THE SPORT OF ROWING In 1922, the Washington coach was Ed Leader,1702 and when he was offered the coaching job at Yale, he invited the Pococks to come along to the East Coast. George declined, but Dick accepted. That left George to carry on alone at Boeing as a foreman. A few months later when the next Washington coach, Rusty Callow,1703 came to George to ask him to build an eight, George agreed to do it in his spare time and on his days off if Rusty could find a spot on campus for him to work. Rusty offered the upper floor of the old seaplane hangar which the team was using as their shellhouse. But when word leaked out, a story titled “Pocock to Build Shells Again on University Campus” appeared in the Seattle Post- Intelligencer, and George felt he had no alternative. George: “I just could not stay with Boeing because a man cannot split his loyalties. In my case it involved, in the words of the poet, ‘forsaking the substance and grasping the shadow.’”1704 Stan: “When he first started out, he was struggling. He had to try and make a living after having left a good job at Boeing. “When he built the first eight, he asked himself, ‘What should I charge for it?’ because he had few expenses. He was on his own in the university shellhouse and had no rent to pay, no insurance, so he checked into what the eights from England were costing because that was where everybody in the East was getting their shells. “He knew George Sims.1705 They had been apprenticed together. He thought he was the best boatbuilder he ever knew. At any rate, he wrote to George and asked him, ‘What are you charging for an eight these 1702 See Chapter 52. 1703 See Chapter 53. 1704 Newell, p. 65 1705 boatbuilder in Putney on the Thames in London near the start of the Boat Race course. days?’ The answer was $1,250 [which must have yielded a reasonable profit considering his lack of overhead]. “But that stayed the price of a Pocock eight all through the Depression up until World War II, and when we started up again in ‘45 . . . still the same. “It turned out that a portion of the pay that he and Uncle Dick had received while working for Boeing had been paid in Boeing stock, and as that company grew, my dad slowly realized that he had become financially set for life. He was very conscious of trying to help out the sport of rowing financially, and so he passed his good fortune on and kept selling shells at 1922 prices. “After I joined the business, I can remember him and me sitting down and trying to adjust our prices. We were paying our guys more and more . . . and so we brought it all the way up to $1,375! “And that’s where it stayed again for a long time. That was the same price we were charging Harvard or Yale or anybody. That was the price. “Well, nobody could compete with that, and so an unintended result of this was that nobody could go into the business! We got wind that Chris Craft were interested, but they backed out in a hurry. There was not enough in it. “But that was not the intent at all. I know that for a fact!”1706 Clubs, high schools, prep schools and in every colleges all bought Pocock shells. Pretty soon, virtually every eight boathouse in the United States was a Pocock. George and Stan worked with everybody regardless of their financial condition. There were plenty of deals made, agreements to pay later, orders on account. 1706 S. Pocock, personal conversation, 2005 452
