Crews

At Poughkeepsie, It was the year's major regatta for college crews--four miles down the Hudson, with five boats from the East to turn back the two from the West which had won six times in the last twelve years. Again the favorite was California, trained to the minute, rowing the odd, short, leg & arm stroke with which Coach Ky Ebright stampeded college rowing in 1932. Washington had beaten California by a split second last spring (TIME, April 22) but that was a shorter race and since then Al Ulbrickson had demoted the eight sophomores whom earlier in the season he had called the best crew he had ever coached, patched up a new varsity around a nucleus of last year's. Of the Eastern shells, Navy's had the best rating. Penn was a sprint crew. Syracuse, coached by 83-year-old Jim Ten Eyck, had a chance and so did Cornell. Columbia was clearly out of it.

The boats splashed away from the start and then settled down to keep within striking distance of Washington, making the early pace. One mile down the river, Washington was still leading, with Syracuse and Navy close behind when the race began to tighten. First Cornell, then California began to creep up on the leaders. At the Railroad Bridge, three miles from the start, Syracuse dropped back. Cornell and California, passing Washington, were fighting each other for the lead. The fight went on down the last mile of the river, level and murky in a late afternoon drizzle. Twenty-five strokes from the finish, California's Coxswain Reggie Watt looked at the Cornell crew and barked: "They'll beat us just the way Washington did, by six feet. . . ." Spectators on the observation train, on boats near the finish, saw Berkenkamp, the California stroke, get his beat a notch higher. An instant later, both shells shot across the finish.

Because few spectators at a crew race are in a position to judge the finish, Poughkeepsie race officials long ago devised a method to let the crowd know who has won. The lane in which each crew rows is numbered. When the race is over a man on the vehicular bridge, just above the finish, sets off bombs to indicate the number of the winner's lane. The name of the man is Mike Bogo. A 300-lb. Poughkeepsie barkeeper, he applied for and was long ago awarded the job because he had contracted a passion for playing with firecrackers during his boyhood in Italy. Last week, for the first time in his career as bomber for the regatta, Barkeeper Bogo let his passion get the best of him. When the race was over, he set off five bombs, to show that Cornell, rowing in the fifth lane, had won the race. Five minutes later, when the crews were paddling back up the river and the crowd had started to disperse, the judges posted the correct results. California, in lane No. 1, had won, with Cornell 1/3 of a second behind. Washington was third, with Navy, Syracuse, Penn, Columbia strung out in that order up the river.

At New London the party; as usual, began the night before the race in which Harvard and Yale find an excuse for not participating in the Poughkeepsie Regatta, which neither could hope to win, by perpetuating the oldest (83) and possibly the most fashionable intercollegiate sporting event in the U. S. The next morning, the Thames was so full of yachts that it was easier to count the ones that were missing than the ones that were there. President Roosevelt arrived by train, joined his family for breakfast on the Sequoia. All morning, under a bright blue sky, the harbor hummed with pleasant preliminaries for a gala afternoon.

The day was a fiasco for all concerned but particularly so for the President who started the day wrong by forgetting his red Harvard necktie and being forced to borrow one from a sailor. First the Yale freshmen won their race by 2/5 of a second after Harvard had led for the first mile and a half. Then President Roosevelt watched his son Franklin Jr. rowing No. 4 in the Harvard junior varsity, carry on the tradition that his father has not seen Harvard win a boat race at New London since he was elected. This time, Harvard managed to lose again by inches, even though a Yale man caught a crab and nearly capsized the shell 150 yards from the finish. Finally, when most of the spectators had waited for two hours for the varsity race, Alfred W. Putnam, who had been frantically riding up & down the course in the referee's launch, announced that the course was too rough to row and that this No. 1 event would be postponed till next day. Chagrinned, the President took train to Hyde Park.

Next day, over water that was still choppy, a sound Yale crew that Penn had beaten by a full length earlier in the season pulled gently up the river to the halfway mark, then paddled off to win, by what sportswriters courteously estimated as eleven lengths, over a Harvard shell which seemed demoralized after the biggest man in the boat, Henry Saltonstall, caught a crab in the first half mile.

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