SEQUIM — A piece of local memorabilia — at once brand new and speaking of the past — is finding a home in Sequim.
Randy Perry has agreed to loan his recent purchase of a banner from the 2023 film “The Boys in the Boat,” the biopic of the 1936 University of Washington crew team that won Olympic Games gold and features former Sequim resident Joe Rantz — to Sequim Museum & Arts.
Perry said he follows an online movie memorabilia auction site but hadn’t purchased anything from it until some items from the film became available.
“I wanted something that was tied to Joe,” Perry said last week. “It’s spectacular.”
The banner is featured in the movie during a montage where supporters are raising funds to send the team to Germany for the Olympic Games. Soon afterward, they were told the U.S. Olympic committee would not be paying for their trip.
Perry said he was hoping to get his hands on some of the jerseys team members used in the film, but their asking prices (well over $1,000) were too much. The banner came in at about $450, he said.
“I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it,” Perry said.
Judy Reandeau Stipe, the volunteer executive director for Sequim Museum & Arts, said she had recently received a “Boys in the Boat” movie poster from Pat Macauley, the committee chair for the Joe Rantz Rotary Youth Fund who helped organize a screening of the film at Deer Park Cinemas in Port Angeles as a fundraiser for the fund.
“I was already emotional from that (donation),” Stipe said, and in walked Perry with the loan offer in his pocket.
“I’m not a surprise kind of person, but I was speechless,” she said.
“It just shows what people can do for this community.”
She said the museum’s extensive Rantz collection, one that now features a recorded broadcast of the 1936 Olympic Games final coming out of an antique radio set, has a similar popularity the museum drew for its Manis Mastodon display.
The banner, Stipe said, should go up in the museum within the next month or so.
Perry said he didn’t buy the banner to make money but plans to loan it out for a while and that “maybe someone would want to buy it down the road.”
Coincidentally, a piece of sports memorabilia Perry purchased in the 1980s was a University of Washington versus University of Southern California football game in 1936 — a game some of those UW crew members may have attended.
For more about Sequim Museum & Arts, 544 N. Sequim Ave., visit sequimmuseum.com.
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Michael Dashiell is the editor of the Sequim Gazette of the Olympic Peninsula News Group, which also is composed of other Sound Publishing newspapers Peninsula Daily News and Forks Forum. Reach him at editor@sequimgazette.com.
