PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
OUTGOING
PRESIDENT'S
REMARKS
By James D. Blitch IV
Blitch Law PC
It is customary for the outgoing president to give
the board members a small gift. I did this at our last
board meeting. I gave each person a book, The Boys
in the Boat by Daniel James Brown.
This book tells the story of eight young men who in the
mid-1930s came together as freshmen to row for the
University of Washington in Seattle. This was during
the depths of the depression, and Seattle was basically a
lumber town. With time and training, they became an
extraordinary crew. During their junior year in 1936,
they started by beating their archrival, Cal Berkeley.
Then they came East–winning first on the Hudson
River in Poughkeepsie, New York and then at Princeton
where the 1936 Olympic trials for rowing were held.
They beat all the big boys, all the well-to-do Eastern
crews. They became the U.S. men’s eight for the 1936
Olympics in Berlin. They became a big deal.
6 May 2017
In Berlin, in the weeks prior to the rowing finals,
they spent a lot of time exploring the city and having
fun. They were completely unaware of what Hitler’s
Germany had been doing to hide everything. There
is not time here to tell that story, but it is a fascinating
part of the book.
About the rowing, they had two big problems. The
stroke oarsman, Don Hume, became very sick. He had
lost fourteen pounds. He had a fever that would not
go away. During some of the training rows, the coach
tried using a substitute, but the boat was not the same.
Even so, on the day of the finals, the coach thought
he had no choice but to use a sub. The other rowers
protested–they wanted Don Hume in the boat in the
stroke seat, and eventually the coach relented. But it
did not look good.