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"There
is nothing -
absolutely nothing -
half so much worth
doing as simply
messing about in
boats...."
The Wind in the Willows
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Ernestine Bayer was the
Rosa Parks of the movement to establish women’s rowing as a sport.
During the 1950s the late Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat on a bus
to a white man, thus igniting the civil rights movement. During the 1930s
the male rowing establishment told Ernestine Bayer she couldn’t
row because she was a woman. So she established a woman’s boat club
and then in the 1960s took the first U.S. women’s eight to France
to row in world competition. Her actions created an uproar in the male
rowing community. Today women constitute more than half the rowers in
the United States.
I wrote this story on how I came to write her biography for the fall issue
of The Catch, the quarterly newsletter I edit for the Alden Ocean Shell
Association.
By Lew Cuyler
Perhaps it
was just plain luck that I met Ernestine Bayer when she was in her eighties
and I was in my sixties, a time of our lives when we had both mellowed.
Had we been of the same age
in the 1930s I might have rejected her as being “a pushy broad”
and she might have rejected me as being just another unenlightened male
rower enjoying an experience denied to women.
Fortunately that was not
the case. Instead we met at a time when I was in the full-flush of re-starting
my rowing career, thanks to finding an unexpected lake a mile from a house
my wife and I had just bought in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. That discovery
prompted an immediate decision: I would re-visit the sport I had so enjoyed
in school and college, but this time in a single since there was no rowing
club around, except for Williams College which uses the lake. But I was
way past the age and education threshold for Williams and besides I am
an Amherst graduate, Class of 1955.
One event led to another.
In 1992 I met Ernie accidentally while watching a race at a regatta in
New York state for Alden ocean shells. She had white hair, and at 83 was
obviously my senior.
“See that woman,”
she said, pointing to a racer, involving me even though I had not acknowledged
her presence.
“She’s shooting
her tail,” she pronounced.
I took notice as she commented
again and again about the good and bad rowing styles of dozens of racers
as they passed our vantage point. It took only 10 minutes or so for me
to become profoundly impressed with her knowledge, enthusiasm, direct
style, sparkle, and, yes…her beauty.
A few years later, my enthusiasm
for rowing merged with my retirement from the newspaper world where I
had been an editor and reporter. The result was I led an effort to establish
a rowing club and started a business of selling and leasing single rowing
shells. At the same time, I began to fancy myself as an occasionally formidable
seniors competitor in single sculls.
I also became a coach of
a high school women’s novice four. It was immediately apparent that
the girls had no inkling of how women’s rowing in the United States
came to be. They paid their fees, they came to a boathouse, they took
out a shell, they mostly responded to my coaching and they politely accepted
my hopes for them to become oarswomen.
They assumed it was forever
thus. They simply had no idea that as late as the 1960s boathouses and
competitive rowing were not available to women because of their sex. They
did not know that in the pre-1970s era, women could go to parties in boathouses,
but they were not allowed to row or join rowing clubs because male rowers
believed that females were too frail for such an arduous sport. Women
were too dainty; they didn’t know how to sweat. Such were the assumptions
of the pre-70s rowing culture.
Ernestine Bayer changed all
of that. I simply decided after practice one day that all women rowers
should know her story. The book, Ernestine Bayer…Mother of US Women’s
Rowing, chronicles her often contentious life and how it intertwined with
those of her late husband, Ernest, and daughter, Tina.
In 1971 the family moved
to New Hampshire where Ernestine established a new kind of rowing culture…one
for recreational rowers who used the “Alden”. Conceived by
the late Arthur Martin as a shell that could be rowed in New England coastal
waters, the Alden became popular for people without access to boathouses
or even to coaching.
Having bought one of Martin’s
first shells, Ernie then inspired the founding of the Alden Ocean Shell
Association in 1972 and through her efforts as secretary enrolled 700-800
members in the next 17 years.
She resigned as secretary in 1988 at the age of 79 to give herself more
time for her own competitive rowing career. Until well into her 90s she
competed in dozens of regattas, including the Head of the Charles.
In September 2001 at the
age of 92, for instance, she competed in the FISA World Masters Championships
in Montreal, Canada. She rowed in a women’s eight that was first,
she took another first in a women’s double, and a second in a mixed
double.
Ernie’s rowing career
off the water was not as smooth as her stroke. Her sharp focus on the
simple proposition that women should row continued throughout her life.
At times her unrelenting efforts and single-minded quest upset both male
and female rowers leading to incidents of conflict and occasional near
rebellion at her dictates.
I believe her accomplishments
were remarkable for two reasons:
First, she was the John the Baptist for women’s rowing, the voice
crying in the pre-Title IX wilderness, insisting that women could row,
that women could row fast, and that they should share this wonderful activity
with men. The federal Title IX legislation in 1972 really opened up the
sport of rowing for women. However, Ernie Bayer laid the groundwork.
Secondly, she profoundly
influenced the development of two very different rowing cultures that
mostly do not associate with each other.
Through the 1960s she was
involved with the traditional culture of rowing clubs, boathouses, coaches,
coachboats and very formal regattas.
In the 1970s, as the sparkplug
for the Alden Ocean Shell Association, she built a culture for recreational
rowing that could be enjoyed without the need for boathouses and formal
infrastructure.
The book's price is $20.00.
A bit over 200 pages with 40 photos, the book may be ordered through my
email: BerkSculling@aol.com
or on the web at www.booksurge.com
or www.amazon.com
Ernestine Bayer died Sept. 10, 2006, just days after the book was published
.
Here is what readers have said:
“What can I say? The book looks beautiful, the pictures
could not be better, its got intimacy, action, suspense, drama and a lot
of crew talk that those of us who have ever seriously rowed eat up.”
JM
“…have
found it to be the most comprehensive book on rowing out there…wonderful
story about a dynamic woman and her family intertwined with many aspects
of rowing…Only wish this book were out there 10 years ago when I
began rowing.” CM
“The
book is awesome! I am so glad you took the pains to remind us all of what
we have forgotten about Ernie’s journey through life.” ME
“I
thoroughly enjoyed reading the very well-written, well-researched and
inspiring story of Ms. Bayer and her efforts to promote women’s
rowing…This should become mandatory reading for any member of a
women’s crew.” RC
“I
sat down and read it in one night! It was fantastic!!” RM
“I
am strongly impressed by its attractive format and readable contents.”
BB
Ernie Bayer Book Review
(This review appeared in the
Spring 2007 issue of The Catch, the quarterly publication of the International
Recreational and Open Water Rowing Assn. (IROW). Ms. MacLeod is assistant
editor. IROW is an outgrowth of the former Alden Ocean Shell Assn. Ms.
Bayer was principal founder of that group.)
By Eva Bélanger MacLeod
In
his first book, a biography, journalist and rower Lew Cuyler recounts
the life of the force of nature that was Ernestine Bayer and her enormous
impact on women’s rowing in the United States.
Several years before
women baseball players had “a league of their own” Ernie moved
heaven and earth (and more importantly, the male rowing establishment)
so that women could have “a boathouse of their own”.
From an 18 year
old whose marriage to an Olympic athlete in 1928 had to remain secret
lest he be disqualified due to the superstition that “…sex
sapped the strength of athletes...” to a 92 year old stroking a
double at the Head of the Charles Regatta, Ernestine Bayer’s life
reads like a cross between Churchill and MacGyver.
Although the book
recreates the environment of those early days of women’s rowing
and includes the stories of those who helped and those who hindered (the
latter not prevailing for long!), you don’t need to be a rower to
appreciate the stories of creative solutions to challenges. The author
includes enough rowing history for context as well as explanations of
rowing terms.
And
it’s not just another book about the historical struggle against
gender inequality and injustice, but rather an inspirational tale about
one woman’s refusal to take “no” for an answer in her
life and all of the entertaining details about how she got her way, thereby
paving the way for others.
The
stories are delightfully detailed, allowing the reader to vicariously
experience things like the energy of Vichy in 1967 with European women
trading shirts (and more!) and the creativity and ingenuity of the American
women as they did whatever it took to make things happen, whether scavenging
for equipment or cobbling together uniform equivalents.
It’s
also the story of rowing as a family affair for the three3 Bayers, as
they were known, Ernestine, her husband Ernest and daughter Tina.
In
some respects, this book could be considered a virtual “prequel”
to Dan Boyne’s book “The Red Rose Crew”, since Ernie
was a pioneer of those pioneers. Ernie’s founding of the PGRC (Philadelphia
Girls Rowing Club) in 1938 (and on Philadelphia’s famous Boathouse
Row, no less) begat, eventually, the women of the 1975 World Championships
of Boyne’s book.
Ernie
lived a lifelong love affair with rowing and was the ultimate rowing evangelist.
It was as if she hated to see anyone miss out on something that could
bring so much joy and satisfaction. From the PGRC to the Alden Ocean Shell
Association (which begat IROW) and to the race that bears her name on
the Head of the Charles Regatta course during the weekend of the regatta,
she lived a life of influence and left a legacy for us all.
Read
this book. It’ll make you laugh—it’ll make you cry—it’ll
make you run out and pick up your oars. And it will make you eager for
the day when someone will say about you, “Who was that white-haired
woman tearing down the river?”
The book, $20, may be ordered directly from the author
at (413) 358-0720 or email: BerkSculling@aol.com
It is also available from amazon.com
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