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Schuylkill's rich history in rowing

Dotty Brown is a former Inquirer editor who is writing a book on the history of Boathouse Row

Dotty Brown

is a former Inquirer editor who is writing

a book on the history of Boathouse Row

for Temple University Press

Every year, thousands of people pound down the paved backbone of the city in the sweaty exuberance of the Broad Street Run.

Next weekend, in another extraordinary test of athleticism and determination open to all, the sound will be the beating of oars down a different city artery - the Schuylkill.

Rowing out their hearts and lungs in the Head of the Schuylkill Regatta will be more than 80 categories of rowers sorted by age, sex, and ability, from high school teenagers and college freshmen to committed athletes striving for world competition to masters rowers in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and, yes, 80s. Also racing will be gold-medal Olympic champions from New Zealand and top rowers from Norway, Australia, the Czech Republic, and the United States.

Altogether, about 7,000 rowers are expected - participation that has jumped more than 40 percent in the last decade and is expected to surpass last year's record, when rowers hailed from 28 states, 225 cities, and six countries. More than half are now women, a fact that would shock the crowds who witnessed the first recorded regatta on the Schuylkill on Nov. 12, 1835.

That day, seven eight-oared barges, much heavier than today's hip-hugging vessels, competed: the Cleopatra, Falcon, Sylph, Blue Devil, Metamora, Aurora, and Imp. The event "brought to the shores of the Schuylkill more persons than were ever assembled on its banks before," wrote John Thomas Scharf in his History of Philadelphia, published in 1884. They "came on horseback and in gigs and wagons and coaches, the number present being several thousand, and the event being also considered by some persons sufficient to justify a cessation of business for the day."

Regattas soared in popularity after 1858, when the emerging boat clubs of Boathouse Row banded together to form the Schuylkill Navy, the country's oldest amateur athletic governing body.

By the 1870s, when Philadelphia artist Thomas Eakins painted his Central High School classmate, champion rower Max Schmitt, as many as 30,000 people would throng the river banks, crowd its bridges, and pile onto rowboats and steamers to cheer the racers and wage bets. With baseball and football in their infancies, rowing was the single most popular spectator sport in the country, and Philadelphia was the place to see it.

Time and time again, rowing has brought attention to the city. In 1900, the Vesper Boat Club's eight won the first rowing competition in the newly reinstated Olympics.

In 1920, John B. Kelly Sr. (before he fathered Grace Kelly) won two Olympic gold medals in one afternoon. Returning to Philadelphia, he was cheered by 100,000 people. He won gold again in 1924. His statue stands by the Schuylkill grandstands along the drive named for his Olympian son, John B. Kelly Jr., a powerhouse who assembled the eight-oared crew that brought gold home to Philadelphia in the 1964 Olympics.

In another first, a group of intrepid Philadelphia women gave birth to competitive women's rowing in the United States. It didn't come easily to Ernestine Bayer and the others who dared launch Philadelphia Girls Rowing Club in 1938, an era when the hugely physical sport was seen as unseemly, even impossible, for women.

And in the 1960s, with women scullers still barred from Olympic competition, another Philadelphian, Joanne Wright Iverson, made it her mission to take down that barrier. At long last, it happened in 1976.

Today, rowing's popularity is again shining a light on Philadelphia, blessed with a placid river and committed rowing organizations. It will be evident next weekend, as thousands of rowers, their families, friends, and fans flock to a riverfront brimming with history, architecture, and art and as they help fill the city's hotels and restaurants.

The athletes, whose age averages in the early 20s, will take home with them photos of Victorian boathouses, the e-mail addresses of new friends, and a belief in their own abilities that is burnished by hard effort, focus, and teamwork.

Diane Braceland Vreugdenhil, of Havertown, who in 1976 was among the first female Olympic scullers, recently reflected on how the discipline of training and competition stuck with her through the years.

The effort demanded of you, she said, makes you focus on "your priorities in life, knowing what your purpose is, why you get up every morning." The payoff, whether or not you become an Olympian, is a sense of accomplishment that carries through the years. The work is hard, but you "go out and do it and do the best that you can do."

Contact Dotty Brown at dottyinky@gmail.com.