72nd Rowing

While the Democrats were nominating Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire for the U. S. Presidency in June 1852, the Boston & Maine Railroad was casting about for some smart new way to advertise the candidate's home state as a summer resort. A bright young B. & M. passenger agent named Jim Elkins thought it would be clever to promote a boat race between Harvard and Yale on Lake Winnepesaukee. He persuaded New Haven friends to persuade Yale to issue a challenge which Harvard promptly accepted. The race was billed as "the marine contest of the ages." The man who the following spring was to become the 14th President of the U. S. was in the crowd of 4,000 that saw Harvard win. Last week 80,000 people, including the 32nd President of the U. S., turned out at New London to watch the 72nd rowing of this oldest intercollegiate event in the land.

Until 1895, when the Poughkeepsie Regatta started, the winner of the Har-vard-Yale race was considered the best crew in the U. S. As the athletic import of the race declined, its social prestige increased. Last week more than half of the commissioned yachts in Eastern waters were crowded into the mouth of the Thames. Biggest were boats like Carl Tucker's Migrant (661 tons), Arthur Curtiss James's Aloha (659 tons), Hiram Edward Manville's Hi-Esmaro (1,333 tons). J. P. Morgan's Corsair (2,181 tons), like Gerard B. Lambert's three-masted schooner Atlantic (303 tons), stayed in the harbor below the bridge. Her Harvard-alumnus owner, wearing an old panama with a blue ribbon, bought 18 observation-car tickets for himself and guests, smiled when the conductor counted them twice. Scattered along the course were most of the boats that started two days later for the race to Bermuda. Governor Cross of Connecticut was on a Navy cutter anchored near the finish. Notably absent was Vincent Astor's Nourmahal.

On the morning of the races President Roosevelt left the Department of Commerce's inspection boat Sequoia which had brought him from New Haven, boarded the referee's boat, Dodger III, to watch the races. Going up the river, the Dodger III passed the Harvard freshman shell in which Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. was No. 6. The Harvard coxswain gave the order to "let her run" while father and son exchanged a wave.

Odds favored Coach Ed Leader's boat because Yale had won all its earlier races this season while Harvard had been a consistent loser. The varsity shells pulled up to the starting line early in the evening, after Yale's freshman and Junior varsity had won their races. At the start, Harvard's stroke, Sam Drury Jr., strapping big son of the strapping big headmaster of St. Paul's School, got his beat up to 37, splashed out to a lead of three quarters of a length. Yale, pulling a shade slower, crept up. The shells were even at the half-mile mark. At the mile, Yale was a third of a length ahead. The crews settled down into the rhythm of the race with Yale, smoothly stroked by Johnny Jackson, clearing its puddles by six feet at 30 strokes a minute, with Harvard getting less run out of a faster beat. By the time they came into the last mile, a smooth dark lane between two walls of yachts, there was a length of open water between them. Drury sent his stroke up; Yale held its lead without raising its beat and then, when the last Harvard challenge failed, drew away by inches to a lead of 2 1/4 lengths at the finish. The time of the first Harvard-Yale boat race was not recorded. Yale's time last week--19:51.8--was a record for the four miles on the Thames, ten seconds faster than Harvard's in 1916. Even the losers last week were two fifths of a second ahead of the old record --20:02. Said President Roosevelt: ''It was an awfully good race. Do you know I've been waiting for years, actually for years, to see the record of this course broken. And today both crews broke it. Simply splendid! Splendid!" Six Williams students chartered a 40-ft. yawl, Cumberbunce II. The night after the race they found Cumberbunce II stranded 500 ft. from her moorings. When one of them hired a water taxi and tried to get aboard, a man with a revolver ordered him off, ordered the taxi to tow him out of the harbor, and then put off into Long Island Sound on Cumberbunce II. Authorities started a search for the first pirate on the Atlantic Coast since 1819, when five were hanged in Boston.

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