row2k Features
Book Excerpt: Chapter 10, Understroking the Opposition -- from Four Years at Four, by John Escher
February 18, 2022
John Escher and Philip Makanna

Bob Olson (R. Nuss) and Ma

Bob Olson has written a decorous account of how he came to row with us:

"Our crew consisted, I believe, of Engineers, Lawyers and Lost Souls. I was a Lost Soul. You need a little background:

"After high school I worked the summer digging telephone holes for Con Ed.

"The next summer I worked on the Tappan Zee Bridge. The next summer I had a number of jobs but ended up as a deck hand on the dredge Pittsburgh, outside of Bridgeport; for the most part I didn’t mind the work and liked the people. They were fun-- mostly smart and generally good company.

"I had assumed that I was a very strong card player until I played gin rummy from ten one night until two the next morning with the paymaster of the dredge. We probably played a hundred hands, I won none. I asked my opponent if he had been cheating. He replied that with me cheating would have been absurd. I lost several months’ pay but he settled for a carton of Camels.

"I felt the same way about chess until I played with an old Italian who had probably never seen the inside of a high school. He butchered me, and then I learned that he had spent a large part of WWII in an American POW camp where there was little to do but play chess.

"I didn’t like Brown. It seemed a cold and lonely place. Mostly I didn’t like it because I was not ready for college, and when September 1956 arrived I simply could not go back. On the 10th, I took the train to 42nd street and Broadway to join the Marines. Four men were waiting at that desk so I joined the Army, volunteered for jump school and then for Special Forces training.

"In the Spring of 1958 I was sent to a very small, quite illegal Special Forces group in Berlin. The cold war was on, and if you consider anyone who sells military information for money a spy then most of the people in Berlin were spies.

"Berlin for me was a very dreamy place. I remember the wonderful young women, the food in the Foreign Legion Officers club, Russian music, vodka and caviar, rain and cold in Bavaria which we reached by parachute, and the occasional very real danger. I also remember the decent Germans who had clearly been Nazis. I thought that they had been Nazis but in Berlin in 1958 no one had ever heard of Nazis. There is a web site (Det A 10th SFG) that will tell you about it, and the most evocative image for me is the guard tower and concertina wire.

"When I came back to Brown and assumed the life of a 1959 undergraduate I felt like I had fallen off the moon. I tried to improve things by drinking bourbon and smoking heavily. I looked up the younger brother of Drusilla Escher, a dear old friend, and he brought me to crew practice with him. I remember clearly that we had to run two miles to get there and I needed to stop twice."

R. Nussbaum Olson 5
R. Nussbaum Olson 5

"I was put in the barge and then in the 5 seat of a shell. The 5 seat requires a willingness to pull hard and not much else– and I was fully qualified. Until that day however my athletic qualifications elicited raucous laughter from anyone familiar with them.

"The rest of the story you probably know. We beat almost everyone almost all the time.

"Somehow I saw a good thing and didn’t leave. A later generation would have called it good vibes.

As to how to duplicate what happened - I do not have the foggiest notion, maybe this: if you need a coach try to find an ex-marine pilot at a RISD cocktail party who is brilliant, dedicated, and will work for nothing. For a stroke find the best high school oarsman in the country and get him to row for Brown.

"What we did was come a long way. I know that modern crews are faster and train more efficiently. But they haven’t come as far partly because they can’t-- we started back further– our crew was an impoverished club and we beat almost every varsity in the country. Having made this modest statement, in my heart I know that as to twenty-first century folks I just want to see them on the river.

"As to what this experience did for me, a whole separate issue, I gave up my career as an alcoholic and started a Real Estate company. Perhaps I should have stuck to bourbon-- the reader can decide (longviewlp.com).

"Whatever else, I learned what fun it is to win. The fierce and primitive joy I felt when we beat Dartmouth matches anything parachuting could offer.

"I got decent grades. I made friends who have lasted all my life. Phil Makanna once told me that Brown crew gave him the courage to live (some life). I can’t do any better than that."

But this is not the version I Bottle told my girlfriends, all of whom I wished heartily to impress. Bob Olson was in a bar with my sister. He held her high over his head with one hand and said, "I won't let you down until you promise to marry me."

"Okay, okay," my sister said, "I'll marry you." So he let her down. But she had no intention of marrying him and didn't.

But she sent him a few of her poems. He passed them off as his own since he wanted to convince some friends of his literary prowess. (I always told you, my sister, that you should do more with your poetry.)

Bob told my sister that he was on the construction crew that built the first Tappan Zee bridge. His employers considered him too large to send up in the superstructure.

His job was to wear sunglasses and lie on his back in a rowboat and stare upward all day. If anyone fell off the bridge he was to row to the person and pull him into the boat. While eight persons did drop into the Hudson, none fell while Bob was in the boat.

Each night two different hierarchies of bridge workers would gather in the same place. First, some workers were better at poker than others. Second, some jobs are more dangerous than others and the persons who do them are worth more.

Bob couldn't stand this. He cried, "I want to work on the bridge!"

On his first day he was very high and a bunch of girders came swinging on the end of a cable down then up.

He jumped to a beam fifteen feet below. The other workers had to pry his arms and legs loose. He woke in a hospital with a nurse telling him that if he even so much as thought about any woman, no babies.

Bob Olson thought about what the nurse told him. And he thought about her.

So the doctor and everybody told him (in more medical language) nope, no kids.

There must be some compensation for this, he thought, and while he was in Berlin he met many Mädchens and well discovered that what the medical establishment had so clearly stated was untrue.

This was the person my sister told me about. He was big and strong and returning to Brown. I did some research and located the room where he was living-- in Wriston Quadrangle (a quad is different; it's four people with two oars apiece and what Bill Engeman rowed on the Potomac).

I knocked. The door opened. A huge cloud of cigarette smoke wafted into the hall. I went in anyway.

"I will try rowing for a week," Bob Olson said, "if you will agree to drive with me up to Orange, Massachusetts and jump out of an airplane."

"Well, did you hold him to it?" a Philadelphia reporter later asked. "Nah, I knew his sister and his mother and I knew he'd screw it up."

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