- [Coach] Lengthen. Lengthen. Go. - [Angie] It's one of those sport just watching makes you tired. - [Coach] Give me everything, boys. - [Angie] It's also one of those sports that not a whole lot of people watch. - They do it for themselves, they do it for each other, you're certainly not doing it for the glory. It's not the greatest spectator sport. - [Angie] Rowers today like rowers of yesterday don't row for fame and yet one would think this rowing team would've received a bit more of that given their incredible accomplishment in 1936. - These sons of loggers and fishermen, coming from the woods of western Washington, they were something of a shock and very much a breath of fresh air. - Boats back then were filled with sons of senators from Ivy league schools, not boys who could barely scrape enough money together to attend a state college. But these University of Washington rowing team members not only beat the odds to win against teams in the U.S. They went on to win gold in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a race watched by a swastika wearing crowd that included Adolf Hitler. It's a story of American underdogs who reminded a Depression era nation what could be done when everyone quite literally pulls together. This is an incredible story. So why did it take 75 years for somebody to write it? - It's a good question. - [Angie] In this one on one with author Daniel James Brown we talk about how even he didn't know about this team's incredible feat until a neighbor's visit. - This is a story that literally walked into my life one day six years ago in the person of my neighbor, a lady I knew then only as Judy. She'd been reading one of my earlier books to her father and he was living under hospice care at her house. He was in the last couple months of his life and he was enjoying that book and she asked if I'd come down to meet him. - [Angie] That man was Joe Rantz, one of the rowing team member from Washington. His heart warming story led Brown on a six year journey to research the challenges of rowing, the Depression, and Nazi Germany and ultimately write "The Boys in the Boat." - [Daniel] I did want to capture a slice of what America was like during those years and also a slice of what Germany was like during those years partly because I wanted people to understand in this race at the end between basically a German boat and American boat what was at stake symbolically with these two different value systems. - [Angie] It's a tale filled with so many struggles, it reads like a Hollywood script and yet in this interview, Daniel James Brown explains how he researched the real life scenes and even tells us about a few that he had to cut from these pages. - That image really touched me and somehow or another it didn't make it into the book and I do regret that. - [Angie] That's next in this Maryville Talks Books one on one with author Daniel James Brown. Presented by Maryville University and Left Bank Books and media sponsors St. Louis Public Radio 90.7 KWMU, and HEC TV. This is the St. Louis Rowing Club's boathouse that we're talking with you today in and we got some birds joining us. - We do. - You've spent a lot of time in places like this over the last several years, haven't you? - Over the last couple years I have been in many boathouses all over the country form New England to San Diego, meeting lots of rowers and really enjoying the experience. - Had you rowed at all before writing this book? - I row with my pen. - You row with your pen. - I had not rowed and I still haven't rowed in any significant way. It was one of the first things I worried about the day after I decided I really wanted to write this book it had occurred to me that I was gonna be writing a book about a sport that I didn't participate in. So I made a point through the whole process of learning as much as I could from as many rowers, seeking out rowers, spending a lot of time at the shell houses. So I got lots of help from lots of rowers. - [Angie] And I do not row so I don't know much about it but you help the reader in understanding how difficult this sport is. - [Daniel] It's an incredibly demanding sport and I mean particularly at the Olympic level. They say that rowing an Olympic 2,000 meter race one of the rowers puts out as much energy as if he played two NBA basketball games back to back but he does it all in about six minutes and he consumes as much oxygen pound for pound as a thoroughbred racehorse does at a full gallop so the physical demands of rowing at this level are just extraordinary. I mean they're pretty much unparalleled I think in any sport that I'm aware of. - But then you have the mental part of it too because in Washington they row through the winter right? - Exactly, yes. And that's in it itself is very challenging because believe me I've been out there, it rains and it sleets, it occasionally snows but the worst thing out on Lake Washington in January or February or any time of the winter is just the terrible cold cutting wind that is always always in your face or in your back or just cutting at you and it just takes an enormous amount of mental fortitude to make yourself get up every day and go do that again and again and again and in fact I mean part of the process of arriving at this Olympic crew was that a lot of kids dropped out along the way because it was just too tough. - What I love about this book is it's a history book, it's sports saga, it's a story with some geography in it. It has suspense with all the races and it's a heartwarming story if nothing else. And you did it all in less than 400 pages which is pretty incredible. How long did it take you to write this? - The writing didn't take very long because I tend not to write until I know where I'm going but the research took a very long time. I started this project about six years ago and I think probably four of those years were spent just doing research. And the research ran everything from traditional library research, looking up newspaper articles from the 1930s on microfilm to much more unconventional things like finding out what time the sun comes up in Poughkeepsie, New York on the day of a particularly race to a lot of conversations with the family members of the nine young men who are at the heart of this story. These events took place 75 years ago and when the families of the nine rowers I'm writing about found out what I was up to they were very very eager to help and so I sat for probably 100 hours talking to the family members and learning about each of their fathers or grandfathers, whatever the case might be. So the research was very sweet being and I just tried to take information from wherever I could get it. - So you talk about the nine boys in the boat and you really feel like you get to know them as a reader. They almost become your friend but the one that you are rooting for as a reader the most is Joe Rantz. How long did you know him before he passed? - Well Joe only lived a couple of months after I started talking to him and I spent as much time as I could talking to him while he was alive and I think he enjoyed that a lot. But then after Joe passed away his daughter Judy had spent the last several years following her dad around literally with a notepad, writing down every recollection he had about this whole sequence of events and so after Joe was gone I spent hundreds of hours with Judy as she helped me to flesh out her dad's part of the story. - That explains a lot because there's so much detail in this book. I mean that's what really transports you back 75 80 years. - A lot of the heart basically comes from Judy. She just adored her dad and many of the sessions we had when we talked through the story involved a lot of tears on her part because he had recently passed away but I couldn't have begun to write the book without her. - I've heard you say that this is kind of a metaphor for that generation, you know that they had humility, that you know we talk about them begin the greatest generation, can you talk a little bit about that metaphor? - Yeah you know I feel pretty strongly about that. I didn't really think in these terms until I had finished the book. I didn't write the book with this in mind but when I finished the book and I sat back and I thought to myself what does this story mean to me? I realized that this story of these nine young men who got in a boat and learned to pull together and do these extraordinary things is a pretty good metaphor for that generation of Americans how found themselves in the same boat of the Depression who had to learn humility because of the suffering that they went through and had to open their hearts to one another and learn to get together and get along and do great things so I do, I think it's a good metaphor for that generation, it's a generation that I admire a lot, it's the generation of you know my father and mother and my uncle and my aunts and so in many ways the book wound up being a tribute to that whole generation. - Let's talk more about how you got to know about this generation and the facts that you gathered. Did it take you overseas? Did you go to Berlin? - I did, it was fairly late in the process but I did not want to write the last few chapters of the book which are set in Berlin without having seen the racecourse on which this gold medal race was run and fortunately the Regatta grounds, the race course, is still there and it looks very much as it did in 1936 and there was a German gentleman there who showed me around. And then he led me up onto the balcony, there was a balcony on which Hitler and the other Nazis stood as they watched the American boat and the German boat in this race and so I was able to get up on that balcony and stand where Hitler had stood and look out over the race course and see it from the vantage point that he did and it was kind of creepy. - How so, it just felt-- - Well just to stand I think any place where Hitler had stood and to sort of put yourself in his shoes even for a moment, is unnerving. But it was also very moving I mean that was a moment at which I got very emotional actually because I thought back on those boys and all the boys who were like them who wound up coming to Germany you know 10 years later trying to hunt Hitler down and so many of them died trying to do that and so it turned out to be a be a pretty emotional moment for me actually. - That's a very big part of the book. I love how you have all of the boys are training and becoming a team you also have what's happening in Germany and it's a side of Germany that we don't always get to hear about it's the pre war Germany. - Exactly, it was a period I didn't know that much about. I mean I think we all pretty much know what happened during the war once the Nazis were in power but these were the years when the Nazis were coming to power and the dark side of Germany was just beginning to develop and it was something of a revelation to me how systematic and how cynical the Nazis were in the way that they misled world opinion in those years leading up to the war. - Sure I mean you talk about the propaganda and how it even worked on a lot of the Olympians. They came back, like the boys in the boat. - It did. Yeah. - They came back saying it's great. - Many of the athletes that went to Berlin in 1936 and the thousands and thousands of Americans who went to Berlin that summer many of them probably most of them came back thinking that Germany was a clean, efficient, modern, respectable, well run country and mostly they had admiration for it. Now they changed their minds within a few years as events unfolded of course but the Germans were very effective in creating almost turning Berlin into almost a movie set on which they could create a sort of fantasy version of what Germany was. - And you talk about the boys' experiences in Germany and there's even parts that kind of let you in on kind of their naivete when, the part for them that led me to that was when people would come up though them and say Heil Hitler and they responded with-- - Heil Roosevelt. - Which kind of just, they didn't get what was going on? - No, they didn't I mean they were having fun and they knew Hitler was, they knew Hitler was a bad guy, he was a dictator but that's about the extent of what they knew or they thought about it at that point. He was just sort of a comical figure to them. It was kind of cute, as Hitler entered the Olympic stadium for the opening ceremonies, a lot of the athletes stood at attention as Hitler and his entourage entered the stadium. The American boys, at least the boys from the rowing crew just sort of lounged on the grass and waved at him as he walked by on his way into the stadium. - And this, you got this from their journals I guess? - Yes, exactly, yeah three of them left very detailed journals of their days in Berlin and so those were really useful. - It's those tidbits that kind of keep you on your toes as a reader 'cause there's all these interesting things. - There also, what keep me excited as a writer because a project like this is a little bit like a treasure hunt I mean you know the scope of the story, you know the big story but then it's fun finding all the little kinds of treasures along the way that enrich it and bring into life. - I noticed there was a tidbit in the notes that I thought was very interesting and that was the tidbit about the allied troops when they were encircling Berlin at the end it was Hitler's fall. - Yes. - What kind of boat were they using? - Well as the American troops approached Berlin form the west, they came to I think it was the Elbe River separating them from Berlin and they had no way to get across but the first troops there found an old abandoned German 8 or racing shell so they climbed in it and I believe they used their rifles as paddles and made their way across the river and onto Berlin. - I mean that's ironic in a way isn't it? - It is, yeah. - Were there any other pieces that boy you thought, gosh that was a great story but I just couldn't put it in? - Oh there were a lot, you know. The only thing I regret is there's a point in the story where Joe is left behind by his family as a child out in the woods on the Olympic Peninsula and this is just a small detail but as his family piled in the car and drove away on this rainy day and left Joe sort of in shock standing on the porch watching them go his little brother Harry Jr. Remembers that the car, it was Franklin it had an oval back window and Joe also remembers that Harry Jr. Was saying but what about Joe but what about Joe and Joe from the porch could see his little brother mouthing these words but what about Joe and that image really touched me and somehow or another it didn't make it into the book and I do regret that. - And Joe was how old at that time? - Joe was I think 14 at that point so he was you know to the verge of, well he was an adolescent but we wound up living completely on his own and having to forage in the woods for berries and poaching salmon out of the Dungeness River in order to survive. - This story, you know you wanted to build I mean the whole book is building up to the end scene which we know the outcome. - You do, I mean you know when you pick the book up you know how it ends and that was one of my challenges as a writer of course was to keep the suspense for the reader even knowing that. - And you know the end and yet you're questioning it throughout the book because there are so many moving parts and-- - Yes, exactly. - Who's gonna be in the boat, is Joe gonna be in the boat? So on and so forth. - Well and that's the way they experienced it. They of course didn't know how it was going to end and so as much as possible I'm letting you see the story from the vantage point of Joe and each of these other young men and experiencing it the way that they did with all the uncertainty and all the challenges that had to be overcome. - That's what I mean there are these roadblocks, every page it seems for this team and then they get to Germany and we won't spoil it but they're even more there. So what I'm bringing all this up for is this is an incredible story, like you said you sat there and Joe Rantz is, well his daughter's house and knew immediately that this is an awesome story. So why did it take 75 years for somebody to write it? - It's a good question. I think partly that August, the Jesse Owens story, which is a great story, it's a wonderful story but it did sort of suck all the oxygen out of the air in terms of press coverage that August. So I suspect there are a lot of good stories from the '36 Olympics that might not have been told and then also these guys came back from Europe in dribs and drabs, there was no ticker tape parade or anything, there was a newspaper strike that week so one of the Seattle papers didn't have any coverage of the event at all and so yeah the event just sort of faded away and there are people of a certain age in Seattle who do remember it but for most part it had gone away. - The families, they met up every 10 years and had a race back on the lake is that right with these boys? - Well the crew would have an anniversary race every 10 year anniversary of the gold medal race and then more than that the families of all nine of them would just get together for barbecues and picnics, through the rest of their lives I mean these guys were incredibly bonded together. They really loved each to her and even as they were very old men they just, they always wanted to be together doing something or another. - Obviously Joe didn't get to read this book. - They were all gone by the time that the book was published but the families of all nine of these guys were very very excited when the book comes out and that means a lot to me. You know when I first heard this story from Joe and then I dig into it, I knew it was a great story. Before I even touched it it just was a good story and I just wanted to do justice to it so the fact that the family members are happy with it that makes me happy. - It was such a good book, I want to know what you're writing next so I can read it. - If I knew I would tell you. - Really? - Yeah, you know a book like this as I say it took four years just to do the research so it's five six years of my life and I want it to be a topic I really love. It's gonna be hard to find a topic I love as much as this one but I'm looking for it. - Do you have any other neighbors that you need to go talk to? - I mean one strategy would be to sit in my living room and wait for more neighbors to come to me but I don't-- - It worked really well for this book. - It worked the first time. - [Angie] None of the nine rowing team members served in World War II. Most of them graduated college as engineers and were recruited to design air crafts for the war effort. They lived long, happy lives, many of them saw their 90s. But now the legend of their gold medal winning bond lives on in these pages where they will forever be known as the boys in the boat.