Joseph Rantz

Joseph "Joe" Harry Rantz (born March 31, 1914 in Spokane , Washington , † September 10, 2007 in Redmond , Washington ) was an American rower .

Life

Youth until 1935

Joseph's father had an auto repair shop in Spokane and his mother was a piano teacher. The mother died of throat cancer in 1918, after which his father went to Canada for some time. Joseph lived first with relatives, later temporarily with his brother fifteen years his senior, who had studied in Pennsylvania, then was a school inspector in Idaho, until he moved to Seattle as a chemistry teacher. After his father returned, Joseph lived mostly with his father and his half-siblings from the father's second marriage. After the Great Depression , his father and his family moved from their own farm in Sequim to Seattle, Joseph stayed on the farm alone. In 1931 he moved in with his brother and went to Seattle to Roosevelt High School, which he graduated in 1932. Then he worked for a year to earn money for his studies.

In 1933, Rantz began his studies at the University of Washington and applied for a place in the freshmen eight of the Washington Huskies, the sports team at his university. The freshmen crew was coached by Tom Bolles, who became head coach at Harvard in 1936. Head coach Al Ulbrickson was responsible for the older rowers, while boat builder George Yeoman Pocock had his workshop near the huskies' boathouse. In 1934, the Huskies Freshmen boat with Herbert Morris , George Hunt and Joseph Rantz won both the competition for the Pacific Championships against the boat from the University of California, Berkeley and at the US Championships of the Intercollegiate Rowing Association (IRA) on the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie . The first team lost to the Berkeley team at the IRA Championships.

In 1935 all three Huskies boats win at the Pacific Championships against the boats from California. The freshmen with batsmen Donald Hume , Gordon Adam and John White , the junior team with helmsmen Robert Moch , Jim McMillin and Charles Day and, as the first team, the freshmen of the previous year. At the IRA championships, the Freshmen win with Hume and the juniors with Rantz, who were the first team to row at the Pacific Championships. The crew around Robert Moch started as the first team and took third place.

The Olympic year 1936

In 1936 Ulbrickson created his new first crew from rowers from the three boats from the previous year. Eighth with Herbert Morris, Charles Day, Gordon Adam, John White, Jim McMillin, George Hunt, Joseph Rantz, Donald Hume and helmsman Robert Moch won on Lake Washington on April 18 by three lengths ahead of Berkeley. Both boats were built by George Yeoman Pocock, the Husky Clipper was only christened at the end of March 1936. At the end of June at the IRA Championships on the Hudson, all three boats from Washington won, the first team won for the first time in ten years, back then with Ulbrickson as batsman.

While the IRA championships were held over four miles, the elimination race for the Olympic Games in Berlin took place on a 2,000-meter course on Lake Carnegie in Princeton. In the finals, the boats from California, Washington, Pennsylvania and the New York Athletic Club rowed. Washington won by a boat length ahead of Penn and Berkeley. After qualifying for Berlin, a fundraising campaign in Washington State raised the fare to Berlin within two days, the first donor being the Seattle Times . The crossing took place on the SS Manhattan, which was completed in 1931 . The rowing competitions of the Olympic Games on the regatta course Berlin-Grünau did not take place until the second week of the Games. In the run-up on August 12, the American eighth won with six meters in front of the British boat, the European champions from Hungary and the runner-up European champions from Switzerland also reached the final directly. The British, Germans and Italians reached the finals via the hope runs on August 13th. In the final on August 14th, Italians and Germans drove on lanes 1 and 2, the US eighth on lane 6. The American winners, the second-placed Italians and the Germans reached the finish line within a second.

Later years

With the exception of Robert Moch, who had completed his studies, the entire crew also competed as the first team in 1937 and won again in Poughkeepsie. Morris Hunt and Rantz ended their active careers with the race in 1937, the three had not lost a single official race in their careers.

Joe Rantz finished his post graduate studies as a chemical engineer in 1939, as did his longtime girlfriend Joyce. They married on the evening of their graduation day. They had five children, Joyce died in 2002. Rantz began his professional career in California at the Union Oil Company , then moved back to Boeing in Seattle during the war and later worked at Boeing on research for NASA.

The 1936 crew met often and every ten years they rowed together in the Husky Clipper , with Charles Day, who died early, only being there twice. In 1986 the others rowed together for the last time. The Husky Clipper hangs on the ceiling of the dining room in the University of Washington's Conibear Shellhouse , where freshmen gather every fall to apply for a place on the Washington Huskies' boat.

literature

• Daniel James Brown: The miracle of Berlin. Riemann Verlag München 2015 ISBN 978-3-570-50184-9 (Original: The Boys in the Boat . Viking, Penguin Group New York 2013)

Web links

• Joe Rantz in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• The Husky crew in the 1930s (English)

Footnotes

1. ↑ Pocock had christened the boat with Sauerkraftsaft "to get it used to Germany." (Brown: Das Wunder von Berlin. 2015 p. 315)
2. ↑ Brown: The Miracle of Berlin. 2015 p. 370ff