Stuyve Pell was a good friend and my rowing mentor.

I came to rowing 19 years ago, having never competed in any organized team sport because of a long history of asthma. That didn't seem to matter to Stuyve. I think he was impressed by the zeal with which I took up a sport that was an important part of his life, and in his ever helpful way he wanted to make sure that I got the help I needed to stick with it and succeed. Stuyve put together my first ergometer when it arrived in pieces in a long cardboard box. Stuyve went with me to look over a red Peinert Single that a former Carnegie Lake Rowing Association member was selling in Lawrenceville to make sure it would be a sound investment as my first boat. He gave me tips on technique and rigging and induced me to use a rear view bicycle mirror attached to my glasses, as he did, to help me steer that single. He explained rowing terms and jargon and was an invaluable reference in the years I wrote the newsletter for CLRA. He volunteered regularly at the finish line for Princeton races and so did I.

When I entered my first Head of the Charles, Stuyve gave me a copy of an article on steering that course, with diagrams on how to approach each bridge and take each turn. I studied it avidly the week before that regatta and before each HOC I rowed in over the years. For the Head of the Schuykill, Stuyve invited me to launch my boat from his club, University Barge in Philadelphia, rather than in the mayhem of the general boat launching area. He and Pat asked me to join them and Stuyve's doubles partner Don McSween for supper at the Annex Restaurant when we all returned to Princeton.

One memory in particular stands out. It was in connection with my first Diamond States Masters Regatta held on Noxontown Pond on the campus of St. Andrew's School in Middletown Delaware where Stuyve's father had been headmaster and where he spent his childhood. I'd entered a Women's Single event, my first singles race away from Lake Carnegie, and Stuyve knew I was nervous. He suggested that he and Pat and I drive down to Middletown the afternoon before the regatta so I could row the course with him in advance. We would get a couple of rooms at a nearby motel and stay the night in order to be rested and ready to race the next day. Now Stuyve was both very generous when it came to others and scrimped when it came to treating himself. So for him to offer to spend a night in a motel only three hours from Princeton when he would ordinarily drive down in time for his own race was not only very helpful to me and but extraordinarily generous of him.

There were other kindnesses. Stuyve and Pat insisted I stay overnight in their house when my furnace caught fire one winter night after the repairman I'd called to fix some malfunction had patched two wires together that didn't belong anywhere near each other. One summer Stuyve and Pat called their daughter Alison in Washington state to tell her that I would be in Seattle with a couple of free days in between a walking trip to the Olympic Peninsula and a another trip to Mt. Rainier, with the result that Alison, whom I don't think I had met before, picked me up and took me out to her home in Snohomish, where I had a lovely time with her and Michael and their three boys. In recent years, after Pat died, Stuyve shared McCarter Theatre tickets with me and I shared Princeton University Orchestra concerts with him.

However rowing was the primary link between Stuyve and me. Like others, I watched in awe as he came in first time and time again, his strategy being to get out ahead of the competition with powerful strokes at the start and stay ahead until he crossed the finish line. I asked him once how many races he rowed each year. Twenty-five, he said, with his usual sense for precision. When he returned from someplace like the Canadian Henley and I asked him how he had done, his stock answer was that he had "held off the Indians one more time." I admired Pat for accompanying him to those many races and regattas, which must have been boring for her, and I often wondered what he did with all the medals he came home with. In later years I wondered how his psyche would take it when inevitably age would catch up with him and he wouldn't be first every time. Judging from what I saw of him in the last month, I needn't have worried. He faced one of the most dreaded cancers, diagnosed only a little over three months ago, with a calm pragmatism and fortitude that was truly remarkable.

Two years ago on Valentine's Day Stuyve appeared at my door with a miniature potted rosebush covered with tiny red blossoms. I recognized it as coming from the floral section of McCaffrey's Supermarket. When the weather warmed up, I stuck it in the ground by the deck in back of my house, where it flourished, becoming bushier and putting out new and larger blooms. At some point in the last couple of weeks, I mentioned this plant to Stuyve, adding that the first buds for this year had already appeared. "What!" he exclaimed. "That $4.99 plant?" Yes, I said, the very one.

May it continue to thrive as a tangible reminder of a wonderful friend and rowing mentor.