In a climactic scene from George Clooney’s new film adaptation The Boys in the Boat, famed Seattle Post-Intelligencer journalist Royal Brougham cries out over transatlantic airwaves, “An underdog team for an underdog nation!”
Brougham, speaking of the triumphant University of Washington crew at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, tailored that line for a national audience. But those eight Husky rowers represented a kind of twofold underdog. Because as far as Depression-era America went, Seattle was the dregs.
The Emerald City in the 1930s was a place of saw-chewed butt logs, tin-roof shacks, and mud-encrusted rail lines, all painted in wonderful detail by author Daniel James Brown
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