A few years back, my husband slipped his hand into the pocket of a smart hand-me-down sports coat from my Uncle Allan. He felt something in his pocket and was surprised to find a ticket for the showing of a PBS documentary called “The Boys of ’36.” Uncle Allan had arranged to preview this documentary in his beloved Nordic Museum in Ballard. Ballard is an old fishing village in Seattle once populated by Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders, Finns, and Danes who manned the boats and worked the docks in their old wool sweaters and flat caps.
Allan was a devoted University of Washington Husky and worked in logging camps during his summers. He later worked his way to Harvard to get a master’s degree in soils to prepare him for a career in the construction industry in his hometown of Seattle. He was a lifelong friend to the “U” and, as a student, crossed paths with the young men who later became famous as Olympic champions. To most of America, these young men are known as The Boys in the Boat, the name author Daniel James Brown gave to the 1936 eight-man rowing team in his 2013 book about Seattle’s favorite sons (until the Legion of Boom came along). Now, this non-fiction story has been made into a movie debuting on Christmas Day. The film is directed by George Clooney, but don’t let that keep you from seeing the film, reading the book, or listening to the audiobook.
The story of the 1936 University of Washington eight-man rowing crew is the story America needs right now to remind us of how there is such a thing as pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. Sorry, not sorry, lefties.
It’s a story of how swallowing self-doubt and releasing ego for the good of the team can create an even more powerful force—a collective rhythm. In rowing, they call it the swing.
Back in 1936, Seattle was a fishing and logging town. Skid row was a long, steep road where loggers slid their felled trees down to Henry Yesler’s mill. Boeing was a mere 20 years old. Amazon was still a river in South America. Bill Gates’s father was only nine years old. And it was the fourth year of the Great Depression, where 25 percent of men were out of work.
The story of “The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics” is a true American story about a bunch of “sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers from the American West … who defeated successive echelons of privilege and power” to beat Adolph Hitler, the head of the Nazi socialist party. Inspired in part by American eugenicist Margaret Sanger, who founded the organization that would become Planned Parenthood, Hitler would kill six million Jews and other unfortunates in his quest for a “master race.”
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The 1936 games were the Jesse Owens games. Owens was the avatar of American track and field excellence, a black man who, by competing and winning, put a thumb in the eye of one of the world’s worst actors. But Hitler had no idea that a Jew was rowing in the University of Washington’s eight-man scull.
The emotional heartbeat of the story is Joe Rantz. The gangly boy was abandoned three times by his family— once when his mother died, and then twice by his father and his new wife. A pre-adolescent Joe had to chop wood and work in a Spokane area camp mess hall to earn a bed and a meal when his stepmother ordered Joe’s father to kick him out.
Yet, Variety sniped that the story reminded the writer of Chariots of Fire (as if that’s a bad thing), a “kind of WASP daydream of a sports movie. It could almost be a late-’90s Matt Damon movie, only with less interior conflict.”
“‘The Boys in the Boat,’ a movie that may remind you of ‘Chariots of Fire,’ is a kind of WASP daydream of a sports movie. It could almost be a late-’90s Matt Damon movie, only with less interior conflict,” writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. https://t.co/1MldOVlaRc
— Variety (@Variety) December 17, 2023
Maybe the movie is bad. I’ll let you know after I see it next week. The story is perfection, however. Perhaps the critic would prefer the story be about any other group of individuals as long as they weren’t WASPY white. It’s a shame he judges these young men by the color of their skin and not the content of their character.
Some of the kids who came to the University of Washington during the Great Depression had parents who could help pay tuition, but Rantz and couple other members of the crew paid their own way, earning money by felling trees, hanging by ropes to blast the granite walls of the Grand Coulee Dam, washing dishes, mopping floors, and sometimes only getting a meal when they poached salmon out of a stream.
Privileged they weren’t.
This was the old American West, when your success depended on your willingness to work, getting a good education, and having a plan. Gen Z kids have been taught that success is illusory, that the man is holding everyone else down, and that the color of your skin dictates destiny. That idea of America is for losers.
And yet here we are, a rich country whose people can afford luxury beliefs but whose souls are impoverished.
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Back in the Great Depression days, men who couldn’t find work lived in cheap flop houses or Hoovervilles in pockets of Seattle. Tar-paper-roofed boxes were called home, hobos hitched rides on trains in search of a better situation, there was a watery soup when one finally got to the end of the bread line, and everyone seemed to be looking for a job.
Now Ballard, that old Seattle fishing village, is a haven for drug-addicted camp dwellers and tony condos, and where teens walking home from school are shaken down by gangs who aren’t poor or hungry, just bereft of integrity and ignorant of what is right and wrong. This nihilism is indulged and encouraged by this generation of “leaders” who refuse to believe that people should be punished for wrongdoing.
There is a better America to be had. An America in which we equip people to make ethical choices, encourage hard work, and set aside our own egos for a minute to help others. Maybe then someone or some team would be worth cheering for — and our country would get back into the swing of things.
See the trailer for the film below.
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