[00:00:00] Andrew: Hello, travelers. Welcome. I am Andrew Shults. I am a producer with Shaka Guide, and I'm joined by my friend here, Matt Caracciolo. He's a writer and an editor for Shaka Guide as well. How's it going, Matt?
[00:00:14] Matt: Doing great. How you doing? Happy Friday.
[00:00:16] Andrew: Happy Friday. I'm doing fantastic. I'm excited to talk to you today. We are gonna dive into of an interesting story that we've got featured on our Olympic National Park tour from Shaka Guide. It's not actually really about the park itself, but it is about person who grew up really close to the park, essentially a local hero and it ties into a larger story is centered around the 1936 Olympics. Now you guys listening out there might have heard about this story. You might be familiar with it a bit from the 2013 book by Daniel James Brown called The Boys in the Boat, which did get turned into a pretty big movie in 2023. So, it's a pretty well-known story, but there's lots of little details to dive into. I think it's particularly relevant to the moment right now because the 2026 Winter Olympics are in Milan and we've got our resident expert on Italy, and soon-to-be traveler, Matt here. Are you excited about the games that are coming up?
[00:01:18] Matt: I am. The reason Andrew's bringing it up is because I am going to the Olympics, which I'm very excited about, my first Olympics!
[00:01:25] Andrew: Yes. So we can all collectively be jealous of Matt here as he gets to go travel to Italy and experience the Olympics. And I think you said you're gonna watch a couple of events, right?
[00:01:35] Matt: Yeah, we're gonna go to two hockey games and a speed skating final. I can't tell you how stoked I am to see somebody win a gold medal in person.
[00:01:44] Andrew: Yeah.
[00:01:45] Matt: That will just be amazing.
[00:01:46] Andrew: These athletes dedicate their entire lives to something. This is why it's so fun to watch the Olympics, it's a culminating moment for elite athletes to make it to this stage. And then to potentially win gold would be like the pinnacle of their success in this field. And to be able to witness a moment like that has got to be emotional.
[00:02:05] Matt: I can't wait.
[00:02:06] Andrew: Yes. Get outta here now. Cool. So the Olympics are coming up. So it felt like a good time to talk about a story about the Olympics, and that is the story of Joe Rantz. So Matt, why don't you tell us a little bit about who Joe Rantz is?
[00:02:23] Matt: Yeah, so Joe Rantz is one of the members of the men's rowing team in the 1936 Olympics and the reason that he is part of our Olympic National Park tour is that he spent a good amount of his childhood in a nearby town called Sequim. When you look at the word Sequim, it looks like it says 'see-quim', but I believe it is pronounced 'skwim'.
[00:02:47] Andrew: You're correct. Yes. I remember when we were producing this tour, we about this a lot. I think we even make a little bit of a joke in the tour audio about it, it just being fun to say as well. Sequim.
[00:03:02] Matt: Yeah, say 'Sequim' all day.
[00:03:06] Andrew: So yeah, so he's from the area of Sequim, which is pretty close to Olympic National Park. It's on the Olympic Peninsula, western Washington state. At this time in the 1930s, what is that area like?
[00:03:22] Matt: Yeah, so it's pretty remote. So Olympic National Park that's there today- it wasn't a national park at the time, it was a national monument. So it wasn't necessarily a big tourist draw at the time like it is now. And just in general I don't think Washington as like a whole state is a very populous area yet.
[00:03:41] Obviously you have Seattle and Tacoma and those places, but they're not giant. Generally speaking it's a kind of remote area. And then Sequim is the remote area of the remote area.
[00:03:53] Andrew: Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. I lived in Seattle a few years myself and Sequim and Port Angeles and the cities that surround the current entrance area of Olympic National Park and the Olympic mountain ranges, it's a totally different world, even by today's standard, I'd say it's more small town, foresty, and a little bit rural in a sense compared to a big city like Seattle.
[00:04:22] So I'd imagine at that time especially. It felt even more disconnected from like mainstream USA. Joe Rantz grows up in this area. What is Joe Rantz' childhood like? What type of home did he grow up in? What type of kid was he?
[00:04:44] Matt: Yeah. Joe Rantz has been described as good natured, diligent, he liked to play guitar like a pretty solid kid, but he had a rough childhood. His mother died when he was young, and his father, he married to this woman who just did not like him at all. I don't know specifically why, but she was more focused on her children than him to the point where she wouldn't even let him stay in the house sometimes.
[00:05:07] Like he slept in a schoolhouse for at least a year. Yeah, and then at age 15, the entire family actually packed up and left to go live somewhere else without Joe. Like his father just did not have the capability to keep that family together in a way that included Joe. So Joe, basically, as a sophomore in high school, started raising himself.
[00:05:33] Like he, he did odd jobs to keep himself fed. He lived in a half finished cabin in the woods. But he still went to school. He kept his grades up. I don't know how you can get to be more of a solid person than that to go through all that and still be like, pretty put together.
[00:05:52] Andrew: Yeah, kudos to Joe. That sounds really rough. And I think at one point his father maybe tried to bring him back home for a little bit but it was short-lived. His stepmom wasn't having it and so maybe at some point his father cared a little bit about him, but it feels like a lonely and a struggle of an experience for Joe as a child.
[00:06:17] And yet he's doing really impressive things. He's playing guitar. He's described as being smart and like good at school, even though he is like living on his own as a kid. That's already a pretty impressive life experience to have.
[00:06:36] Matt: And when he is a teenager- this is the Great Depression too- so on top of all that, and that might be one factor why his mom didn't want him around is, ' I've got my kids. I need to take care of my kids with my limited resources.' Not that's a great excuse, but that might have been where her brain was at the time.
[00:06:53] Andrew: I think that possibly could be it for sure. He's an athlete in high school. I believe he does like a little gymnastics. Maybe he's on a few different sports teams. But he actually, was it during high school that he reconnects with his older brother?
[00:07:10] Matt: Yeah, so one of his older brothers does invite him to live with them in Seattle. So his senior year, he does get to enjoy a more typical high school lifestyle where he is got a stable home, he can just focus on his grades and extracurriculars instead of trying to find something to eat.
[00:07:30] So that, that's definitely a leg up his senior year in high school with his brother.
[00:07:35] Andrew: Yeah, basically it was like a brother that his father had much earlier, so he had already grown up and I believe his brother had a wife of his own at that time. It's nice Joe gets to just be a kid for a little bit. It's a short little window there where he doesn't have to fend for himself quite as much, and he thrives even more so. He was thriving in the bad conditions, so he does even better, I think once he has a little bit of help. And basically he's such a great athlete in high school that he gets noticed right by some possible recruiters from the University of Washington.
[00:08:15] Matt: That's right. So he is on the gymnastics team and the University of Washington rowing coach is at the high school for another reason, but he happens to see Joe practicing gymnastics and thinks that he would be a good addition to the rowing team. And yeah, he does recruit him to come to it's a University of Washington.
[00:08:36] Andrew: Yeah, essentially he sees Joe, I think he's 6' 2", 6' 3", like really muscular, you could see some old pictures of him online if you look up Joe Rantz and you can immediately tell he was an athlete.
[00:08:49] Matt: It's hard to imagine somebody who's 6'3" on the gymnastics team, or I feel like gymnasts are usually on the shorter side, so 6'3", that must have been something.
[00:08:59] Andrew: That's probably what that recruiter thought like, 'you're in the wrong sport. We, gotta put you in a boat and put you to really good use.'
[00:09:07] Matt: 'Look at that wingspan! You could use that rowing a boat.'
[00:09:09] Andrew: Exactly. That's just good, that's good recruiting there. He essentially encourages Joe to try out for the UW rowing team. It's like he still had to work his way into school and onto the team. It wasn't like a done deal just because he was seen, right?
[00:09:29] Matt: And he had to raise the money to get to college too. It's not like he got a full ride scholarship or anything like that. Yeah, he did spend some time making some money before going on to college, and then, yeah, he got himself onto the rowing team once he got there.
[00:09:43] Andrew: Right, so we basically established Joe Rantz grows up small rural part of Washington. He's living near the area around Olympic National Park. But he has some connections with Seattle, eventually does- where he went to high school was in Seattle when he is living with his brother. That's where he becomes a really excellent athlete, gets discovered, works his way into UW, works his way onto the UW rowing team. That's where the story kind of opens up a bit because this is already like a really impressive personal path, but he's about to become part of a much bigger story of a group of young men who defy the odds in the sport of rowing at large. So maybe you could tell us a bit more about what happens after Joe Rantz is on the UW rowing team. What happens to that team?
[00:10:43] Matt: Yeah, you're right. At this point, it's not really just Joe's story, it's the team's story. Even though he's the main character of the book, it's not called The 'Boy' in the Boat. It's The 'Boys' in the Boat. And pretty much everyone on this team, it is like Joe, maybe they didn't have such a rough childhood, but they're coming from working class families.
[00:11:01] Like they're coming from farms, they're coming from fishing families, logging families, that sort of thing. So they've all like, they've got that kind of work ethic behind them. But they're all kind of underdogs in the same way.
[00:11:14] And it's, not to lean too hard into a stereotype but when you think of rowing teams, you don't normally think of guys that are coming from logging and fishing families. Like you're thinking of the Winklevoss twins and The Social Network, out east, in these prestigious places like Harvard and Yale. And that's what their competition looks like for UW.
[00:11:36] They're competing against these established elite teams that are mostly out on the East Coast and they're winning anyways. And they actually- I don't know the total ins and outs of how the Olympic qualifiers worked back then- but essentially the UW rowing team by defeating all these other more elite East Coast teams earned the spot on the Olympic team as like the official men's rowing team for the 1936 Olympic.
[00:12:09] Andrew: That's incredible. I totally agree with the perception of the sport, and I think that's even true today. Like you said, the Harvard Winklevoss twins. To this day it's a sport that gets a lot of rich people, for lack of a better word, people who are privileged and have a lot of money and have a pathway to train all the time and get really into the weeds on the specifics of the sport.
[00:12:41] And then here in UW, we've got people who are excelling because they grew up in circumstances that really just made them really tough and really strong, and it's inspiring to see that grittiness and tough upbringing and the strength that came from that overcoming, what could be described as like power from money or success from money. That's generalizing. But for the most part, it feels like the case here. And then the fact that they qualify for the Olympics is crazy because of how remote UW really is even today, but especially at that time. The center of the United States is really, know, the northeast, it's New York, it's the capital area. For a team on the very upper left hand corner of the map to be able to pull through and defeat everybody else to win that spot is pretty awesome. So, at this point, they defy the odds and they get a spot. They're qualified to compete in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but it's all the way in Berlin. So logistically, that's not an easy thing to make happen. So actually it's not even a done deal at this point. Just because they qualify doesn't mean they're actually going yet.
[00:13:57] Matt: That's right. I guess the Olympic committee was short on funds, so even though they'd qualified they did not actually have the money to go. And so, what ended up happening was the Seattle community supported them. The Seattle community ended up rallying behind the UW rowing team.
[00:14:14] Between the radio and newspapers and volunteers going door-to-door knocking, they said, ' look, our boys need help. They need money to actually go to Berlin.' And in two days they raised over $5,000. And I looked it up because $5,000 may not sound all that much. It's still a lot today in two days just by a community effort, without social media, without a Kickstarter. But $5,000 in those days was something over $100,000. So they raised $100,000 in two days.
[00:14:47] Andrew: That's insane.
[00:14:48] Matt: Which is pretty awesome.
[00:14:49] Andrew: Yeah. I'm with you. I think $5,000's a lot. I don't know if I could pull together $5,000 in the next two days for something by myself. So the fact that's essentially $100,000 of equivalent value- it's absolutely incredible.
[00:15:05] Matt: In the Great Depression.
[00:15:07] Andrew: In the Great Depression too!
[00:15:08] Matt: Let's not forget that part either.
[00:15:11] Andrew: Yeah.
[00:15:11] Matt: People don't have much to give but they gave anyway.
[00:15:14] Andrew: Exactly. It just speaks to like how inspiring this journey is, and to people who were in that community at the time recognized what Joe Rantz and these other boys on the team did and where they came from and everyone collectively decided, 'you know what? These guys deserve to go. They've been through a lot and they've earned it. We can all pull together to make it happen.' That's pretty awesome.
[00:15:41] So, they raise the money. The community comes together. The UW team is going to the Olympics in Berlin. This is 1936 in Berlin. So obviously, the Nazis are becoming a regime that is becoming more and more well known. At this point, not a whole lot is known about the atrocities that are gonna be happening soon. But, they're seen as a rising political power. This is a really unique Olympic games in history. Maybe just describe what's going on in the world when this team itself comes to the Olympics, a lot of people are coming together in Berlin and it's a complicated period of history, right?
[00:16:35] Matt: Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's really weird Olympics. It's interesting, but for all the wrong reasons. Like you said, World War II hasn't started yet obviously, but people are starting to become a little concerned about what Nazis are all about.
[00:16:48] But the Nazis decide to hide some of their like anti-Semitic efforts and really try to like present Berlin as this very clean and efficient place and that the Nazi regime are on the up and up. ' See how great things are when we're in charge?' So it's all one big propaganda piece.
[00:17:07] Andrew: Yeah.
[00:17:08] Matt: So that's one interesting aspect. Another interesting aspect is that it's the first Olympic games to be televised, albeit to a small, I believe, Berlin-only audience. But, that's interesting that like, some of these events were televised live for people to see. But then people do know that the Nazis are white supremacists.
[00:17:31] And so like the other kind of big Olympic story for the 1936 games is Jesse Owens, which, where I'm from in Columbus is a big name because he went to Ohio State. And if you go to Ohio State, then you might exercise at the Jesse Owens gym, the JO North, JO South. Jesse Owens, an African American man, has a great Olympic games right under the nose of Adolf Hitler.
[00:17:53] So that, that's another big story happening at the same time as The Boys in the Boat.
[00:17:58] Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned, this was one of the first times that we've got some televised events for the Olympics, maybe the first time. And it wasn't like a whole lot filmed, but there was actually some footage of rowing race that we're gonna talk about in a minute. It was also like a really globally-accessible event because of radio. We talked about radio being really important, I think, in the process of Seattle as a town coming together to raise the money. Radio was a big part of that campaign, I think. And I think I saw that radio broadcast, at least the rowing events that we're gonna talk about in a minute, to over 300 million people, which is pretty huge.
[00:18:44] It's a really interesting time technologically, and for like, media. So the convergence of these different variables does make for like, a really interesting moment. So, let's narrow in on the rowing event specifically because that's the reason why Joe Rantz and the UW team are heading to Berlin. What are the expectations in this event at this Olympics? Who are the favorites? How are we expecting our US team to do?
[00:19:18] Matt: Yeah, so you know, as the home team, obviously Germany is favored to win. The Americans have had good teams in the past. I was kinda looking up how many goals have we had up to that point. We'd actually done pretty well up to 1936. So it's not that we were total underdogs. You've got the home team, Germany. You've got Great Britain in there, which again, thinking of elite- upper crust places like Oxford or Cambridge. They've probably got guys like that on their team. And so I, I think the Americans are probably considered to be in the mix but maybe not the favorites.
[00:19:54] Andrew: And with Germany being probably the favorites, and as you mentioned, the Nazi regime wanting to use this event as propaganda essentially, somebody very important is actually gonna show up and watch this event in person. And who else could it be?
[00:20:19] Matt: Adolf Hitler. Yeah, so the rowing team qualifies for the final. And so the final happens along this river. 75,000 people in the stands and among them is not just Hitler but a lot of the top Nazis. They get like this balcony seat and they're getting ready for the race to start.