Das Boat
Narrative nonfiction is a particularly pleasing form of writing to me. Many people would agree that there are more than enough true stories to fill our imaginations and that we don’t need fiction to lift our hearts. I have never been particularly good at writing fiction. I don’t think its a lack of imagination, but rather a lack of interest in factionalizing from scratch. I have been known to embellish a story to the point where many would consider it more fictional than real, but there is something about the spine of the story being from real life that spurs me to be the storyteller that I am. My stories are sometimes built around circumstances or tales, but they are mostly borne of the people I meet. People are the real currency of a storyteller.
Needless to say, I have met many interesting people in my seventy years, but none more than Irving Aaron Jenkins. I met Irving in 1990 when he was 76 years old. He had recently reconnected with my mother after their 55th Cornell Reunion. He actually hadn’t attended but had read her name in the list of attendees in the Alumni News. You see, Irving had known my mother in college and hadn’t seen her in 55 years. He had been engaged to be married to my mother’s best friend, Kay, but life had intervened and that had never happened. He had taken a tramp steamer to Hawaii after graduation with all the best intentions, but between racking up some bills at the company store at the Del Monte pineapple plantation on the big island and meeting a nice local nurse, things changed and Irving ended up spending forty years managing a pineapple plantation from horseback along Mauna Kea Bay. After many years and the death of his wife, Irving sought out my mother and they were married when she was 76. It gave me the opportunity over the next twenty years to get to know Irving and his extremely interesting story.
Irving had grown up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where his father was a union organizer who actually had his offices at none other than Union Square. As a city boy growing up in those days to a height of 6’4” and weighing in at 240 pounds, he boxed in the Golden Gloves tournaments and came out a heavyweight champion of New York in 1932. That bought him a ticket to Cornell where he majored in agronomy (just like you would expect of a city boy), and rowed heavyweight crew well enough to become the stroke of the eight-man varsity crew. It was all of that that made Irving’s life such a great story.
His name and upbringing caused me to always tell him that he was Jewish even if no one ever told him. No one who isn’t Jewish has the name Irving Aaron Jenkins and comes from the Lower East Side with a father a labor organizer. Along with being Jewish, which he swore he was not, I also used to tell him that he was most certainly a member of the Communist Party in the early 30’s. He denied that as well. But every story he told me about his younger life made me more and more certain that I was right on both counts.
The Golden Gloves boxing titles figured into his story when he went to the Alternative Olympics in 1936 as a member of the U.S. team as a heavyweight boxer. That little-known event, set up and sponsored by the Soviet Union was done to detract from Hitler’s extravaganza in Berlin. The alternative games never took place thanks to General Franco’s decision (supposedly with the help of a call from his pal Adolf) to attack Barcelona and prematurely begin the Spanish Civil War and coincidentally prevented the holding of the Alternative Olympics. It was that outcome that caused Irving to get evacuated from Spain on an American warship moored at the time in Malaga, and that, in turn, gave him the bug the next year when he graduated to catch that tramp steamer from San Francisco to Hilo, Hawaii. And that set the course of his life since Hawaii became his home for forty years.
But it was the events that led up to his involvement in the Alternative Olympics that are what came to my mind in the past few days. Irving had been an athlete his whole life and when he went out for the crew team at Cornell in the fall of 1933, he was not entirely surprised that he liked it so much. Rowing crew involves an entire year of physical training for literally minutes on the open water during the few races that the team has in the spring. It is often said that one of the purest and most rigorous sports is rowing crew. It requires full-body involvement and a combination of incredible stamina over the typical 2,000 meter course with races lasting only five to eight minutes. I’m no kinesiologist, but I bet the requirements for a top crew member must be a combination of aerobic and anaerobic capacity at the highest levels of performance.
In Irving’s third year rowing, he was at the top of his form and was rowing stroke on the first varsity boat at Cornell. The stroke position is the seat closest to the coxswain and is the position which sets the pace for the boat. That means that its occupied by the strongest and most aware member of the team. When Irving went to Barcelona, he had hoped to be able to row crew for the U.S. team, but this rag-tag operation could not support a crew team, so he was recruited to box instead. Truth be told, Irving was hoping to go to Berlin for the traditional Olympic Games, but that didn’t work out so well. You see, the Cornell crew was one of the seven crew teams in contention for representing the United States in the Berlin Olympics (along with Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, University of Washington and University of California Berkeley). It was those six, plus Cornell, that met in the summer of 1936 to race in the Poughkeepsie Regatta put on by the Hudson River Rowing Association. The U.S. Olympic Team was in as much of a depression as the rest of the country, and the Poughkeepsie Regatta was the easiest and cheapest way to hold their Olympic trials that year for the team to be sent to Berlin (paid for from their own resources). It was at that race that the Cornell crew team, and every other contestant there, got its ass kicked by the University of Washington Huskies, rowing in the Husky Clipper.
The winning team was made up of a bunch of country boys from the Pacific Northwest. They have come to be known as The Boys in the Boat and were the subject of the 2013 book of narrative nonfiction written by Daniel James Brown. I read that book when it came out, so when I saw that George Clooney had made a movie based on the book, I was anxious to see it. This weekend I stumbled on an early showing of the movie and I simply had to go. The moment I was waiting for came about two-thirds of the way through the movie during the Poughkeepsie Regatta when the Huskies started to make their move during the race. The announcer says that the Washington boat is blowing past Cornell, and that’s when it happened. Clooney panned across the water to show the Huskies passing the front of the Cornell boat. It was then that I saw the coxswain and the stroke of the Cornell boat and I thought about Irving straining at the oar 87 years ago. That is when I realized and remembered what an amazing life Irving had led. All I can say is that I hope that when I am dead for fifteen years someone finds some reason to remember me the way I remembered Irving during that movie.