Unruly Comments

Most people think of crew as a gentleman's sport for preppies and upwardly mobile types and for the most part that's an accurate description of Ivy League crew. But, where I learned to row, at the West Side Rowing Club, in Buffalo, N.Y., the aristocratic aura was conspicuously absent. The clubhouse, a beautiful old wood building, was situated on Bird Island in between the Niagara River and the Black Rock canal about a half mile from where the Peace Bridge ran over into Canada. A half mile in the other direction was Buffalo's sewage treatment plant and city dump, Squaw Island. We used to have to run laps around the giant sewage treatment tanks, and sometimes we'd even run through the dump. The air was rotten on the leeward side of the island, but on the river side, the winds off the water would clear the stink out of our nostrils. In the spring, we'd pray that the ice would break up so we wouldn't have to run those ten-mile races through the putrid air.

If those terrible fumes were the arms of Scylla swooping down upon our noses, then the water was Charybdis, a horrifying whirlpool of slime, filth, and most dangerous of all, rapscallions on the shore waiting in ambush. There was no telling what would show up on a day's row. Once, we found a dead buck--it was unmarked so we speculated that it had fallen through some thin ice. Another time a man's body was found.

The water was a greenish, oil-laden composition, often full of large black gobs, that would only come off the shells with gasoline. But it's hard to tell which was worse, the water or the people walking along side. A thin breakwall separated the canal from the river and Lake Erie, and oftentimes, fishermen would cast a line into the canal, although only disease-ridden carp could still live in it. Once, during a race, a fisherman cast his line clear over a boat and while he was still within shouting distance the air was full of invectives between the coxswain and the fisherman. In another race an oarsman was hit in the forehead by a stone cast by some malicious hooligan; it's a great West Side legend that he did not stop rowing.

I too had a little run-in with a gang of punks from Buffalo's West Side. I was rowing in a single scull without paying very much attention to what was ahead, when, passing under the drawbridge leading onto Bird Island, a firecracker went off about a foot from my head. And then another one landed in the boat and went off under my leg, then a third and a fourth in the air above me.

The West Side was a tough part of town--and that's where a lot of the old men in the club came from. Some of them, John Bennett, Doc Schaab and Jim Turner, were national and Olympic champions. John Bennett, a captain for the Buffalo police force, still holds the world record time for pair-oareds shells. John was a great one for pep-talks but I remember him best of all for his training recommendation: one bottle of Ballantine Ale every day. Some of these men lived half their lives down at the boat-house. One, who always chewed on long cigars but never lit them, was so dedicated to rowing that he tried to build a shell in his two-room apartment, or so the story goes. But his wife told him either the boat went or she did, and according to all accounts, he's now sharing the apartment with two shells.

A few guys down at the West Side were pretty shady looking characters, especially the Tech students. I remember once seeing them ahead of me while out doing some road-work, when suddenly a group of about four disappeared into the bushes. Later I learned they had a pint of sloe-gin.

West Side Rowing Club has a tradition of toughness and rowdiness that goes back to the days when some club oarsmen pulled up along side another club's shell in the water and started a fearsome donnybrook. It's not quite the same as the Harvard crew's winning tradition--but it was one hell of a good time, a grand style of rowing.