarily long, thin hand. We talked for a while. Joe’s voice was thin and reedy, not much more than a whisper. When the conversation began to turn to his own life, I leaned closer and took out my notepad. I was surprised at first, then astonished, at what this man had endured and overcome in his life. But it wasn’t until he began to talk about his rowing career that he started, from time to time, to cry. He talked about learning the art of rowing, about the sleek and delicate wooden boats known as “shells,” about tactics and techniques. He told stories about long, cold hours on the water under steel-gray skies, about smashing victories, and about marching under Adolf Hitler’s eyes into the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. But it was when he tried to talk about “the boat” that the tears really welled up in his bright eyes.

  At first I didn’t know what he meant by “the boat.” I thought he meant the Husky Clipper, the racing shell in which he had rowed his way to glory. Then I thought he meant his crewmates. Eventually I realized that “the boat” was something more than just the shell or its crew. To Joe, it was something bigger than that, something mysterious and almost beyond definition. It was a shared experience, a golden moment long ago, when he had been part of something much larger than himself. Joe was crying partly for the loss of that moment, but much more for the sheer beauty of it.

  A Washington crew working out, circa 1929.

  As I was preparing to leave that afternoon, Judy removed Joe’s gold medal from the glass case against the wall and handed it to me. The medal had vanished once, years before. The family had searched high and low, then given it up for lost before they finally found it, buried in some insulating material in the attic. A squirrel had apparently taken a liking to the glimmer of the gold and hidden the medal away in its nest. As Judy was telling me this, it occurred to me that Joe’s story, like the medal, had been squirreled away out of sight for too long.

  I shook Joe’s hand and told him I would like to come back and talk to him some more. I said that I’d like to write a book about his rowing days. Joe grasped my hand again and said he’d like that, but then his voice broke once more. “But not just about me,” he whispered. “It has to be about the boat.”

  The Washington shell house, 1930s.

  1

  Only Nine Seats

  On a sunny October afternoon in 1933, two young men, taller than most, hurried across the University of Washington’s campus. The school was perched on a bluff overlooking the still waters of Seattle’s Lake Washington. A gray, overcast morning had given way to a radiant day, and students were lounging on the grass in front of the massive new stone library, eating, chatting, and studying. But the two boys, both freshmen in their first weeks of college, did not stop. They were on a mission.

  One of them, six-foot-three Roger Morris, had a loose, gangly build, dark hair, and heavy black eyebrows. The other, Joe Rantz, was a pencil tip shorter, but more solidly built, with broad shoulders, powerful legs, and a strong jaw. He wore his blond hair in a crew cut and watched the scene through gray eyes verging into blue.

  The boys, who had recently met in engineering class, rounded the library and descended a long grassy slope. They crossed Montlake Boulevard, dodging a steady stream of black automobiles. After a few more turns they followed a dirt road running through open woods and into a marshy area at the edge of Lake Washington. As they walked they began to overtake other boys headed in the same direction.

  Finally they came to a point of land jutting out into the water. An odd-looking building stood there, an old airplane hangar covered with weather-beaten shingles and inset with enormous windows. The sides slanted up toward the roof. At the front, a wide wooden ramp stretched from enormous sliding doors to a long floating dock. Lake Washington spread out to the east. The canal known as the Cut stretched to the west, connecting to Portage Bay and the calm waters of Lake Union.

  A crowd of young men, 175 in all, milled about nervously. They were mostly tall and lean, like Joe and Roger, though a dozen or so were noticeably short and slight. And they all shared the same goal. They wanted to make the University of Washington’s freshman rowing team.

  A handful of current team members, older boys wearing white jerseys emblazoned with large purple Ws, stood with their arms crossed, eyeing the newcomers, sizing them up. Joe and Roger stepped inside the building. Along each wall of the cavernous room, the long, sleek racing shells were stacked four high on wooden racks. With their polished wooden hulls turned upward, they gleamed in white shafts of light that fell from the windows overhead. Faded but still colorful banners from rival colleges hung from the rafters. Dozens of spruce oars, each ten to twelve feet long and tipped with a white blade, stood on end in the corners of the room. The air was dry and still. It smelled sweetly of varnish and freshly sawn cedar. The sound of someone working with a wood rasp came from the back, up in a loft.

  Joe and Roger signed in, then returned to the bright light ou
tside and sat on a bench, waiting for instructions. Joe glanced at Roger, who seemed relaxed and confident.

  “Aren’t you nervous?” Joe whispered.

  Roger glanced back at him. “I’m panicked. I just look like this to demoralize the competition.” Joe smiled briefly, too close to panic himself to hold the smile long.

  For Joe, more than anyone else there, something important hung in the balance that day, and it was more than a spot on the crew. He already felt as if he didn’t fit in with most of the other students on campus. Most of the young men around him were city boys dressed neatly in freshly pressed woolen slacks and expensive cardigan sweaters. Their fathers were doctors and lawyers. They were mostly unbothered by the problems plaguing so much of the country that fall.

  America was in the fourth year of the Great Depression. Ten million people had no job and no prospect of finding one. No one knew when the hard times might end. As many as two million people were homeless. In downtown Seattle that morning, hungry men stood in long lines waiting for soup kitchens to open. Others prepared to spend the day trying to sell apples and oranges for a few pennies apiece. Down by the waterfront, in a crowded shantytown called Hooverville, mothers huddled over campfires and children awoke in damp cardboard boxes that served as their beds.

  Seattle’s Hooverville.

  Joe himself had been on his own for years, with no one at home to support him. Every day he wore the same old wrinkled hand-me-down sweater and the same dusty old shoes. He had worked for a year after high school to save up enough money to pay for his first year of college. Yet his savings were probably not going to last. If he ran out of money, there was a good chance he’d have to drop out of school, head back to his small, bleak hometown, and look forward to a life of odd jobs, foraging in the woods for food, and living alone in a cold, half-finished house. A spot on the freshman crew could prevent that. Each rower was guaranteed a part-time job on campus. That job might just bring in enough money to get Joe through four years of school. Then he could earn an engineering degree and find a good job. If all went well, he could marry his high school sweetheart, a bright, pretty girl named Joyce who stood by him no matter what.