Editor’s Note: Our Boys in the Boat is a series about the legacy of Whatcom and Skagit County rowers on the University of Washington crew that won Olympic gold in 1936, depicted in the book and movie “The Boys in the Boat.” Today’s story explores two members of the crew whose lives were largely untold.
Before they were “The Boys in the Boat,” Don Hume and Gordy Adam were boys growing up in Skagit and Whatcom counties.
They went on to become part of rowing history, members of the University of Washington eight-oared crew that stunned the world by winning 1936 Olympic gold in Adolf Hitler’s Germany over veteran German and Italian crews. Unlike most of their seven crewmates (eight rowers plus coxswain), Hume and Adam grew up well north of Seattle, shaped by not only the Great Depression but also by their remote surroundings.
The true story of the crew and that race were immortalized in the bestselling 2013 book, “The Boys in the Boat,” now a Hollywood movie, directed by George Clooney and set for Christmas Eve release.
Unlike the book and movie’s main character, Joe Rantz, both Hume and Adam had solid families and supportive parents.
[ Read more: Excerpts from Don Hume’s diary ]
But being raised as children of the Depression, they shared a backstory with their UW crewmates of hard physical work and financial struggle — Adam at his family’s Everson dairy farm and Hume in an Anacortes pulp mill.
Hume had been a star athlete in Anacortes, where his family moved from Olympia in 1929 after his father couldn’t find work during the Depression. Hume’s father, Bernie, got a job at the Anacortes Pulp Mill while Don attended four years of high school, graduating in 1933.
At Anacortes High, Don played basketball and football and was on the track and field team. His 1933 senior class yearbook entry showed him as Key Club president, a member of the yearbook staff and senior ball committee, having a role in the senior play. He finished 10th in his class in academic achievement, according to a story in the Anacortes American newspaper.
Hume made mark in Anacortes
A high-school hint of Hume’s grit, later seen at the Berlin Olympics when he rowed through what was believed to be walking pneumonia, came in a newspaper account of an Anacortes High football game. Hume, a lanky tackle, dislocated his shoulder while sacking the quarterback in a game against Whatcom High.
Instead of leaving the game, according to the story, Hume “found that by turning a backward somersault that his arm would snap back into place.” Hume kept blocking and tackling, his shoulder repeatedly dislocating, causing intense pain. When the somersaults no longer worked, he turned to a teammate to yank his shoulder back into its socket. Finally, the referee had had enough. He told the team captain to remove Hume, despite his protests to “pull my arm back in and I’ll be all right.”
After the mill closed in 1932, the Humes stayed in Anacortes until Don’s graduation, then returned to Olympia with Don’s younger brother, Dale. Don stayed for another year in Anacortes, working at the lumber mill while living with family friend Carl Everett and family, according to longtime Anacortes newspaper reporter Wallie Funk.
Hume fell in love with rowing after high school. He came across a beat-up rowboat on the shore of Guemes Channel and fixed it up. He spent hours rowing up and down the channel, and around Guemes Island. One summer, he took days to row from Anacortes to the family summer cabin in Olympia.
“My dad would tell me stories about sitting on his dock looking up the bay, waiting for him,” said Don’s nephew Tim Hume, 58, of Olympia, who shared memories and his uncle’s memorabilia with CDN in recent interviews.
Back in Anacortes, Carl Everett’s basement held workout and weightlifting gear, wrote Funk, that helped Hume hone his muscles as he dreamed of making the UW rowing squad. Enrollment at a university in those Depression days came with major perks — reliable housing and regular meals.
No neighbors in Everson
Meanwhile, 55 miles north, Gordy Adam graduated from Deming’s Mt. Baker High in 1932. Adam was born in Seattle after his dad moved to the U.S. from Scotland and started a small grocery store. When Gordy was in the second grade, his family left Seattle and his father “made the mistake of buying a small dairy farm … in the Nooksack Valley,” Adam said, according to his 1988 oral history interview with the LA84 Foundation project. With Gordy an only child, the family struggled to make the Everson farm successful.
Just down the road from the farm, Adam attended a two-room schoolhouse, the Glen Echo School, with mostly other farm kids, before attending Mt. Baker.
“They had no neighbors,” said Tracy Ward, Adam’s daughter, and he would only meet up with friends after walking to school. “I think being an only child might have been why he was quieter.”
The farm “was never a very successful operation, but it was a great place, I guess, for me to grow up because there were woods and streams and a lot of wide, open space,” Adam said in 1988.
Neither Hume nor Adam had rowed competitively before college, which was not unusual. Hume made a mission of joining legendary coach Al Ulbrickson’s storied program, but for Adam, his path to UW — and Olympic destiny — was shaped by fate, and a downtown Seattle streetcar.
Adam planned to attend Washington State and study engineering after graduation. But he didn’t have money, and realized he lacked some required courses. So he returned to Mt. Baker High and worked the family farm for a year. Still broke, Adam got a job with an Alaskan canning company, working a grueling five months setting and pulling up salmon traps. Upon his return to Seattle with a few hundred dollars in his pocket, he discovered the UW campus was just a streetcar ride away. Class registration happened to be underway. Hello, Huskies.
Adam returned home to Everson to tell his folks. They were Husky football fans who had never attended college. “They were tickled to death,” he said.
Adam made the UW freshman football team as a walk-on but realized he’d never be first string. After three weeks he tried crew. He liked it. And as a “country kid” from Whatcom County, the prospect of travel — a promising crew got to compete at freshmen nationals in Poughkeepsie, New York — was appealing.
Adam in the ‘engine room’
In the boat, the 6-foot-2, 172-pound Hume played a prominent role in the critical stroke seat facing the coxswain, positioned in front of Rantz. The stroke sets the boat’s pace, and requires excellent technique and rhythm. Adam, at 6-2, 175 pounds, was in the third seat, five behind Hume, part of what’s known as “the engine room” that provides the shell’s oomph.
Adam said seats three and four were “sort of ordinary” but Ulbrickson described Adam as anything but. In a United Press International (UPI) story, he described Adam as the “silent man of the crew. Hardly ever says a word on or off the water. Long on fortitude and probably pulls more weight than any man in boat.”
Seats “three, four and five tend to be three athletes that are in there to put the hammer down, especially in the last 500 meters of a race,” said Eric Cohen, UW champion coxswain and rowing historian. “You want warriors.
You want guys that will fight to the end … Those are the guys that you go to for inspiration when everything in your body hurts.”
Ulbrickson called Hume the “poker-faced sophomore. Never shows fatigue even though he may be in torture … gives promise of being one of Washington’s greatest stroke oars.”
They needed every one of Hume and Adam’s contributions to win gold on Aug. 14, 1936.
Hume was in bed with a spiking fever the morning of the race, a culmination of several days of illness since the team’s arrival in Germany in late July. Some reports had him losing up to 14 pounds leading to the final. The team had qualified first but were suspiciously assigned the worst lane, No. 6, with the most wind and choppiest water. The lane was an estimated two-boat-length disadvantage, Hume said in a daily diary written for months up to and including the Olympics. Lane 6 was also the closest to the grandstands, with thousands screaming “Deutschland! Deutschland!” at the race’s critical juncture. Germany and Italy got the calmest lanes, 1 and 2.
Hampered by a horrendous start, the U.S. boat made its move with just 500 meters left, Adam putting the hammer down, Hume snapping out of a woozy daze. With 300 meters left, they caught the Italians and Germans and it was a three-way race. When they crossed the finish line, they didn’t know they’d won until hearing it from the public address announcer. In a race 2,000 meters long, they had won gold by six-tenths of a second.
“Probably the toughest race we’ll ever have to row,” Hume said in his diary entry that night.
Lives forever changed
After winning stunning Olympic gold as sophomores, Adam and Hume returned to UW and rowing. But their lives were changed forever — their victory in Germany bonded all nine for life. For years they returned annually to UW for reunions, climbing aboard the 62-foot shell, Husky Clipper, together with coxswain Bobby Moch, later a Seattle attorney, and rowing the waters in front of the old shell house.
Besides Moch, the other Olympians on the UW team were Joe Rantz, George Hunt, Jim “Stub” McMillin, Johnny White, Charles Day and Roger Morris.
Hume graduated from UW, served in World War II as a merchant mariner, and traveled the world working in oil and energy exploration. Tim Hume remembers his Uncle Don showing up twice a year — Christmas Eve and in June for the rowing reunion — at his Olympia home, where Don had his mail sent because he was on the road so much. Hume was married briefly and had no children. He considered his brother Dale’s family his own. Something of an international man of mystery, Hume was the one guy at the annual UW crew reunions that you were unsure would show.
“There was always kind of a joke that nobody really knew exactly what he did,” Tim said.
What they did know: Don was a gifted, self-taught pianist. He would bring presents from faraway places — Russia, Japan, Indonesia.
“Literally you could just sit there and listen to him for hours,” Tim said. “It was almost indescribable how smart, funny, engaging, humble, adventurous he was.”
Adam left UW just short of his diploma for a steady job at Boeing, where he worked for 38 years as a production engineer, working on the B-17, B-29, early 707s and 727s. Teammates Rantz and McMillin also had career Boeing jobs.
Adam married his wife Margaret, whom he met at UW, and settled for a time in Seahurst, where they raised daughter Tracy and son Dave. Tall, humble and even-keeled, Adam liked to garden and work with his hands — everything from a major home expansion that included a floor-to-ceiling copper fireplace, to a dollhouse for his granddaughter.
“I was so proud to hold his hand and go places,” said Tracy, 79, of Grove City, Illinois. “He was good at what he did and very conscientious. He was very nice to people. He was very quiet in a lot of ways. As he got older, he got more social. I saw him laugh a lot.”
In retirement, Adam and his wife moved to Laguna Hills, California. Grandpa Gordy “was a really kind man,” said Brian Adam, 43, of Petaluma, California, and was “definitely an engineer,” struck by the efficiency of the trains and the design of the German autobahn during the Olympics.
‘Heil Roosevelt’
Also on display in 1936 — Hitler’s sway over the German population, a precursor of the horrors to come.
“We couldn’t help but notice all over Berlin (that) wherever you went or whoever you bumped into, nobody said ‘Hello,’ nobody said ‘Good morning,’” Adam said in the 1988 interview. “They were all friendly and helpful but the standard greeting was ‘Heil Hitler.’ We, of course, got smart once in a while and would answer them, ‘Heil Roosevelt,’ which I don’t think they noticed.”
Gordy Adam died in 1992, Don Hume in 2001. Each chose to be cremated with their ashes cast over water — Adam in the ocean off the California coast, Hume off Guemes Island, where he first fell in love with how a boat could move under human power. A few “Boys in the Boat” were there to scatter his remains.
The boys in the boat are all gone now, the last, Roger Morris, passing away in 2009, several years before the book would unexpectedly vault them into the kind of enduring fame they never experienced while living. Maybe just as well, says Tim Hume.
“I don’t think any of them would have liked any of this,” Tim said. “They were really humble, great men, and they didn’t live off that glory.”
Joe Rantz was right in saying it’s about the boys and the boat, said Hume. “That connection was real for their entire lives.”
Coming Wednesday: A story of the re-creation of the University of Washington’s shell house for the “The Boys in the Boat” movie.
Meri-Jo Borzilleri is a freelance journalist whose stories have appeared in Cascadia Daily News, The Seattle Times, New York Times and ESPN.com, among other outlets. A former sports reporter for the Miami Herald, Colorado Springs Gazette and Hilton Head Island Packet, she was rowing a single scull when nearly run over by a tugboat during a Learn to Row session on Lake Union.
