EXCERPT: Brown crew didn’t look like Yale, Harvard, or The University of Washington. We were not an official sport but an informal organization with the privilege of rowing on the Seekonk River at the top of Narragansett Bay out of the Narragansett Boat Club which is the oldest rowing club in the United States unless the Detroit Boat Club is.

It was a hot clear day still more August than September as thirty of us candidates for the 1957-8 Brownfreshman crew stood crowded around the boat club’s open barn door staring down a precipitous ramp at a hunk of black driftwood that looked more like the shattered hull of a hundred-year-old shipwreck sticking out of the sand than some kind of dock.