22 February 2024

By Tom Daley*

The release of George Clooney’s movie The Boys in the Boat has rekindled the interest in the story of the 1936 University of Washington rowing team that was sparked by Daniel James Brown’s book about the crew ten years ago. The movie is advertised as being based on the book, but that is an overstatement. The only two things the book and the movie have in common are the title and the names of the main characters. While Brown’s book is a work of non-fiction, Clooney chose to make up his own story for the movie, largely divorced from reality. Rowers who have read the book will recognize that virtually every single fact about the team and the rowing in 1936 depicted in the movie is incorrect, substantially embellished, or a complete fabrication. The fact that most people will walk out of the theater believing that the 1936 Olympic gold medal in the eights was won by a college team made up of guys who had been rowing for just six months may be a feel-good Cinderella story, but it is an insult to the sport of rowing.

Interviews of Clooney make it clear that the dramatic excesses of the movie were born from his fascination with the underdog myth of the 1936 UW crew that emerged following the publication of Brown’s book in 2013. It is the myth of the “hicks from the sticks” who somehow overcame impossible odds to bring home Olympic gold. Google the book title and you will see constant repetition of the claim that the Olympic victory “shocked the rowing world”, “stunned the world” and was “the ultimate underdog win”. This myth is captured by these excerpts from the book’s dust jacket:

“[T]he improbable, intimate account of nine working class boys from the American West who at the 1936 Olympics showed the world what true grit really meant . . . the story of the University of Washington’s eight-oar crew, a team that transformed the sport . . . It was an unlikely quest from the start—a team composed of the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, who first had to master the harsh physical and psychological demands of collegiate rowing and then defeat the East Coast’s elite teams that had long dominated the sport. . . unexpectedly wiping the smile off Adolf Hitler’s face by beating his vaunted German team to capture the Olympic gold medal.”

It is a wonderful fairy tale, but it is just a fairy tale. None of it is actually true. 

The Boys were not the sons of loggers and shipyard workers. There was nothing at all improbable about the University of Washington producing the world’s top crew in 1936. U.S. college rowing at that time was not dominated by the East Coast schools. The victory at the Olympics was not a stunning upset. The German eight was not even remotely “vaunted”. And most obvious of all, the 1936 UW team did not in any way “transform” the sport.

Because people who should know better continue to propagate this myth, it is time to step back and examine the story objectively. This article, in three parts, will explore the actual historical facts surrounding the 1936 UW crew to show that the underdog mythology of the Boys in the Boat, though it makes for an uplifting story, is completely false.

The starting point is debunking what has come to be the lead phrase in almost any description of The Boys in the Boat, that The Boys were “the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers”. In the PBS documentary The Boys of ’36, that purports to tell the true story of the 1936 UW crew, they are described as “the sons of loggers, the sons of fishermen.” This characterization is critical to the narrative that paints the UW team’s quest as a class struggle. It is the downtrodden boys of the rural Northwest against the prep school boys of the Northeast and the Aryan ubermenschen of Hitler’s Germany. This description of the Boys is often accompanied by a black-and-white photo of the team that year, standing shirtless on the dock, looking like a Dorothea Lange portrait of downtrodden Depression-era laborers.

However, this characterization of the Boys is a lie, pure and simple. If you read Brown’s book carefully and then do some genealogical research about the Boys on the internet, here is what you discover about their fathers and their family circumstances:

Bobby Moch (cox). – Father Gaston Moch was a well-to-do jeweler in Montesanto, Washington, the owner of a jewelry store that he operated for 67 years. His obituary notes that he served as city treasurer, president of the Chamber of Commerce and “on every important committee for decades and decades.” Bobby was a high school valedictorian and went on to Harvard Law School after graduation from UW. A far cry from the son of a logger.

Johnny White (#4) – Father John White, Sr., worked as a broker from an office in downtown Seattle exporting iron and steel. The 1920 census showed that the family had a live-in servant. However, his business dried up during the Depression and the family fell on hard times, about which Brown writes: “Johnny’s father had one passion that overrode all his other interests and kept him going through those hard years—rowing. Before moving west to Seattle, he had been a first-rate sculler at the prestigious Pennsylvania Athletic Club in Philadelphia. He had brought his shell out to Seattle, and now he spent long hours rowing alone on Lake Washington. . . Johnny was the apple of his eye, and he wanted more than anything for his son to become an oarsman. Johnny, in turn, wanted nothing more than to meet his father’s often very high expectations.” Like Moch, Johnny was another high school whiz kid, graduating two years early at age sixteen. He was too small at that point for his dream of rowing at UW, so he delayed college for two years, working in a shipyard and a sawmill, to mature and build himself up physically, as well as to save money to pay his way in college. Is it in any way “improbable” that this kid would end up as a top collegiate rower?

Don Hume (stroke) – Father Bernard Hume worked as a bookkeeper at the Puget Sound Pulp and Timber Co. in Anacortes, Washington. In addition to being a three-sport athlete at Anacortes High, Don was on the yearbook staff and in the senior play. And he was an accomplished pianist, to boot. A February 1936 article about him in the Anacortes Daily Mercury reported: “Don is a concert pianist of no mean ability. Some half a dozen years ago he placed third in a state pianist contest. If the boys down at the crew house get a little weary, Don should be able to fire them up with a few bars of Il Trovatore or Pagliacci which this writer has heard him ramble off on the piano.” Don’s family moved to Olympia when he graduated from high school, but he stayed behind to work for a year before college. An article in the Anacortes newspaper said: “he lucked out when family friend Carl Everett offered Don both work, a room in his home and the use of a basement full of muscle-honing gear.” The job was in a lumber mill, giving him, like Johnny White, the opportunity to build up his strength and his college savings fund. The article reported on his training that year in a “13-foot clinker-built boat” that he had found, ”He became a familiar solitary figure making his way up and down Guemes Channel, something of a curiosity to many who were aware of the lean broad shouldered oarsman but not keyed into what this incessant almost obsessive rowing was about. “Here again, one has to ask in what way it was “improbable” that this multi-talented driven young man would become a star oarsman?

George Hunt (#6) – Father George Hunt, Sr., worked as a mortician in Pullyap, Washington, according to the 1930 census records. George, Jr. was another high school standout. Brown says of him in the book: “At Pullyap High School, he had been a superstar. He played football, basketball, and tennis.  He was class treasurer, an assistant librarian, a member of the radio club, and he appeared on the honor roll every year. . . He was something of a fashion plate, always well dressed.”

Chuck Day (#2) – Father Herbert Day was described by Brown as a “successful dentist” who raised the family “just north of the Washington campus, in the area where the fraternities are located.” Chuck went on to medical school after graduation and became a doctor. No hardship story here. And to top it all off, his older brother rowed in the 4 seat of the UW eight that won the national championship in 1933.

Jim McMillin (#5) – Father James C. McMillin was an accountant who worked for 26 years in the King County Engineering Department. The family lived in the Queen Anne district of Seattle, described in Wikipedia as a “popular spot for the city’s early economic and cultural elite to build their mansions”, though the McMillins themselves were of modest means. Jim worked during his years at UW to pay his way through school. He was another smart kid, who, during World War II, worked at MIT as a laboratory engineer on classified research.

Roger Morris (bow) – Father Herbert Morris managed a moving company described by Brown in his book as the “family’s moving business, Franklin Transfer Company.” Brown notes how when Roger was working in his father’s business, he would see families being moved out of houses they had lost to foreclosure and “whispered a prayer of gratitude” that his own family had been spared this fate. He came to UW with an interest in rowing born of his years of experience in a rowboat. Brown tells the story of how at age twelve he rowed fifteen miles in open water “among salmon trawlers and tugboats” to get back to his home.

Gordy Adam (#3) – Father David Adam was a Scottish immigrant who moved to Seattle and opened a grocery store that was unsuccessful. In an interview, Gordy recounted what happened after that: “When I was in second grade, my father made the mistake of buying a small dairy farm in the northern part of the state of Washington, near the Canadian border. . . It was never a very successful operation. . . but it was a great place for me to grow up because there were woods and streams and a lot of wide open space.” Finally, we have the son of a grocer-turned-farmer. Gordy played football in high school and tried out for football at UW where he made the freshman team. However, after three weeks he decided to switch over to freshman crew instead.

Joe Rantz (#7) – Father Harry Rantz was a talented mechanic who owned a business which made and repaired cars in the early years of the automobile. Joe’s brother Fred, fifteen years older than him, went to college and became a high school chemistry teacher. It was an upper-middle class life, but it fell apart upon the death of Joe’s mother when Joe was age four. Harry went into a tailspin, left the family, then returned and married a younger woman with whom he had four more children. In 1925, Harry ended up buying land and building a farm, which failed in 1929 when the Depression hit. So, Joe was the son of a farmer for four years. Harry’s new wife did not like Joe, which led to his abandonment when the family moved away without him when he was just age 15. During his senior year in high school, Joe lived in the home of his brother and wife and their daughter, attending the school where his brother taught. Brown tells us that Joe preferred living on his own, “As he had feared, in Seattle Fred had directed his every move. . . he had felt suffocated by the ceaseless rejoinders and advice—on everything from what classes to take to how to tie his necktie.” Compare these two images: the movie myth of Joe living in an abandoned car in a Hooverville and Joe living with his older brother’s family, complaining about being told how to wear his necktie. Quite a contrast between myth and reality.

There you have it – nine Boys, two of whom were for a while the sons of farmers. These were clearly not boys who “were finding it hard to survive” and “hanging on by the skin of their teeth”, to quote from the PBS documentary.

If you adjust the narrative, it reads something like this:

“… a team composed of the sons of a jeweler, a dentist, an accountant, a mortician, a bookkeeper, the owner of a moving business, and a former first-rate sculler from the prestigious Pennsylvania Athletic Club in Philadelphia.”

This certainly doesn’t resonate the same way as the myth. However, unlike the myth, it has the virtue of being true.

Did the “sons of loggers” myth originate prior to Brown’s book? Perhaps. However, Brown himself wrote this sentence in the book’s prologue describing his first meeting with Joe Rantz: “And I knew that he had been one of the nine young men from the state of Washington—farm boys, fishermen, and loggers—who shocked both the rowing world and Adolf Hitler by winning the gold medal in eight-oared rowing at the 1936 Olympics.” This was an unfortunate aggrandizement of the truth, because it was no doubt this single sentence that the book’s publicists seized upon in fabricating the Cinderella fairy tale that now pervades every discussion of this story.

Note that Brown’s sentence refers to the Boys themselves, not to their fathers. However, a person reading this sentence might have thought that these teenage college students could not themselves have been fishermen and loggers. “Farm boys” are boys whose fathers are farmers. Surely Brown must have meant the same with respect to the fishermen and loggers. The “sons of” narrative was adopted—with shipyard workers added in—and the Cinderella story was born. Or perhaps someone just independently made it up prior to Brown. Who knows?

What about Brown’s statement itself? Why, having painstakingly researched the book, would he say that the nine Boys were “farm boys, fishermen, and loggers”? This description might fairly be applied to Rantz, who was a farm boy who took a summer job as a logger between his freshman and sophomore years, and who went fishing as a source of food. Gordy Adam, another farm boy, worked for five months before his freshman year for a salmon canning company in Alaska. Don Hume worked for a year in a lumber mill. And Johnny White worked in a shipyard for a year before his freshman year, which is perhaps where the “sons of shipyard workers” leaked in. But the brief bios of the Boys and their families above reveal that they were not a group of “farm boys, fishermen, and loggers.”

They were in fact simply above-average middle-class boys of the era, or upper-middle-class by the depressed standards of the day. Some of their families were struggling like so many others during the Depression, but they were in no way characters out of The Grapes of Wrath. Consider these numbers from a study published by the U.S. Department of Education. In 1940, less than one-half of the U.S. population had gone beyond the eighth grade in school. Only six percent of males had a college degree. The UW Boys were in the 94th percentile of the population in terms of educational attainment. In 1938, the U.S. Congress found it necessary to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act making it illegal to employ children under age 16 in mining and manufacturing. The UW boys were in college studying their way to successful careers, while the vast majority of the population their age was hard at work trying to scrape out a living.

As the short biographies above show, these were smart kids who were going to attend college with or without rowing. Six of the nine majored in engineering and went on to careers in industry. Hume was a geology major who had a career in the oil industry. Day and Moch became a doctor and a lawyer. To cast them as proletarian class warriors who “took on and defeated successive echelons of privilege and power” (to quote from one book review) would no doubt have struck the Boys as amusing.

Unfortunately, for some reason, Brown felt moved to hyperbole, not content to stick to the script of what was a great story in its own right. Joe’s personal story was indeed compelling, but to extrapolate that to the entire crew created complete fiction. And then Brown couldn’t resist adding that these young men “shocked the rowing world” with their victory—another demonstrably false statement that will be debunked later in this article. It was just this one sentence in the book where Brown ran off the rails. For the rest of his narrative, he sticks to the facts that he so meticulously documented. The story is a solid work of non-fiction. It’s the story that has been manufactured about Brown’s story that is a complete fairy tale.

But suppose the nine Boys in the Boat had indeed all been the sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers. Would that have made their rowing success an improbable story that shocked the world in 1936? Not at all.

Was the American public shocked by the fact that Jesse Owens, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper, won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics? Was it considered improbable that Lou Gehrig, the son of an alcoholic sheet metal worker, would win the American League Most Valuable Player Award in 1936?  Were sports fans stunned in 1936 by the fact that the top college football team in the country that year was a bunch of farm boys from the University of Minnesota? Of course not. It is a truism in sports that top athletes can come from any walk of life. In fact, athletes who grow up in an environment of hard work and adversity are often the most successful. 

Why should rowing have been regarded any differently in 1936? One of the United States’ most famous scullers of the 1920s was Jack Kelly, six-time U.S. sculling champion who won three Olympic gold medals. The son of Irish immigrants, at age 18 he went to work as a bricklayer. Did this background in manual labor put him at a disadvantage as a rower? Would people have considered it improbable that a bricklayer could become an Olympic rowing champion? Not at all. In fact, in 1936, the elite British rowing establishment would have said that this narrative is exactly backwards. If the Boys came from a background of manual labor, their rowing success was not unlikely—it was completely predictable. It would give them an unfair advantage over genteel upper-class prep school boys. To quote from the 1923 book Rowing, by Navy crew coach Richard Glendon:

In England rowing is purely a gentleman’s game, and the blooded crews are not allowed to compete against artisans, laborers, mechanics, etc., as such classes, by making a business of muscular toil, have an advantage for muscular development over gentleman amateurs, whose more sedentary vocations give them less opportunity for developing muscle.

For this reason, Jack Kelly was denied permission to row in the 1920 Henley Royal Regatta. Regatta rules prohibited entry by any rower “who is or ever has been…by trade or employment for wages a mechanic, artisan or labourer”. This rule was still in place in 1936, when the Australian Olympic eight tried to row at Henley the month prior to the Olympics in Berlin. They were denied entry, because their boat was made up of policemen who rowed for the New South Wales Police Rowing Club. The UW college boys were not just competing against members of the landed gentry. Their competition included a boat full of cops.

And if the 1936 Italian Olympic eight had tried to row at Henley, they too would have been denied entry to the regatta. They were the heaviest crew in the Olympic finals that year, finishing second to the Americans, and were thus described by one writer: “All eight were born in Livorno and all of them were harbour dockers, labourers, workers, and members of the crews of risiatori, who, by force of oars, competed to be the first to reach the merchant ships and unload them.” Talk about grit. These guys made the UW college boys look positively bourgeois by comparison.

The notion that rowing was dominated by the wealthy upper class in 1936 is just nonsense. Given the cost of the sport, the upper class may have had the most participants in the sport. But they were by no means always the most successful. When UW coach Al Ulbrickson spotted Joe Rantz working out in a high school gym in 1932, he didn’t ask him what his father did for a living. He saw a big strong kid he could mold into a rower and told him to come down to the boathouse when he got to UW. And UW had a lot of Joe Rantz types to build their rowing team. Brown tells us that 185 freshmen boys showed up to try out for crew Joe’s first year at UW. In 1935, it was 210.

Here’s your choice. You can try to build a rowing team with an incoming freshman squad of:

a) 200 country boys, many of them with years of farm or other manual work under their belts,

b) 40 prep school boys who rowed a few months each spring on their school crew teams.

A crew coach in 1936 would take option a) every time. After one intense year of rowing on the freshman team, any advantages the prep school rowers would have from their limited prior experience would be erased. 

Of course, things are very different today. At the top college programs, rowers now arrive on campus fully formed with years of experience rowing year-round and they go straight to the varsity. And most of them arrive from overseas, having rowed for years in international regattas. (The Washington men’s varsity eight that took second place at the 2023 IRAs had just one American among the nine boys in its boat, sitting in the bow seat.) There are no longer many varsity slots for U.S. prep school rowers in the top men’s rowing programs. And essentially no slots at all for athletes with no rowing experience.

But in 1936, start with the nation’s premier college rowing program and feed it 200 big, motivated guys each year, you’ve got a formula for success. It didn’t matter in the slightest what their parents did for a living. And make no mistake, the University of Washington had what was widely recognized as perhaps the nation’s premier college rowing program in 1936. That is the subject of Part 2 of this article, which will be published tomorrow.

*His freshman year at Princeton in 1971, Tom Daley stood ready for the university’s mandatory swim test, which was staying afloat for ten minutes. The freshman lightweight crew coach was there and when he spotted Tom, “a 6’3” string bean with disproportionately long arms and legs,” he told Tom to come down to the boathouse to join the rowing program. Without any previous exposure to the sport, Tom showed up at the boathouse, and crew would become the dominant experience of his four years in college. “I rowed on the lightweight squad for three years, then in the heavyweight varsity boat my senior year.” After going undefeated and winning the lightweight eight event at the 1973 Eastern Sprints, the boat went to Henley Royal Regatta where the crew won the Thames Challenge Cup. For the 50th anniversary, they did a row-past on the Henley course – all “thirteen of us went back—all nine in the boat, the two spares and the spare cox, and the coach. All still alive and wanting to relive the memory. That experience had the enduring impact on us that was captured by Daniel J. Brown in his descriptions of what rowing comes to mean to those who give a few years of their life to it. That part of the Boys in the Boat myth is absolutely true.” Below is a photo of Tom and his “boys in the boat” with the Thames Cup from that occasion. Tom is third from the right.