We won our heat, jumping the six other crews at the start, never were behind, tried hard not to win by more than a length.
I can't remember whether we took care of LaSalle in that heat or in the semifinals late Saturday afternoon or both. Surely though we never beat them before.
In between outings all through the middle of the day I slept like a baby, something I never did before or afterward. While I can't speak as to the sleeping habits of my crewmates, we usually did things together just as an eight-oared crew should. But we must have interrupted all the sleeping to eat.
We only saw the dark horse crew in glimpses that were either real or more real than that in dream.
If Menlo Park made one mistake in preparing for the Dad Vail final it was not wearing those black shirts, and appearing in white instead.
We jumped them at the start as we jumped everybody. The other crews were left upriver. This was a two-boat race the whole two thousand one hundred twelve meters. We had a length, then they closed to a half length, and then we pulled away to open water-- barely-- as we headed for what we must have thought was the porcupine dock.
Did Bill ever let the rating slip below 38? I don't think so. Was it up in the 40's? Way up in the 40's. In the upper 40's? Maybe. We had four tall guys and four short ones and no other choice.
Bill Engeman's father George caught our final sprint on Super-8 film. For years Bill's two sons Michael and Charlie had to watch it over and over. Couldn't have turned them off too much however since they both became members of a national lightweight eight.
Reader, you will see the picture of us draped in all the fragrant shirts just stripped off and handed to us by other oarsmen.
The crew with their shirts
Missing from those shirts however is the one we would have liked best. It could have been either black or white, we wouldn't have cared, but Dewey Hecht explained to Whitey Helander that his guys had made huge sacrifice to come all the way from California and paid the price for the shirts themselves. Well...who didn't.
The traditions in crew are strong. B.J. Helander, Whitey's widow, recently told us that Whitey thought Dewey a poor sport.
Bad karma, Dewey! You should have advised your guys to give up their shirts. I understand that you yourself were the product of a deprived rowing background and you and the guys you rowed with were called the orphans of the Stanford Estuary, just as we were orphans of the Seekonk whenever we weren't being called Cinderellas.
But you blew it right there, Dewey. We loved you when you came to Providence and coached us for an afternoon. Great comments from the motorboat. We thought we were LORD OF THE FLIES and ran the whole island. We were ready to hire you in a flash as first paid crew coach at Brown.
The true situation was not exactly as Brown president Barnaby C. Keeney would delineate it to me. We were the only ones at Brown who knew anything about crew, he said, so we got to hire the next coach.
This just was not so. I have no idea where the miscommunication lay. All I can say is we didn't have the power we thought. That lay with the triumvirate of Athletic Director Paul F. Mackesey, Dean Admiral Edward R. Durgin, and Student Representative William K. Engeman.
Bill loved you, Dewey. The others may have as well. A lack of investment opportunity in Providence, R.I. was the official reason you didn't get hired, just as I didn't get hired as freshman coach for lack of personal charisma decades later.
Nope. It was bad karma. The shirts.
Our season wasn't over. The Eastern Sprints offered us a berth for the following Sunday. Mouse drove the Stein from Philadelphia to Princeton-- a short trip but one I thought more apt to get him arrested since there were no longer four persons available to hold up Engeman's roof.
After winning the Vails
We oarsmen returned to Providence and practiced in another boat. Was Mouse there or did he stay in Princeton? He doesn't know. He doesn't even know if he drove The Stein to Princeton. But we all got to Princeton and started to practice on Lake Carnegie.
A rowing snob saw us go by and back on shore bullied Jim Moody on account of his small size.
"That's a funny crew," he said. "It has a coxswain at both ends. Which way does it go?"
To qualify we had to beat Navy. Rowing at four for Navy was Joe Baldwin, the intercollegiate heavyweight boxing champ.
We went off the line at 44 and soon had a length and a quarter on Navy. But they were understroking us and kept coming back, inch by inch. We sprinted at the finish but lost by two-tenths of a second.
Up on shore my two much younger brothers, who had run to follow the race went back to my parents with a message:
"Bot's throwing up."
"four" - Google News
February 11, 2022 at 06:09PM
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Book Excerpt, Chapter 9, First Dad Vail -- from Four Years at Four, by John Escher - row2k.com
"four" - Google News
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