My Bucket List Row … 47 Years Deferred
/From Wellesley College’s First Intercollegiate Team to Her First Head of the Charles Race Nearly Five Decades Later
Our intercollegiate Wellesley four made news in the Fall of 1971 with Boston Globe photo and story about women’s rowing. It would be another year before the Head of the Charles permitted women to row eights in its competition, and our cox and each of these rowers, except me, was in that historic Wellesley eight.
Let’s step back a few decades, in fact let’s start this rowing story at the turn of the century.
My grandmother –I called her Nonna – rowed stroke for her Wellesley crew from 1903 to 1907. Wellesley crews in those times rowed only ceremonially on Lake Waban, our beautiful campus lake.
When I went to Wellesley College, the first of my Nonna’s grandchildren to do so, my aunt Esther, who was an education professor at Wellesley and also an Alumna, gave me Nonna’s rowing Sweater. I have it today – with a few moth holes in it, but the - W - remains in place. The following two excerpts are from a story my Aunt Esther wrote after my Nonna died. In reading this memoir years later, I discovered where I got my stubborn streak and perseverance.
Nonna died when I was 15 years old, so she didn’t live to see me attend Wellesley College nor did she get to see me row there. She would have been thrilled by both milestones.
In my sophomore year of college I discovered rowing. Loved it. I was obsessed by it from the moment I rowed one of the lovingly named “Wellesley barges” out of our Lake Waban boathouse. These boats were built for Wellesley rowers for our dorm and class races and rowing classes and designed to slip into their water slots with our oars raised vertically above our heads. Quite different than racing shells where all oars are removed together at the dock after everyone is out of the boat. A part of my rowing story, below, will show you what happens when someone – I was that someone – raises her oar out of its oarlock while we are all in a competitive boat.
Wellesley’s boathouse on Lake Waban with our specially made boats wide enough to stay upright even without the oars in the oarlocks. Photo Wellesley.edu
Here’s what I wrote for Wellesley magazine about the magical day that I stepped into a racing four.
What I wrote for Wellesley Magazine in a 1984 story headlined “Row, Row, Row Your Boat … A Love Affair with a Lake.”
By my senior year at Wellesley College, I was living in San Francisco with my Wellesley College friend Harriet Milnes, with whom I’d hung out during my first year when she was a senior. As a profile I will post later illuminates, once Harriett and my other senior class friends graduated, every bit of my outside of class focus shifted to rowing. By the way, Harriett’s and my paths that have crossed through the years – she came to my wedding in 1978, met my high school/college boyfriend and dear friend David Conger ,and they were married. I attended their daughter’s wedding last summer. Speaks to the power of enduring friendships.
In the fall of my senior year, the Head of the Charles allowed women’s eights to row for the first time. And Wellesley College – rowers from my class of 1973 driving the boat – competed among 13 other women’s boats of all ages. I will let me dear friend Sally (Brumley) Keller pick up the story of that boat. Just know it’s the boat I wished I’d been in. The one that 47 years later pushed me to row this year’s Head of the Charles as my bucket list race.
Sally (right, with Queen of Rowing Crown) and me, Wellesley classmates, fellow rowers, and Sally rows at a nationally competitive level today. In 2019 Head of the Charles she stroked her 70+ (average age) boat to a gold medal with plenty of time to spare. A dominant row! She stays with me for the Head of the Charles so it was quite fun this year for each of us to be rowing an eight.
Head of the Charles 1972
Fall of my senior year and I’m on the other coast studying Navajo language and education at U.C. Berkeley and rowing for Mills College on Oakland’s Lake Merritt. My friend Harriett was, by then, a graduate student at Mills and she had taken up rowing with Mills, and the crew kindly invited me to jump in. Mills was a West Coast rowing power at that time, so it felt great to be in their boat.
Meanwhile back East, my rowing mates at Wellesley were pulling together an eight to row in the Head of the Charles . Why not? It’s the first time women could row an eight in this race, and so they did.
Here’s a photo of that Wellesley College crew, taken from a bridge followed by the words Sally wrote to me, sharing this memory. You’ll note that she hadn’t forgotten the day when I pulled my oar out after our first row in our wooden racing four – and yes. I was a must less experienced rower than Sally was then, and remain so today.
Sally’s words: Wellesley's W 8+ was 7th of 13 entries in 1972 HOCR, first year there was a W 8+ event (not yet divided into club/collegiate/etc...). First year there were more than a few women racing (scullers).
“We rowed out of MIT’s boathouse, borrowing one of their old wooden boats, as Wellesley didn’t have a racing 8+ at that time, or a coach for that matter... Barbara Jordan was the “water” person - canoeing, swimming, sailing... so she signed when we needed for entries, but knew nothing about crew and didn’t go out coaching us. Did cox us once, which I remember vividly: I was in stroke seat when we came into the dock and Dave said “hand me your oar” to someone on starboard...someone inexperienced (even more than the rest of us!) who took her oar out of the oarlock to hand to him and we flipped right there at the dock. I came up facing BJ and will never forget the surprised look on her face!! (How she fit in that seat, I have no idea...maybe sitting up high enough that she was easily dumped out - good thing)
Happy memories - Sally”
Winter 2016
Enter Risa Greendlinger, yes another Wellesley College graduate years later than me, with whom I’d worked on a political campaign in the 1980s. We'd stayed in touch, so she invites me to join her for coffee early one morning, telling me she’s going to be near Cambridge. We meet. She tells me she’s just been on a rowing erg working out at Community Rowing, Inc.. I’m curious. Soon, I’m in, and by the next week I am joining her at 6:00 a.m. to erg.
Thank you, Risa. Serendipity is a big part of my life, as it likely is for everyone. But I always remind younger folks when I speak to them, serendipity only benefits those who recognize it and are ready to act. Go for it.
As winter draws to an end, Risa and I are joining GS 1, a lower level General Sweeps class coached by John Sisk. By March 2016, I am layered up agains the cold morning weather and rowing in the dark in a fiberglass boat (a first) with fiberglass oars (a first), and I am loving it. Can’t wait to be on the dock at 5:25 am, ready to row on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And pretty soon I am signing up to learn how to skull – single, double, quad – and I love that, too. And then I am volunteering to row on Tuesday and Thursdays with para-rowers – rowers with disabilities and by showing up we give them the chance to row, and soon I am bowing quads and doubles.
In the summer of 2018 I returned to Lake Waban for my 45th Wellesley reunion. Each reunion year 1973 returns, the Wellesley athletic department brings our boat – named Spirit of ‘73, in our honor – out of storage. It’s in the boathouse waiting for us. And we get to row it on Lake Waban. We’ve done this at every reunion.
For our Lake Waban Row in June 2018, I united my two rowing families, CRI and Wellesley. Glenda Fishman, Wellesley College 1970, with whom I row in GS Sweeps coxed us around the lake while her husband shoot photos. Sally is stroking, having switched seats with Gigi, who stroked us in 1972. Debbie and I have our old seats in the bow.
If we all make it to 2023, we’ll all be rowing Spirit of ‘73 again. Wooden hull. Wooden oars.
Our legacy. Wellesley College Class of 1973 competitive rowers.
By now, I am obsessively in love! With rowing. And with CRI! Suddenly, I am part of an extraordinary new community where I know everyone by first name. And we are rowing on the Charles River. No better combination possible!
Head of the Charles Practice 2019. This video is one of our early practice for our Head of the Charles Row. Not our final boats. Different mix of rowers, which made it fun. All of us rowed with each other until Anna Jurascheck chose the 3 boats who rowed in the Head of the Charles.
Upstream from CRI, just around the river’s bend, is Wellesley College boathouse. Through the decades, Wellesley kept rowing competitively until in May 2016 Wellesley rowers won the NCAA Division 3 women’s rowing championship. What follows is an excerpt from an Endnote essay I wrote at the time for Wellesley magazine – again uniting my CRI and Wellesley College rowing experiences. If you’d like to read this entire essay – The Girls in the Boat, click here.
“On our first March outing, as we readied our shell, I heard clicking oars on the river. From around the river’s bend, grey-hulled shells powered by blue and white oars emerged. Barely readable in winter dawn’s dim light, I saw WELLESLEY on their hulls.
‘Go Blue. Go Wellesley,’ I shouted, startling my boat mates. From that morning on, shouting to them was ritual. For me it was an invisible tether connecting our baby strokes in the ‘Spirit of ‘73’ to these powerful, polished rowers and their enviable pace.
On the morning of my 65th birthday, when I became a ‘senior citizen,’ I rowed – without a dockside shout-out. Wellesley’s rowers were in San Diego to compete. Midway through our row, we paused and the coach asked if I had a birthday wish. ‘Let’s shout, “Go Blue,” I said. ‘Wellesley’s at the NCAA’s.’ He smiled. We shouted. By the next day Wellesley was the Division 3 NCAA champ, earning the college’s first NCAA win by any team!
Later that summer, my daughter, a Wellesley sophomore, told me that a team rower was a fellow worker at her summer job. ‘I asked her if she heard someone shouting “Go Blue’ on the Charles,” said Maya, who knew about my morning hollers.
’Oh, yes,’ her friend replied. ‘We don’t know who she is, but we love that woman!’
It’s fall now, and Wellesley is on the Charles, rowing from its boathouse upstream from mine. I’m shouting still. Perhaps a few of these rowers know now that I once rowed as they do now, albeit not nearly so well. Decades from now when their NCAA win is lore of aging alumnae, I hope they get to shout, ‘Go Blue,’ to young rowers. They’ll know just how I feel.’”
”
Head of the Charles 2019
Magnificent October Sunday. I feel the smallest breath of wind off my back porch. Looks like it’s going to be a smooth row in the afternoon. That morning Sally Keller and I settle in at my house to watch the HORC LiveStream of the Regatta before she needs to catch a bus. When she leaves, I eat an early lunch, dress in layers for the race, and I’m at the boathouse with our 3 GS crews by 1:00. Our race goes off at 4:12, but we are Bow # 31 of 35 boats and we’ve got a long slow row ahead of us to get to the starting line in the Charles River Basin near Boston University.
Without these rowers, there’d be no bucket list row for me. All of you are champs in my book. Showing off our CRI red. I wear it proudly. Sort of like Wellesley Blue. Photo taken before our Head of the Charles row.
Here’s a few photo and a video of our row taken by Jeb Sharp, mostly, with one by Matthew McWeeney, who you will meet in a photo at the end.
Bow #31 is on my back.
Emerging from under the Weeks Bridge. About halfway down the 3-mile course.
Weeks Bridge turn. Row hard, starboard. Turn the boat.
Row harder, starboard. Especially you in the bow.
Eliot Bridge turn at the Head of the Charles Race, CRI GS 2-Dory 2019
To the finish. Thanks Jeb Sharp for biking along and catching us here, too.
A huge thank you to all who came out to watch and cheer our boat on and who encouraged me from afar with your many supportive messages on Facebook. Here are Matthew McWeeney, Rose Moss and my daughter, Maya, on Weeks Bridge waiting for us to row under. Photo by Jeb Sharp
The Morning After
On the Head of the Charles Regatta website a profile of me is posted.
"WHY NOT?"
Pioneering Journalist Crosses Big One Off Bucket List
Written by Samantha Barry, a journalism student at Northeastern University, she’s learned about me through a serendipitous conversation I’d had with a Northeastern Journalism professor, my friend Dan Kennedy. Dan relayed my “bucket list” row to his fellow professor who was organizing coverage of the regatta by his students, and presto, Sam and I were sipping coffee and hot apple cider on blustery cold day just before the regatta began. She texted me on Saturday and we turned out to be close by at the Head of the Charles, so she also shot my photo at the Eliot Bridge.
““I’m obsessed with it, completely obsessed by it,’ Ludtke said. ‘I post sunrises, videos, pictures as well, essays about it, so people who know me through Facebook know that I just love rowing.’
Now that she’s back at it, it doesn’t look like she is going to stop anytime soon. In her run-up to his weekend’s regatta, she simply keeping that ‘Why not’ mentality in mind. She might well find herself back at the Head of the Charles; first regattas have an addictive way of leading to second regattas. Either way, she planned to leave it all on the water.
’So that’s what I intend to do, I intend to leave nothing on the river in my one and only,”’Ludtke said. ‘I’m going to look at it as my one and only because it may well be, and that would be fine. I’d leave this life very satisfied if this was my one and only Head of the Charles rowing race.’
Editor’s Note: Melissa Ludtke’s CRI boat finished 34th in the Mixed Eight event, in a time of 19:27.”
If you would like to read Samatha’s entire story, click here.