Shelfnotes from the Leaburg Library

Paris. Paris, France. City of light; city of love; city of endless fascination, beautiful iconic buildings, tumultuous history - and currently - city of the 2024 Summer Olympics. Wow! If you didn’t love Paris before this, you are about to fall hopelessly in love with her now.

Can you imagine : striding past the Eiffel Tower on a morning training run; or having a “shoot-around” on an outdoor basketball court in full view of the Arch de Triumph and Notre Dame Cathedral; or rowing silently down the Seine at dawn in your 8-man shell synchronizing the swing of the oars to the rhythm of the coxswain’s call.

I got thinking about that last thing as I was reading “The Boys In The Boat” by Daniel Brown, a must read for anyone who loves luminous writing that leaves you breathless at the end of nearly every paragraph. You do not have to know anything about the sport of rowing to become immersed in this story. Brown grabs your attention immediately and his writing whisks you away to another place and time, as though you were actually there.

It is the true story of the University of Washington’s rowing team who, in 1936, went to the Summer Olympic Games in Germany to vie for gold against the world’s most talented oarsmen - and against a German leader who was about to release his despicable form of hatred upon the world.

It is about those eight men who, having finally mastered “the elusive swing”, rowed spectacularly as one in a perfectly crafted hollow shell, and in the process, brought home not only gold medals, but more importantly great honor to their university, to their country, and to themselves.

The story evolves through the life of one of the eight, Joe Rantz, who despite being abandoned by his family at the age of 15, never gave up on himself. He survived by his wits and his determination, worked his way through UW doing odd jobs wherever he could find them, and earned his place on the rowing team through sheer courage and the desire to belong somewhere.

Over the course of three years, Joe and the others learned what it took to be a team, to be the best, to win; and they began to learn what it took to be good men.

At a particularly low point in Joe’s life, George Pocock, the Englishman who built the shells for the university, invited Joe into his workshop. There he began to talk about the wood, the tools, the boats, and life. “Pocock pulled out a thin sheet of cedar, flexed the wood, and talked about the camber and the life it imparted to a shell when wood was put under tension. He talked about the underlying strength of the individual fibers in cedar and how their resilience gave the wood its ability to bounce back. The ability to yield, to bend, to give way, to accommodate was sometimes a source of strength in men as well, as long as it was helmed by inner resolve and by principle.”

It was the first of many conversations between these two, conversations that made a huge difference in Joe’s attitude toward his teammates and in his willingness to put his trust in them.

By the time the Washington Eight showed up in Berlin in 1936, they were ready; they had found their “swing”, they were ‘rowing in perfect, flawless harmony, as if they were forged together.’

You know how the story ends. But you don’t know how beautifully the telling of it is in Daniel Brown’s hands. When he describes a race, you can feel the splash of the oars striking the water; your muscles burn right along with the crew’s; and you can see the way the river looks at dawn just before the sun comes up.

We are given a remarkable glimpse into the nearly impossible demands of the sport of rowing, and the stamina and resolve that are necessary for a team like this one to achieve what they accomplished.

We learn how these working-class, small-town boys finally overcame whatever inner demons they had in order to pull together to beat Hitler’s touted German team at that crucial time in world history.

The boys in the boat are all gone now. But there remains one survivor: the Husky Clipper, the shell rowed by the boys themselves. She hangs in the shellhouse on the UW campus, ‘suspended from the ceiling, a graceful needle of cedar and spruce, her red and yellow woodwork gleaming under small spotlights.’

Every fall, a new crop of freshmen gathers under her and listens to the freshman coach tell them how difficult the sport is, and how not many of them will stick it out till the end. But then he tells them about the honor of rowing for Washington and the legacy of those who have gone before. He calls their attention to the Husky Clipper, - and ‘begins to tell the story.’

The 33rd Olympiad began this week. Rowing will be one of the sports covered by the media. What a grand time to read “The Boys In The Boat,” and to remember them. I know where you can find a copy!

I’ll see you at the library.

P.S. George Clooney made a movie of parts of this book. I guess he didn’t like it as it was written because he wasn’t true to the characters, among other things. And he completely missed the spirit of the story. I don’t recommend it.