9. Honors and Graduation

Late in the spring, I believe just after the Eastern Sprints, I was surprised-shocked, actually-to receive a call from President Stratton’s office inviting me to Kresge Auditorium for MIT’s annual Awards Convocation. Very few details were provided, other than there would be a “significant recognition,” or words to that effect.

That’s about all I would have known in advance of the Convocation had I not received another surprise telephone call, this one from my parents. They had also been invited to the Convocation where, they were told, “Your son will be receiving one of MIT’s two top scholar/athlete awards.” MIT had even suggested that they could arrange for Mother and Dad’s appearance to be a surprise.

As a practical matter, it was not possible for them to make a second trip all the way from West Palm Beach when they had already arranged to come to my graduation just two weeks later. That’s probably why they telephoned in advance. However, the element of surprise was retained because when I arrived at Kresge on the appointed day, my brother Tom was there.1 The other familiar face at the Convocation, though hardly a surprise since he had been my role model throughout my years at MIT, was our outstanding coach, Gary Zwart.

On that day I was presented the Admiral Edward L. Cochrane Award, given annually “to a fourth-year student in the intercollegiate athletic program, for outstanding qualities of humility, leadership, and scholarship.”

Here is a picture after the presentation, taken in front of the MIT Chapel:

It was obviously a very special day. It was also an ending to a college career that was improbable beyond imagination for a young kid who, in his first year at MIT, had struggled academically and who had known absolutely nothing about crew before arriving just four years earlier. I am sure that pride welled up within me.

At the same time, I quite distinctly remember feeling somewhat uneasy about being singled out for this award. Crew is the ultimate team sport with nine equally important players. Lack of conditioning, a lack of discipline, or a poor performance by anyone on the team dooms the outcome for the entire team. I would have been a lot happier if the efforts of the entire 1963 lightweight team had been recognized on that day.

It would be an exaggeration to claim that I dwelled on this for the next forty years. However, those feelings reemerged when I wrote the original set of emails that preceded this document. I skirted the issue simply by omitting this chapter, skipping from the 1963 Sprints to the final story about the American Henley.

You’re reading Chapter Nine right now, so I have obviously changed my mind about omitting this part of the story. Perhaps, over the years, the humility aspect of the award has diminished. But I prefer to believe the main reason, though forty-five years late, is that it gives me the opportunity to dedicate the 1963 Admiral Cochrane Award to the entire squad: oarsmen, coxswains, manager, and coach. We were listed in the 1963 Eastern Sprints program, as follows:

Events unfolded very rapidly after that. I still had one or more final exams ahead of me, but these proved to be routine and it seemed like no time at all before my entire family arrived in Cambridge for MIT’s graduation ceremonies.

My parents had always been great cheerleaders for MIT Crew. They read about every race, saved every news article and provided moral support back when things weren’t going so well. However, living as far away as they did, they had always been long distance supporters. They had never actually seen a crew race in person; in fact, they had never even seen me in a crew shell except for a short visit in 1962 when they drove up to Cambridge to see our team off to Henley. Therefore, you can imagine how pleased I was when they extended their graduation trip to include a few days at Dartmouth while we were training for the American Henley.

I am sure that my graduation from MIT was a very proud day for the entire family, but especially for my father who had financed every penny of my education as well as that of my brother and sister. Quite an accomplishment, I feel, for a man who had been the first from his tiny hometown to have earned a college degree.

That’s Dad on my left, below. I am clutching my MIT diploma, my dad his copy of the graduation program. I am sure that the page he liked the best is the one that I have inserted at the close of this chapter.

(Footnotes)

1 Tom, who was finishing his second year at Harvard Medical School, had accompanied our crew to Henley in 1962 where he took most of the photographs in A Henley Memoir. He was thrust into that role again at the Awards Convocation and at my MIT Graduation.