Doctor Rowing: A Bridge to the Past

On our way to New York to watch daughter Ella run the marathon, we took the Charter Oak Bridge across the Connecticut River in Hartford.

As I do every time we cross the bridge, I reminded Mrs. Doctor Rowing to take a good look to the left to see the huge empty shell of the former Hartford Electric Light Company building. This now-abandoned power plant, officially known as the South Meadow Power Plant, was key to the city’s electric grid from its construction in 1921 until it went offline in 1962. It’s a massive building on the west bank of the river that hogs acres of shoreline. Throughout my time in Hartford in the ’70s, while coxing at Trinity College and for three years coaching freshmen and women’s crews, it sat quietly about 500 meters upstream of our boathouse, oblivious to the efforts in the sleek shells that sped by it every day.

As we rowed past the swirling backwater coming off the riprap arm that created a sheltered place to give coal barges a dock to unload, I’d think of a secret ambition that our coach, Norm Graf, had shared with me.

Like everyone who has coached at Trinity, Coach Graf used to worry about the drive to and from the boathouse. The Trinity campus is on the west side of the Connecticut River, but the boathouse is on the east. The drive to practice at 3 p.m., when many of the insurance companies let out their employees, was  done usually in heavy traffic at breakneck speed. Can’t be late for practice! When it was rumored that the HELCO plant was going to be sold, Graf dreamed of buying it.

After I departed Hartford and coaching at Trinity in 1979, the South Meadow Power Plant had a second life generating power, not from burning coal, as it had done originally, but from burning municipal garbage.

Its future could have been even brighter: When the New England Patriots began talking about building a new stadium in the ’90s, the governor of Connecticut began courting the team’s owner, Robert Kraft, to move the team to Hartford. It was rumored that the South Meadow site was dangled as a great place for the NFL franchise. The NHL Whalers had recently left for Carolina, and the region could have used the boost.

Plans were drawn, and there was enormous excitement for building a riverfront stadium and welcoming the Patriots. Instead, Massachusetts gave them a sweetheart deal for Gillette Stadium. Connecticut had been played, and Hartford got a garbage-burning facility instead.

As I cross the Charter Oak Bridge, I think back on Norm’s big idea. Norm had a lot of big ideas—he told me that calling 10s wasn’t enough to make a significant impact on a boat’s speed, so he wanted me to call 15s. “But don’t use the word 15; that would sound intimidating. Just call them 10s and keep counting.”

When I was introduced to the man who would be my college coach, I didn’t know what to think. A WW2 vet with close-cropped hair, he seemed suspicious of our long-haired generation. He was impatient, demanding, and a bit of a bully. We got used to hearing “Kevin, Ke-VINNN” as he yelled at our poor overworked manager. “Get over here, NOW! I need you.”

When the Grafs had us over for dinner one Sunday, he ripped his wife in front of us for using wine to cook the beef stew.

“These guys are in training and have agreed not to drink,” he complained, “and now you go and blow the whole thing.”

Like many of his coaching colleagues, he was contemptuous of women rowing, yet he rose for 6 a.m. practices every day so that they could have a rowing experience. How many times did I hear him rail about how slow the lightweights and the women were on the dock? But if you knew Coach, you knew that what lit his fuse was just impatience and excitement about getting out on the water.

After retiring, he came back and was the women’s coach, and, of course, they loved him because he took them seriously and because deep down he was a teddy bear.

His first coaching job was with the Yale lightweights in the late ’50s. I wish I had asked him more about that stint; it wasn’t an especially happy time for him, I suspect. The only time he told me much about Yale, he said, “Jim Rathschmidt, the heavyweight varsity coach, had a rule at the boathouse. No one could get out on the water before the varsity heavyweight eight. I can’t tell you how much time we wasted standing around, waiting for them to get out.”

He was offended by that arrogance.

At big regattas, like the IRAs, Norm didn’t hang out with the other coaches. Instead, he went out for a beer (although he drank wine) with the boatmen, the men who repair and rig boats. I remember being somewhat embarrassed. Shouldn’t he be talking and learning and sharing knowledge with all the other coaches? Gradually, I realized that the boatmen were the salt of the earth—kind, wise, and hilarious. I was embarrassed by my own snobbishness.

He had some crazy ideas; the HELCO purchase was just one of them. It’s a huge building, and with that breakwater, there was a nice calm “harbor” that would be ideal for a rowing dock.

“Andy, what if we could get South Meadow and convert it into a boathouse?”

But Coach Graf wasn’t thinking like I was, putting in racks and using the space like every other boathouse I’ve seen. No, he was a visionary.

“What if we put in cables and suspended the sterns from the ceiling, hanging them vertically, like sides of beef? We could take advantage of the building’s height and hoist them up and down with pulleys.

“It’s never been tried, Andy! We wouldn’t even need the whole building.”

Our fleet of Schoenbrods like sides of beef? Rocky was then the sports movie—an Oscar winner that everyone had seen. The scene of Sylvester Stallone working in a meat freezer, getting in extra body-shot punches against the hanging beef, was etched in my memory, as it must have been in Norm’s. When I had seen it in the theater, as Rocky battled Apollo Creed in the climactic scene, my friend Murph yelled out, “The meat, Rocky! Hit the meat!”

Every time I drive over the Charter Oak Bridge, I have visions of Norm’s HELCO boathouse, and let me tell you, as impractical as it might have been, in my mind it looks fantastic. In Seattle, Lake Washington Rowing Club converted a warehouse into its boathouse, and Seattle University is in a remodeled fishery.

Dear readers, are there boathouse conversions you know of, spaces that have found second lives as homes for our sport? Has anyone gone vertical with their shells?

Not long ago, a Penn oarsman told me that there was a quotation engraved at the Palestra, the home of the University of Pennsylvania’s storied basketball program, built 99 years ago in 1925, the year of Norman T. Graf’s birth. There’s a plaque that reads, “To play the game is great. To win the game is greater. But to love the game is the greatest of them all.”

Coach Graf, you helped us love rowing. Thank you.

Doctor Rowing, a.k.a. Andy Anderson, has been coxing, coaching, and sculling for 55 years. When not writing, coaching, or thinking about rowing, he teaches at Groton School and considers the fact that all three of his children rowed and coxed—and none played lacrosse—his greatest success.

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