MIT oarsmen, some say, are a curious lot. The better Ivy League schools are loaded with oarsmen who were introduced to the sport of rowing as early as the ninth grade. Rowing at the high school level in the 1960s was, and remains, very competitive at the better prep schools such as Phillips Exeter and Andover and at a growing number of public schools, especially in Washington, DC and Northern Virginia. Nearly all of the academically qualified graduates from these institutions, at least in the sixties, were bound for the better rowing universities, principally those in the Ivy League.

By contrast, the freshman oarsman at MIT who had prior rowing experience was the rare exception. No one ever accused MIT of being a Jock School!  For example, Steve Aldrich, a Phillips Andover graduate, was the only member of my Class of '63 freshman team who knew the first thing about crew before entering MIT. I'm not at all sure that any member of the Class of '64 Freshmen champions had prior experience. Our varsity stroke, Mark Barron '64, used to joke that the closest he had ever been to an athletic field was when he played clarinet in the high school marching band. It was basically the same with nearly all of us.

I wouldn't attempt to argue that this actually worked out to our advantage, but our coaches were quite adept at finding the will to win where we lacked experience; heart where we lacked form. The rigorous training program would take care of the rest. We also had an advantage in that the living groups, both fraternities and dormitories, put tremendous pressure on incoming freshmen to turn out for extracurricular activities, especially sports. Practically the entire freshman class turned out for one or more major activities. Rowing, the only sport in which we competed in the NCAA's Division I, drew the largest turnout of any of MIT's sports. It was in such an environment that I had my own introduction to crew. My guess is that well over 100 freshmen turned up at the boathouse for the first day of fall training.

Due to a shortage of on-campus housing, MIT depended heavily on its 29 fraternities to house up to 40 percent of the incoming freshman class. Rush Week was held before the first week of classes even began. It was during a Rush Week visit to Lambda Chi Alpha that I met George Dotson. If Gary Zwart was my role model at MIT, George became my mentor. Before I had attended my first academic class, George sized me up, saying in his Oklahoma drawl, "You oughta be a coxswain." (When I entered MIT I weighed about 120 pounds, soaking wet.) Silas Allen, a real gentleman who was Captain of the 1960 Lightweight Crew and also a Lambda Chi, made a strong impression on me as well. Before I knew it George, who was a sophomore and a coxswain on the heavyweight squad, had dragged me down to the boathouse. As they say, the rest is history.

It was George who taught me, by example, that the most respected coxswains were those who threw themselves totally into the sport. Except when actually on the water, when the cox's role is obviously and dramatically different from the oarsmen's, George participated in every session of calisthenics before and after the crew's time on the river, right along with the oarsmen. Three years later when we were at the peak of our pre-Henley training, someone commented on how unusual it was that Bob Vernon was out there running up and down the steps of the stadium with the rest of the team. Not unusual at all. That was the Dotson way.

Still, during that early fall of my freshman year (1959), even though I was turning out for practice every day, I was very skeptical as to whether I could stick with the sport on a year-round basis. I learned very quickly from the upperclassmen that crew is a tremendously demanding sport, consuming as much as 20-30 hours a week. I was concerned, frankly, about whether I could make the grade at MIT academically and also make this level of commitment to sports. George Dotson, whose academic prowess was about the same as mine (I hope that doesn't offend George!), felt differently. He counseled that if you weren’t careful, the MIT grind could turn you into a zombie. If you didn't have crew as a diversion, you would need something else.

How prophetic. During the run-up to Henley, April - June, 1962, training became more and more intense, demanding more and more hours. I guess we must have simply figured out how to adapt. Perhaps a more accurate description is that we became more efficient. For the spring semester of 1962, the MIT Lightweight squad's grade point average—for better or worse, MIT students always compared grades—was at least a 1/2 point higher on MIT's 5-point scale than the campus-wide average. I think there are some lessons there for life.

A final word about the training regimen.  After classes ended each afternoon at 5:00pm, we would head down to the boathouse, or in the winter when the Charles River was frozen solid, to the fieldhouse. Workouts lasted until at least 7:00 or 7:30pm.  We would then head back to the fraternity for late dinner, followed by study until midnight. Spring break, though, was the real test for a freshman crew. Just when the rest of campus was leaving for home, or better yet, for Ft. Lauderdale, the crew remained in Cambridge, stepping up to two training sessions a day. For oarsmen, it was a week of blisters and aching muscles; for the coxswains, a complete loss of voice. It was agony, that first spring vacation. But those who chose Cambridge over Ft. Lauderdale were hooked for life. It was spring vacation training that, more than anything else, turned a bunch of ragtag freshmen into a competitive rowing team.

So that this will not be a chapter entirely without pictures, this is my Class of 1963 Freshman Lightweight Crew on our first road trip to Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, to row against Harvard and Dartmouth in the 1960 Biglin Bowl. Through class reunions, alumni rowing events and email, I have over the years been in contact with Mike Greata, Ed Kaminski and Lauren Sompayrac (2nd, 5th and 8th from the left) and on a regular basis in touch with Jack Lynch (3rd from the left) and Gary Zwart (far right). Yours truly is the little guy down front, at 119 pounds, a mere shadow of his current self.

Here is Dartmouth's dock on the Connecticut River in April 1960. We would spend many wonderful days training there in June 1962, pre-Henley, and in June 1963, pre-American Henley. More about that later.



Finally, here is our very first intercollegiate race, where we beat Dartmouth rather handily. I have to close, unfortunately, with one more important detail—the Harvard Freshmen are just out of the picture on your left! We were not ready, quite yet, for prime time.