The Boys in the Boat (Young Readers Adaptation) Page 2

  But making the team was not going to be easy. Within a few short weeks, only a handful of the 174 boys gathered around him would still be contenders for seats in the first freshman boat. That was the one Joe felt he needed to be in to guarantee his place on the team. In the end, there were only nine seats in the boat.

  Harry, Fred, Nellie, and Joe Rantz, circa 1917.

  2

  A Dream Life Shattered

  The path Joe followed down to the shell house that afternoon was only the last few hundred yards of a much longer, harder, and at times darker journey.

  Joe was the second son of Harry Rantz and Nellie Maxwell. Harry was a big man, well over six feet tall, large in the hands and feet. He was a tinkerer and inventor, a dreamer of big dreams. In his spare time he loved to work with his hands and build contraptions of all kinds. He fiddled with machines, took apart mechanical devices in order to understand them. He even designed and built his own version of an automobile from scratch. Nellie Maxwell was a piano teacher and the daughter of a preacher. They had their first child, Fred, in 1899. Seven years later, looking for a place where Harry could make his mark on the world, they headed west from Pennsylvania, crossed the country, and settled down in Spokane, Washington.

  The town was surrounded by ponderosa pine forest and open range country. The summers were crackling hot, the air dry and perfumed with the vanilla scent of ponderosa bark. In the autumn, towering dust storms would blow in from the wheat country to the west. The winters were bitter cold, the springs stingy and slow in coming. The Rantz family moved into a small frame house on the north side of the cold, clear Spokane River, and Joe was born there in March of 1914.

  Harry set up an automobile shop. Each morning he rose at four thirty to go to work, and often he didn’t return home until well after seven in the evening. It was hard work, but his business did well and he was able to buy his family nice things. Nellie taught piano to neighborhood children and doted on her sons, lavishing love on them and watching over them carefully.

  On Sunday mornings the family attended church together, then spent the day relaxing. Sometimes they just walked into town to buy freshly made peach or strawberry ice cream. Sometimes they drove out to a nearby lake, where they could rent boats and explore the shoreline or spend a hot afternoon swimming or sitting on the grassy banks enjoying a picnic. But the best part for Joe was when they went to Natatorium Park in the cool shade of the cottonwood trees down by the river. Something interesting and fun was always going on there. They could watch a baseball game or listen to a John Philip Sousa band concert. What Joe particularly loved was when his parents would put him on the park’s spectacular new carousel and he could ride, whirling around and around on the back of a carved tiger or elegant horse under the carousel’s dazzling lights.

  Young Joe.

  But when Joe was just about to turn four, this dream life shattered. His memories of what happened next were a kaleidoscope of broken images. He remembered his mother standing by his side in an overgrown field, coughing violently into a handkerchief, and the handkerchief turning bright red with blood. He remembered a doctor with a black leather bag. He remembered sitting on a hard church pew swinging his legs while his mother lay in a box at the front of the church and would not get up. He remembered lying on a bed with his big brother, Fred, perched on the edge. He remembered Fred talking softly about dying and about angels and about needing to go to college and about how Joe would have to go east to stay with relatives in Pennsylvania. He remembered sitting quietly alone on a train for long days and nights, with blue mountains and green muddy fields and rusty rail yards and dark cities full of smokestacks all flashing past the window by his seat. He remembered meeting a woman who said she was his aunt Alma and then, almost immediately, becoming terribly sick. He remembered lying for weeks in a bed in an unfamiliar attic room with the shades always pulled. No Ma, no Pa, no Fred. Only the lonely sound of a train now and then, and a strange room spinning around him. Plus the beginnings of a new heaviness, a feeling of doubt and fear pressing down on his small shoulders and congested chest.

  As he lay ill with scarlet fever in the attic of a woman he did not really know, the world he had known back in Spokane dissolved. His brother had gone off to finish college. His mother was dead of cancer. His father had fled to Canada, unable to cope with his wife’s terrible death.

  Joe's mother, Nellie.

  A little more than a year later, in the summer of 1919, his brother called for him, and five-year-old Joe rode the train back across the country again all by himself. Although he was only twenty, Fred had married and found a good job, and he took care of his little brother for the next two years. By that point, their father, Harry, had returned from Canada, married a young woman named Thula LaFollette, and built a new house in Spokane.

  Harry in a car he built.

  For Joe, that meant still more change. Soon he was moving to another new home, living with a father he hardly remembered and a stepmother he did not know at all. But at least it was a real home, and in time this new life began to feel normal. The house was spacious and well lit. Out back there was a swing with a wide seat big enough for him and his father and Thula to ride three at a time on warm summer nights. He could walk to school, cutting through a field where he would sometimes snatch a sweet ripe melon for an after-school snack. He dug long, elaborate underground tunnels in the vacant lots nearby, and spent long, cool afternoons in them escaping Spokane’s searing, dry summer heat. And the new house was always filled with music. Harry had kept Nellie’s most precious possession, her piano, and he delighted in sitting at the keys with Joe. Harry pounded out popular tunes as his son, perched on the bench next to him, gleefully sang along. Although she was an accomplished violinist, Thula did not join in. She didn’t like the often corny music Harry and Joe chose, and she was not particularly happy to have Nellie’s piano in her house.

  In January 1922, Harry and Thula had a boy named Harry Junior, and the following year they had another son, Mike. With his family growing and more mouths to feed, Harry had to take a job at a gold mine in Idaho some 140 miles away. He’d work there during the week, then make the long drive home on the weekends.

  During one of these weekend visits, in the middle of a dark, moonless night, nine-year-old Joe suddenly awoke to the smell of smoke. He heard flames crackling somewhere in the house. He snatched up baby Mike, grabbed Harry Junior, and stumbled out of the house with his little half brothers. His father and Thula burst out of the house in singed nightclothes a few moments later. Once he saw that his boys were safe, Harry dashed back into the smoke and flames. Several minutes passed before he reappeared. With the fire raging behind him, he was pushing Nellie’s piano inch by inch out through a garage door. He had risked his life to save the last thing he had left from his first marriage. Now, as Joe stood and watched their home burn to the ground, he had that same feeling he’d experienced in his aunt’s dark attic years before. The same coldness, fear, and insecurity. Home, it was beginning to seem to him, was something you couldn’t necessarily count on.

  George Pocock, Rusty Callow (Washington coach before Ulbrickson), Ky Ebright, and Al Ulbrickson.

  3

  A Thousand and One Small Things

  The Washington shell house would eventually become a kind of home to Joe Rantz, but on the first day of practice he and the other freshmen did not even row. The afternoon was largely consumed by the collection of facts and figures. Joe and Roger and all the other hopefuls were told to step onto scales, to stand next to measuring sticks, to fill out forms detailing their medical backgrounds. Assistant coaches and older students carrying clipboards stood by, eyeing them and recording the information.

  Few of the young men assembled outside the shell house that afternoon had ever rowed a stroke in their lives. Most of the freshmen were city boys, but a few, like Joe, were farm boys or lumberjacks or fisherme
n. They came from foggy coastal villages, damp dairy farms, and smoky lumber towns all over Washington state. Growing up, they had wielded axes and fishing gaffs and pitchforks, building up powerful arms and broad shoulders. They were strong, and the coaches knew their strength would help those boys, but they also knew rowing was at least as much art as brawn. There were a thousand and one small things that had to be learned and performed in precisely the right way to propel one of those narrow shells through the water with speed and grace. Over the next few months, the few boys who made the team would need to master every last one of those thousand and one small things. And in those few months some essential questions would be answered. Would the farm boys be able to keep up with the intellectual side of the sport? Would the city boys have the toughness to survive?

  Tom Bolles.

  Al Ulbrickson.

  The freshman coach, Tom Bolles, was in charge that day. He would be the one to decide which nine boys would make the first freshman boat. But another man stood quietly in the broad doorway of the shell house. He was tall, with cold slate-gray eyes, and he was dressed impeccably in a dark three-piece business suit, a crisp white shirt, and a tie. His name was Al Ulbrickson, and he was the head coach of the rowing program. Ulbrickson was known as the least talkative man on campus. Some of the local sports reporters called him the “Man with the Stone Face.” He did not like to show his emotions, but he knew the sport of rowing well. He had been the lead rower, or stroke oar, of a Washington crew that had won national championships in 1924 and 1926. The college had quickly hired him as a coach after graduation. Now rowing was the center of his life and almost a religion to him.

  The new boys sauntered along the dock, getting a feel for the long, yellow-spruce oars. Many of the freshmen, Ulbrickson noted, looked fit. As a group, they were tall and moved gracefully. Ulbrickson was pleased by what he saw. When Bolles and his assistant coaches released the boys for the day, Joe Rantz and all the rest straggled up the hill toward the campus. They moved in small groups, shaking their heads, talking softly among themselves about their chances of making the team. Ulbrickson stood on the floating dock, listening to the lake water lap at the shore, watching the boys leave.

  He was studying them closely because he was thinking well beyond the upcoming season. The previous year had been a strong one for the Washington team. They defeated their archrivals from the University of California, then beat out the best crews the East had to offer, including Yale, Cornell, and Harvard. But Ulbrickson was not satisfied. In 1932, a crew from California had won Olympic gold. No Washington coach had ever even come close to taking a team to the Olympics. The next games were set to take place in Berlin, Germany, in 1936, and Al Ulbrickson didn’t just want to get a crew there. He wanted to bring gold home to Seattle.

  To pull it off, the coach knew, he was going to have to clear a series of imposing hurdles. He’d have to outsmart Cal coach Ky Ebright, who was widely regarded as the intellectual master of the sport. Ebright had an uncanny knack for winning the big races, the ones that really counted. Ulbrickson needed to find a crew that could beat Ebright’s best when it mattered most. Then that crew would have to outrace the top boats from the East at the Olympic trials. Finally, if they did earn the right to represent the United States, they’d face the best oarsmen in the world. They would have to beat the British, who had practically invented the sport; the Italians, who had nearly won in 1932; and the Germans, who, under the new Nazi system, were said to be building extraordinarily powerful and disciplined crews.

  Before he could get to Germany, though, Ulbrickson had to find the nine young men who would make up his crew. He wondered if any of those green and untested boys he had just watched on the dock might meet his strict qualifications. They’d need raw power, superhuman stamina, and solid intelligence to master the details of rowing technique. But they would need something else as well. Something even more important. To be part of that kind of crew—a gold medal crew—each young man would also have to be able to put aside his own personal ambitions. He’d have to throw his ego over the side of the boat, to leave it swirling in the wake of his shell. He’d need to pull, not just for himself, not just for glory, but for the other boys in the boat.

  4

  Life in Exile

  Joe Rantz was no stranger to pulling for himself. He’d been forced to do so at an early age. After the fire burned down their home, nine-year-old Joe and his family moved to the camp near the Idaho mine—the Gold and Ruby—where Joe’s father worked. Harry Rantz no longer had to make the long drive back and forth, but their new home was a stark change from Spokane. The Boulder City camp consisted of thirty-five small cabins and a few other ramshackle buildings clinging to the side of a mountain. Wooden sidewalks stretched from one building to the next. A one-room schoolhouse stood on a flat spot among the pines, but there were few children, and attendance was low. A rutted dirt wagon road plunged from the schoolhouse down the mountainside, cutting back and forth to the base before spilling onto a bridge across the Kootenai River. To Thula, it was a dismal place, but to young Joe, Boulder City was a wonderland.

  When his father operated the mine’s huge steam shovel, Joe could perch happily on the rear end of the machine and ride it as it swung around in circles, almost like the carousel back in Spokane. His father built him a go-cart, and Joe dragged it up the steep roads to the top of the mountain. He pointed the cart downhill, climbed in, and released the brake. He raced down the road at breakneck speed, careening around the hairpin turns, whooping at the top of his lungs all the way to the river and across the bridge. Then he climbed out and began the long trek back to the top of the mountain and did it again and again. He didn’t stop until it was too dark to see the road. When he was in motion, outdoors, the wind in his face brushed away all the anxiety that had been eating at him since his mother’s death. He felt alive.

  Joe (right) with Thula, carrying Mike, and Harry, carrying Harry Jr., at the Gold and Ruby mine.

  When winter closed in and the mountainside was deep in powdery snow, his father got out the welding equipment and built Joe a sled. With it he could rocket down the wagon road at even more terrifying speeds. Sometimes, when the adults weren’t watching, he’d take Harry Junior up the mountain. Joe would find one of the railroad carts used to carry ore down the mountain, give it a shove, and then jump in with his little brother. The two boys would rattle down the tracks at terrifying speeds with Harry Junior in front, shrieking in delight.

  When he wasn’t hurtling down the mountain, Joe helped out at the mill, attended the one-room school above the camp, explored the woods, and climbed among the 6,400-foot-tall mountains in the national park nearby. He swam in the river and hunted for deer antlers and other treasures in the woods. At home, on a small plot of ground inside the picket fence surrounding his family’s cabin, he tended his very own vegetable garden. But that little garden didn’t produce nearly enough to satisfy Joe’s hunger. He was growing fast, and he inhaled food as quickly as his stepmother made it. Thula worried constantly that her own boys, Harry Junior and Mike, wouldn’t get enough to eat. And the household wasn’t getting any smaller.

  Thula was pregnant again, with her third child, and she was miserable living in that tiny cabin on the mountainside. She was beautiful, educated, and artistic. When she was young, growing up on a farm, she had been determined to seek a finer life when she left home. Now she was stuck in Boulder City. It was unbearably hot and dusty in the summer, wet and muddy in the spring and fall. Winter brought the worst of it. Come December, bitterly cold air from Canada made its way through every crack and crevice in the walls of her flimsy cabin. It sliced through whatever layers of clothing she put on. She had hoped to become a concert violinist, but her beloved violin mostly sat on a shelf these days. Her hands were so cracked and sore from the cold, dry Idaho air that she could hardly hold the bow. She was still saddled with a screaming infant, a bored and complaining toddler, and a
stepson who seemed to think of nothing but eating. It did not help that to pass the time Joe sat in the cabin and plucked incessantly at a ukulele, singing and whistling the corny songs that he and his father seemed to enjoy.

  One warm summer afternoon, her tension and frustration finally boiled over. She was in the kitchen, shoving pans around the stovetop angrily, while Joe was outside, down on his hands and knees, working in his vegetable garden. That little garden plot was a sanctuary for him. He was in charge of it, not Thula, and it was a source of enormous pride. When he could bring a fresh basket of tomatoes or an armful of sweet corn into the cabin, and then see them on the dinner table that night, he felt that he was contributing. He felt he was helping Thula, maybe making up for whatever he might have done lately to annoy her. That afternoon, as Joe was working his way down row after row, pulling weeds, he turned around to find his eighteen-month-old brother following him. Mike was imitating Joe, only he wasn’t pulling weeds. He was plucking half-grown carrots out of the ground.