Shawn Vestal: Before becoming a boy in the boat, rower grew up hard in Spokane and North Idaho

Dec. 21—There is a fascinating Inland Northwest origin story that didn't make it into George Clooney's new film.

Call it "The Boy Before the Boat."

The movie, "The Boys in the Boat," focuses on the underdog story of a group of Depression-era kids that became the star rowing team at the University of Washington and won the 1936 Olympic gold medal in dramatic fashion in front of a German crowd including Adolf Hitler.

That story — a kind of "Hoosiers" for rowing — has been the subject of a best-selling book, as well as a PBS documentary and now a feature-length film. The hero and central figure, Joe Rantz, lived a childhood of astonishing deprivation and determination, and it began in Spokane and a mining camp in North Idaho.

The film mostly omits that background. Clooney and the book's author, Daniel James Brown, said at an advance screening in Seattle earlier this year that the filmmakers had to tighten the story to keep it near a two-hour running time, focusing on the rowing team and the Olympics, and leaving out the early days of Rantz.

"If we were doing a six-hour television miniseries, all of those would be really powerful scenes," Clooney told the Seattle Times.

Brown's book tells a vivid and detailed story of Rantz's childhood. Shannon Ward, a language arts teacher at Sacajawea Middle School, taught a young-reader version of the book to her seventh-grade students a few years back.

"They just loved it," Ward said this week.

She gravitated toward the book because of its compelling underdog story and its value as a historical record of this part of the country during the early 20th century. It describes a working-class Seattle that seems worlds away from the city her students would know now, and it tells the story of a child facing challenges that are difficult to believe for someone who grew up in 21st century America.

In particular, she said, her students latched onto the times in Rantz's young life — it happened twice — when his parents essentially left him on his own to get by.

"The part that hit the kids most is when his parents — his dad and stepmom — packed up and left him by himself," Ward said. "Just seeing that life was hard back then and people made it and made something of themselves. Bad things happened to people, and have always happened to people, and they got through it."

Many details of Rantz's adolescence resonated to Ward's seventh-graders — from the years of his essentially raising himself to his job as a jackhammer operator on the Grand Coulee Dam project, hanging in a harness on a cliff face pounding away at the stone, to earn money for tuition.

The story of Rantz and the UW rowing team came to light through a happy accident. Brown lived next door to Rantz's daughter, Judy Willman, in Redmond, Washington, and she approached him with the idea that there might be a book in the story of her father and his fellow Olympians. Rantz was in hospice care in Willman's home, and Brown walked over to meet him — the genesis of the book project.

Brown met with Rantz in the months before his death in 2007, and Willman, who Brown called the "heart and soul" of the book, helped him with much of the later research. The book was published in 2013, and became a worldwide hit.

In an interview with the Peninsula Daily News after the advance screening, Willman said she enjoyed the way the film depicted her father and mother's relationship, but was a bit disappointed that more of her father's early life didn't make the cut.

"That's part of what makes his story so compelling," Willman said.

Truly — the story of Rantz's childhood would make a movie all on its own.

An immediate dislike

Rantz was born in Spokane in March 1914, the second son of Harry and Nellie Rantz, in a home on East Nora Avenue. The Rantzes had come west from Pennsylvania, at a time when Spokane was booming after arrival of the railroad, with mine workers and loggers and farmers crowding the city.

Harry ran an auto repair shop and Nellie taught piano. Among the fragmentary memories of Joe's early childhood, according to Brown's book, was his vivid recollection of his mother "coughing violently into a handkerchief and the handkerchief turning bright red with blood."

He was almost 4 at the time. His other early memories included sitting on the pews in a church at his mother's funeral, after her death from scarlet fever.

Nellie's death inaugurated a series of hardships in Joe's life that Brown details in vivid fashion. Harry remarried, wedding Thula LaFollette — the sister of his older son, Fred's wife — and built a new home in Spokane. When Joe was 9, the family home burned to the ground in the middle of the night. Harry packed them up and moved to the mining camp where he'd been working on the Idaho-Montana border about 18 miles outside Bonners Ferry.

Things were tense in the home for reasons beyond money. As Brown put it in an interview for the 2017 documentary, "Thula took a dislike to Joe almost immediately," and things grew worse in the mining camp.

The Idaho Gold and Ruby Mining Company was located in a camp called Boulder City, comprised of 35 small log cabins with outhouses, a bunkhouse, a blacksmith shop, church and sawmill connected by wooden sidewalks on a mountainside above Boulder Creek.

"For nine-year-old Joe, Boulder City offered a cornucopia of delights," Brown wrote.

Joe rode along with his father on a steam shovel, raced a go-cart down the slopes, and explored the wooded mountains. For his stepmother, however, the camp was a miserable place; an educated, artistic-minded woman, Thula found the conditions intolerable — and her antipathy toward Joe reached a peak after Joe yelled in anger at Thula and Harry's young son.

She demanded that Joe leave the house, and Harry "told his son he would have to move out of the house," Brown wrote. "Joe was ten."

Victim or survivor

Joe moved into the schoolhouse at the mining camp, where he chopped wood for his room. Thula wouldn't cook for him, so he earned his meals working at the camp cookhouse.

But following a difficult labor and delivery of Harry and Thula's daughter, Thula was finished with the mining camp. The family, with Joe, moved to Seattle, into the basement of Thula's parents' home, and then to Sequim, Washington, where Harry had an auto repair shop and bought a farm.

Joe worked alongside his father on cars and on a never-to-be-completed home at the farm. The family moved to the house, where they raised cows and chickens, and powered the lights with a waterwheel on a creek and a generator.

Joe went to school, where he was a good student and well-liked, Brown wrote. His lifelong affinity for playing stringed instruments — ukuleles, banjos, guitar — made him a favorite of the music teacher. And it was there that he met his future wife, Joyce Simdars.

For several years, it was a "near paradise" for Joe, Brown wrote. For Thula, though, "it was yet another disappointment."

Economic woes mounted, as the country drifted toward the Great Depression, and family pressures deepened in the Rantz home.

"A day came when Joe came home from school and he found the family car with the whole family in it and all kinds of luggage in it," Brown said in an interview for the documentary. "And he didn't know what was going on and his father said, 'We can't make it here. We're gonna leave, Joe, but the thing is, you're gonna have to stay behind. Thula doesn't want you to come with us.' "

Joe was 15. His daughter, Judy Willman, said in the documentary that the moment was decisive.

"He really had to make the decision of, 'Am I a victim or am I a survivor?' " she said. "Because he had to pick up his life from there — had to — somehow."

'Who we are as humans'

Joe lived on in the half-finished farmhouse outside Sequim, surviving on foraged food and poached salmon. He sold salmon and stolen liquor to make money, and took whatever jobs he could find. He was tall and strong, standing 6-foot-3, and could do most anything.

He kept attending school, earned good grades, and dated his sweetheart, Joyce. In 1931, his older brother, Fred, wrote him a letter that would change the course of his life. Fred had married and become a history teacher at Seattle's Roosevelt High; he invited Joe to come and live with him, in order to attend Roosevelt — and maybe, after that, to attend the University of Washington.

Joe took him up on it, and before long he was headed toward graduation at Roosevelt High. One day in 1932, as Joe was practicing gymnastics in the school gym, he noticed a visitor watching from a doorway. The man left a card with Joe's brother — it was Al Ulbrickson, crew coach at the UW, asking Joe to think about coming out for the rowing team.

Joe would soon graduate from high school, enroll at UW, and join the rowing team, a crew of Northwest kids from the families of loggers and shipyard workers that set the elite, moneyed world of collegiate rowing on its ear.

He eventually reunited with his father and siblings after the death of his stepmother; they had lived in Seattle all those years after leaving him in Sequim, without making contact.

Joe and Judy graduated from the UW on the same day in 1936, and were married that evening. He went on to a long career with Boeing, and he and Joyce raised five kids in their home in Lake Forest Park.

He died in 2007 at age 93.

In an interview with the Seattle Met in 2006, Judy Willman said she understood the enduring appeal of the story of her father and the other boys in the boat.

"It really is about who we are as humans," she said. "The longing for home and the love and the grief and the striving and the sacrificial companionship. It's hard not to respond to those things."