row2k Features
50 Years since the '64 Gold, and 150 Years as Club
Vesper Celebrates Two Big Ones
June 10, 2014
Janit Gorka/row2k

It was a grainy and dark video that silenced the 250 Vesper members and guests Saturday night for the Annual Banquet, this year both in honor of the 1964 Gold Medal Olympians from #10 Boathouse Row, and celebrating the club's 150th year in existence.

As the screens in the Bodek Lounge of Houston Hall on Penn's campus revealed the images recorded at dusk, skipping and sputtering and trying to focus as the improbable played out on the water of the Toda Rowing Course in Tokyo in 1964, the room was quiet and reverent. You could feel the collective heartbeat of the many people in the room who knew what it is like to have their bow cross the finish line first on the World stage, at the Olympics.

It was as if everyone there was considering how unlikely a victory it was... how complete their ascendancy in the great eights...that their power, determination and training propelled them past Germany and Czechoslovakia on the Toda canal.

The 1964 Olympics was a victory for USA Rowing as well, as they topped the medal count in Tokyo. Not only did the Vesper Eight of Joseph Amlong, Thomas Amlong, Harold Budd, Emory Clark, Stanley Cwiklinski, Hugh Foley, William Knecht, William Stowe, and Robert Zmonyi win, but the coxed pair of Edward Ferry, Conn Finlay and Kent Mitchell also took gold. The double of Seymour Cromwell and James Storm earned a silver, and the coxless four of Geoffrey Picard, Dick Lyon, Ted Mittel and Ted Nash earned a bronze. Philadelphia's Vesper Boat Club and Coach Al Rosenberg had been a part of the most of the medal-winner's rowing development.

Fifty years later, Vesper collected to honor their victory, as well as the achievements of the Club as a whole over the preceding 150 years. With a room full of story-tellers with plenty of swagger, the tales were tall - and so the stories flowed at Houston Hall.

There were so many stories to tell, but the ones that brought the most joy if you looked around the room, were often of episodes away from the river - Bill Stowe's hidden beer stash; Dietrich Rose's insistence that his junior crew be served alcohol at a German restaurant; and the hot temperatures, general debauchery and other mysteries of Vesper's third floor. The camaraderie that brought everyone together on a snowy Philadelphia night in January 2014 is in truth what made all the medals earned over the years most meaningful.

The degrees of separation were scant. Even as Mike Teti (a Vesper legend, the reading of the athlete and coach's resume almost caused oxygen debt for Larry Wittig.) introduced the keynote speaker, John Lehman, Jr., former secretary of the Navy, he spoke of his wife Kay Worthington's connection to Vesper as a double-Gold winning Canadian Olympian. Teti, one of 10 children, noted that he is a family man and that Vesper, to many in attendance, is also a family.

On a more personal note: George Hines, legendary coach at Lasalle High School, added a nice comment to close the evening, noting that rowing is "the finest way to keep teenagers out of trouble." In my own world, I hope that plays out, as my own son with soon join speaker Mike Teti in California...keep him busy!

The assemblage at the Vesper dinner (which incidentally rivals attendance at some US Rowing Conventions) was more evidence that the rowing world is one that will forever move--and be moved-- in unison.

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