Published September 18, 2011
By Ray Thomas
Go down to Quincy’s waterfront
and you will see the historic North Side Boat Club. Walk up close to the sign
in front and it may be a surprise to see that the club’s logo is a pair of
oars.
And further down Front Street at the South Side Boat Club
resides a collection of photographs and trophies documenting the glory this
part of Quincy’s waterfront produced, fame that was not powered by motors but
by strong backs and oars.
From the 1890s to the 1940s, Quincy was a regional rowing
powerhouse. Workers in Quincy’s manufacturing and construction industries
gathered after the workday ended to take their racing shells containing
anywhere from one to eight rowers — referred to as singles, double/pairs, fours
and eights — onto the Mississippi River and Quincy Bay to practice and compete.
The protected bay waters and riverfront provided a good
straight stretch of water and enough shoreline (along what was then called
Edgewater Park) for 5,000 Quincyans to turn out in July 1910 to watch and cheer
on their favorites. Even the Quincy Naval Reserve entered their cutter and
whale boat into the races.
Historian Carl Landrum noted in The Quincy Herald- Whig that
the South Side Boat Club was founded in 1886 and the North Side Boat Club in
1894. The original South Side Boat Club was organized in a cooper (barrel) shop
in a Quincy alley and had only a handful of members. The sport gained
popularity, and in 1903, the Quincy City Council recognized its importance by
granting use of city land for shell storage.
Longtime South Side members Allie Lymenstull, 88, and Herb
Gustafson, 89, recall they were the youngsters when older club members brewed
beer for club dances and used nickel and dime slots to raise travel money
to attend regattas.
The numerous trophies on display at the South Side Boat Club
attest to the fact that the distance from other rowing venues was no problem;
club boats (more than 60 feet long for a racing “eight”) were loaded onto train
cars on the tracks next to Front Street and hauled to races in St. Louis,
Peoria, Detroit, and Chicago on a regular basis.
Quincy rowers even won the national championship in an
“eight” in Philadelphia in 1904 and took the national championship the
following year in a “four” in Springfield, Mass. In 1930 a crew of Quincyans
traveled to Liege, Belgium, for the International Rowing Regatta, barely
missing (by 2/5 second) winning the international “four” championship and
receiving second place in the world. They had competed and distinguished
themselves against an international field and returned home to heroes’ welcomes.
Rowing was one of the first sports in which both men and
women competed. The South Side Boat Club created a “Ladies Aid” division in
1910 and fielded a women’s crew in July 1935. In that same month the club’s
junior team won the Central States Junior Rowing Tournament, with host St.
Louis taking second.
Quincy’s rowing culture ended after World War II, when
soldiers returning home were preoccupied with the needs of new families and the
dream of home ownership.
Rowers went home after work, not out on the
river. Bowling alleys and baseball diamonds
with artificial lighting provided an after supper team activity, and the
river became a place for motor-powered boats.
While the new sports were no match for the physical and
endurance challenges of rowing (which required sustained bursts of full on
power beyond the comfortable bounds of aerobic capacity), they allowed for
greater participation by regular folks.
Labor-saving conveniences saved time and effort, but the
result was that Americans by and large lost touch with intense sustained
exertion in work and sport. America’s postwar mindset emphasized “modern”
living, a lifestyle that, to the extent possible, supplanted the old physical
ways with use of electric and internal combustion devices.
While folks still used their bodies for strenuous physical
labor when there was no labor-saving alternative, rowing for sport went
away like the all night dance contests and the washboard. Fashion conscious
young men wore gloves and hats so as not to look so tanned and “coarse”, and
magazines urged homemakers to improve their status by increasing the
labor-saving appliances in the kitchen.
New homes and subdivisions were built without incurring the
extra cost of sidewalks because modern families used the car to travel,
bicycles became children’s toys, and when someone went for a boat ride it
usually involved a motor, not oars or a paddle.
The intense exertion required for rowing intervals (“full
power 20s” involved repetitions of 20 stroke “pieces” as hard as the crew could
pull) required strong commitment, and it was just a whole lot easier to be on a
bowling or baseball team where exertion was still intense, but in much shorter
bursts.
America’s belief in the value of strenuous activities that
produced physical endurance for the regular person drifted off into the smoky
haze of the bowling alley and the walking or golf cart driven pace of the golf
course.
The new intensive physical sports that did develop like
basketball and football involved cutting and moving on the court and field,
sometimes damaging joints. The physical toll imposed was so great that many
athletes carried a bad knee, ankle or shoulder into their mid-20s, an age when
elite level rowers were just hitting their prime.
No longer in use, Quincy’s rowing boats were sent to other
communities with surviving rowing programs, and the Quincy waterfront was
transformed to a place where motorboats carried people onto the water.
Gradually, the community forgot that Quincy Bay was once the stage for Quincy’s triumph with oars.
Ray Thomas is a former Quincyan (QHS 1970, QU 1974) whose
mother, Maggie Thomas, was a longtime Quincy radio and television reporter and
an actress. He is a lawyer who lives in Portland, Ore.
