In the picture of us throwing Mouse into the Schuylkill you can see Bill in the foreground giving the thumb's up to Whitey, who took the shot. The big blond guy with his back to the camera is Bob Olson. Mouse is doing an upside down point at the red nun buoy which is pointing at the old Callow Hill Bridge that once on its different levels carried cars, pedestrians, streetcars and trains.

But Mouse's left foot is pointing at a hole in said bridge, a hole that is very strange. Think of huge waterbugs coming down the river that look like something out of H.G. Wells. They want to go under the bridge but the bridge is strange too. It's a close-packed maze of girders that seemingly extend right down to the water and keep going to the Schuylkill's bottom. Not even a flatfish submarine could get through without conceding that it must go hard port to reach that entrance to Hades.

Wrong, all wrong and a photographic illusion. Between the Penn Boathouse dock where we are standing and the Callow Hill Bridge (with the Philadelphia Art Museum off to the left) is a huge waterfall, not steep but extremely dangerous.

A lot of water sweeps over Fairmount Dam compared to old days, when much of it ran through waterwheels and locks allowed boats to pass. What I saw in Whitey's photo as the entrance to Hades was not a hole in the bridge but a relic of the past, a dam house at the place where the level of the whole river drops.

Forty years later, Penn let us use its boathouse again along with a very expensive shell and blue and red oars. Since most of us hadn't rowed in decades, we drifted and drifted, and almost took the whole caboodle over the falls until Mouse said, "All eight, row," then we were all right.

As to bridges, a 4-man keeps his eyes in the boat and doesn't notice them most of the time. Still, I have a thing with Philadelphia bridges.

Two or three miles upriver near the Dad Vail starting line, whether for Henley distance in our day or 2000 meters later, the tall Strawberry Mansion Bridge looms with its commanding presence.

Bill Strawberry, who married Mary Rockefeller, comes from the family of Strawbridge and Clothier in Philadelphia and looks like Bing Crosby. Philip Makanna: "I think I remember Strawbridge. Very tweedy. Curly hair like Gladstone Gander?"

Strawbridge but not Strawberry, a fraternity brother of mine, was stroke of the varsity crew we beat when we were freshmen, with the result that the entire varsity quit the next day. George Tidd, also my fraternity brother, was in the same boat, and when the time came for me to be branded, he held down the branding iron an extra amount of time so that the flesh on my left forearm sizzled and smelled.

That brand with Greek letters went right down to the bone, but-- fortunately-- disappeared after thirty years. But the names Bill Strawberry and Bill Strawbridge have stayed with me forever.

"Keep your eyes in the boat" is the first rule of crew. The second should be, "Never use the expression 'crew team.' It is a redundancy."

I did keep my eyes in the boat, but if I had walked a mile to City Center and Market Street, I would have seen the landmark Strawbridge and Clothier building, the huge space whose construction came within a hair of bankrupting Philadelphia.

Strawbridge and Clothier was a department store franchise, not a dress shop. Clothier was the name of a person. The main building remains an icon, but there were thirteen branches in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Eventually Macy's gulped it all.

Mary, daughter of Nelson Rockefeller, was a tall Vassar girl who often would come to Brown. She and Bill Strawbridge would be out on the grass in front of the fraternities and she could throw a miniature football as far as he could-- a mile.

Ten years later, when the marriage failed, Bill Strawbridge went to Mary's re-wedding in her apartment. In a widely published photograph he is seen smiling at the other guy.

Back in 1961 Mary went with her father to try and find her twin brother Michael, the exceptional wrestler at Phillips Exeter Academy and primitive art collector, who tipped over in his catamaran near the Asmat region of New Guinea and never was seen again.

I asked my brother Derek who sells catamarans from Rhode Island if those things tip. He sent me a viral video of a New Zealand couple flying high through the air over their craft. He added, "So this is the thing: there are a lot of cats out there. Probability alone suggests many opportunities for disaster and all sorts of carnage.

"The stats suggest that the faster your boat, which is pretty much dictated by the weight, size of rig, and disproportionate levels of testosterone in the skipper, directly contributes to flipping probability. Add to that disregard for weather and being in the wrong place at the wrong time and unwanted swimming is likely.

"Conversely, the bigger, slower really heavy luxury cats almost never flip. If you are dumb enough to be out in a windstorm on a condomaran, most likely your sails just shred, or maybe your mast comes down. That's about it.

"So then, race boats capsize, big comfy cats don't. Then there are beach cats. We have one. They flip. You swim. You right them and get on your way. Simple enough!"

Well, I apologize to Bill Strawbridge for confusing him over sixty years with a Strawberry and a bridge, and I don't think Michael Rockefeller was eaten by cannibals but may have drowned.

Equally awful and much too soon after college, was what happened to our three-man in the high-stroking boat, Lew Covert (and this incident, solely because it happened, needs to be in the book). Lew was teaching an Outward Bound class in Colorado when his student above him dislodged a boulder. It knocked him off the mountain and killed him.