Just a few years later, the new Conibear Shellhouse was up and running and the old ASUW Shell House was relegated to storage and miscellany. So, what are my earliest memories of the old ASUW Shell House? You might think they were from my childhood but I was only 3 years old when the 1936 crew gathered for its 10-year reunion row in 1946. Inside this huge, wooden shell house, the boys were privy to the wise counsel of Pocock, a man who understood both the dynamics of rowing and the dynamics of the human soul. The racing shells he built by hand were unsurpassed in speed and structure no wonder they were used for decades by colleges across the country as well as by Olympic competitors. Located along the shore of the Montlake Cut, this building, which was erected in 1918, not only served as the training center for decades of Husky oarsmen, but also housed the workshop of the legendary George Pocock. They trained right here in what was then the backwater town of Seattle, in an old building that housed seaplanes at the end of World War I, known then as the ASUW Shell House. Where did this amazing team come from? Not from any of the prestigious rowing programs of colleges back east. The ASUW Shell House owes its massive size and interesting shape to the fact that it was originally designed to potentially house seaplanes from World War I. They pulled off an impossible win in front of Adolf Hitler.
But their skill as a team, their wicked-fast racing shell, and the bond between the boys would not allow any of them to let the others down.
It wasn’t until the last 500 meters or so that Hume snapped out of it and began to respond to the call of coxswain Bobby Moch, ’36, to pick up the pace. Shortly into the 2,000-meter race, he nearly passed out, and became unaware of his surroundings. Don Hume, ’37, their stroke oar, the man who set the pace, was ill with what was probably walking pneumonia.
To make matters worse, the boys from Seattle were so preoccupied with keeping their shell straight in the face of the wind that they missed the drop of the starter’s flag and got off the line a stroke and a half late. That lane, of course, was assigned to the Germans. Not surprisingly, they were assigned to lane six, the outside lane-a lane so exposed to the wind that it was like adding a two-length handicap behind the boat in lane one, the best lane.
0 kommentar(er)
