My Bucket List Row … 47 Years Deferred
/From Wellesley College’s First Intercollegiate Team to Her First Head of the Charles Race Nearly Five Decades Later
Let’s step back a few decades, in fact let’s start this rowing story at the turn of the century.
My grandmother –I called her Nonna – rowed stroke for her Wellesley crew from 1903 to 1907. Wellesley crews in those times rowed only ceremonially on Lake Waban, our beautiful campus lake.
Nonna died when I was 15 years old, so she didn’t live to see me attend Wellesley College nor did she get to see me row there. She would have been thrilled by both milestones.
In my sophomore year of college I discovered rowing. Loved it. I was obsessed by it from the moment I rowed one of the lovingly named “Wellesley barges” out of our Lake Waban boathouse. These boats were built for Wellesley rowers for our dorm and class races and rowing classes and designed to slip into their water slots with our oars raised vertically above our heads. Quite different than racing shells where all oars are removed together at the dock after everyone is out of the boat. A part of my rowing story, below, will show you what happens when someone – I was that someone – raises her oar out of its oarlock while we are all in a competitive boat.
Here’s what I wrote for Wellesley magazine about the magical day that I stepped into a racing four.
By my senior year at Wellesley College, I was living in San Francisco with my Wellesley College friend Harriet Milnes, with whom I’d hung out during my first year when she was a senior. As a profile I will post later illuminates, once Harriett and my other senior class friends graduated, every bit of my outside of class focus shifted to rowing. By the way, Harriett’s and my paths that have crossed through the years – she came to my wedding in 1978, met my high school/college boyfriend and dear friend David Conger ,and they were married. I attended their daughter’s wedding last summer. Speaks to the power of enduring friendships.
In the fall of my senior year, the Head of the Charles allowed women’s eights to row for the first time. And Wellesley College – rowers from my class of 1973 driving the boat – competed among 13 other women’s boats of all ages. I will let me dear friend Sally (Brumley) Keller pick up the story of that boat. Just know it’s the boat I wished I’d been in. The one that 47 years later pushed me to row this year’s Head of the Charles as my bucket list race.
Head of the Charles 1972
Fall of my senior year and I’m on the other coast studying Navajo language and education at U.C. Berkeley and rowing for Mills College on Oakland’s Lake Merritt. My friend Harriett was, by then, a graduate student at Mills and she had taken up rowing with Mills, and the crew kindly invited me to jump in. Mills was a West Coast rowing power at that time, so it felt great to be in their boat.
Meanwhile back East, my rowing mates at Wellesley were pulling together an eight to row in the Head of the Charles . Why not? It’s the first time women could row an eight in this race, and so they did.
Here’s a photo of that Wellesley College crew, taken from a bridge followed by the words Sally wrote to me, sharing this memory. You’ll note that she hadn’t forgotten the day when I pulled my oar out after our first row in our wooden racing four – and yes. I was a must less experienced rower than Sally was then, and remain so today.
Winter 2016
Enter Risa Greendlinger, yes another Wellesley College graduate years later than me, with whom I’d worked on a political campaign in the 1980s. We'd stayed in touch, so she invites me to join her for coffee early one morning, telling me she’s going to be near Cambridge. We meet. She tells me she’s just been on a rowing erg working out at Community Rowing, Inc.. I’m curious. Soon, I’m in, and by the next week I am joining her at 6:00 a.m. to erg.
As winter draws to an end, Risa and I are joining GS 1, a lower level General Sweeps class coached by John Sisk. By March 2016, I am layered up agains the cold morning weather and rowing in the dark in a fiberglass boat (a first) with fiberglass oars (a first), and I am loving it. Can’t wait to be on the dock at 5:25 am, ready to row on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And pretty soon I am signing up to learn how to skull – single, double, quad – and I love that, too. And then I am volunteering to row on Tuesday and Thursdays with para-rowers – rowers with disabilities and by showing up we give them the chance to row, and soon I am bowing quads and doubles.
In the summer of 2018 I returned to Lake Waban for my 45th Wellesley reunion. Each reunion year 1973 returns, the Wellesley athletic department brings our boat – named Spirit of ‘73, in our honor – out of storage. It’s in the boathouse waiting for us. And we get to row it on Lake Waban. We’ve done this at every reunion.
If we all make it to 2023, we’ll all be rowing Spirit of ‘73 again. Wooden hull. Wooden oars.
By now, I am obsessively in love! With rowing. And with CRI! Suddenly, I am part of an extraordinary new community where I know everyone by first name. And we are rowing on the Charles River. No better combination possible!
Upstream from CRI, just around the river’s bend, is Wellesley College boathouse. Through the decades, Wellesley kept rowing competitively until in May 2016 Wellesley rowers won the NCAA Division 3 women’s rowing championship. What follows is an excerpt from an Endnote essay I wrote at the time for Wellesley magazine – again uniting my CRI and Wellesley College rowing experiences. If you’d like to read this entire essay – The Girls in the Boat, click here.
Head of the Charles 2019
Magnificent October Sunday. I feel the smallest breath of wind off my back porch. Looks like it’s going to be a smooth row in the afternoon. That morning Sally Keller and I settle in at my house to watch the HORC LiveStream of the Regatta before she needs to catch a bus. When she leaves, I eat an early lunch, dress in layers for the race, and I’m at the boathouse with our 3 GS crews by 1:00. Our race goes off at 4:12, but we are Bow # 31 of 35 boats and we’ve got a long slow row ahead of us to get to the starting line in the Charles River Basin near Boston University.
Here’s a few photo and a video of our row taken by Jeb Sharp, mostly, with one by Matthew McWeeney, who you will meet in a photo at the end.
The Morning After
On the Head of the Charles Regatta website a profile of me is posted.
"WHY NOT?"
Pioneering Journalist Crosses Big One Off Bucket List
Written by Samantha Barry, a journalism student at Northeastern University, she’s learned about me through a serendipitous conversation I’d had with a Northeastern Journalism professor, my friend Dan Kennedy. Dan relayed my “bucket list” row to his fellow professor who was organizing coverage of the regatta by his students, and presto, Sam and I were sipping coffee and hot apple cider on blustery cold day just before the regatta began. She texted me on Saturday and we turned out to be close by at the Head of the Charles, so she also shot my photo at the Eliot Bridge.
If you would like to read Samatha’s entire story, click here.