The year was 1969, and Jack Kelly was determined that the Vesper Boat Club would remain at the forefront of competitive rowing. Thanks to the long reach of his recruiting efforts, the Vesper men had become a powerhouse, riding on their 1964 Olympics triumph in Tokyo.
Now a new frontier was looming – women’s rowing as an Olympic sport. That January, the all-male National Association of Amateur Oarsmen had finally agreed to support the inclusion of women’s crew in the Olympics. Joanne Iverson, who had long fought that battle, had presented the motion at the NAAO’s annual meeting. The International Olympic Committee concurred and initially set the date for 1972, then pushed it off to the 1976 Games.
Vesper wanted to be ready. Already in 1968, a member of the Philadelphia Girls Rowing Club, had unofficially slipped in at the invitation of Vesper coach Gus Constant.
“I would run up to the Canoe Club and back doing wind sprints with an informal group of runners from other boat clubs – all men,” said Jinx Becker (Sacco). “Between sprints, Gus asked me about my rowing aspirations. I volunteered that I was contemplating leaving PGRC, but was hesitant about moving far afield for rowing opportunities,” she wrote in a memoir. Jinx sensed that some at Vesper were interested in developing a women’s team but others hated the idea. No women had ever been members of the all-male clubs of the Row.
Jinx Becker was the first to break the gender barrier at Vesper
“Gus volunteered the use of his single as the groundwork for when a women’s program would begin,” Sacco said. “I had no access to any of the club’s facilities – no locker room, no shower/bathroom accommodation. They were male only. Nor did I have any coaching for two years – 1968 and 1969. I was strictly on my own.”
At Kelly’s direction, Constant began to look for more women to recruit. One day he stopped a woman jogging past the boathouse. “Here comes this little guy saying, ‘Would you like to row?’” recalled Karin Constant who was soon Gus’ wife.
“By the end of 1969,” said Becker, “Gus, Karin and I had a meeting with Vesper Olympian and board member, Paul Costello, at Mr. Costello’s home to make an argument for initiating a women’s rowing program at VBC. And so, Vesper became the first on Boathouse Row to break the gender barrier.
“Jack Kelly said the girls are here to stay. And that was the end of that. He finally put his foot down.,” Karin Constant said.
In 1971, Diane Braceland (Vreugdenhil), on summer break from college with nothing to do, started rowing at Vesper at the suggestion of her father, who was a member of Malta. Then Marie and Ann Jonik, twin daughters of a PGRC founder, came aboard.
Gus gave them “the tools to row,” said Marie Jonik. John Hooten, she added, got them to the next level.
Karin Constant, Diane Braceland and the Jonik twins: Marie (3d from letf) and Ann /Photo by Phil Jonik
By the time Pam Behrens arrived in 1972, Vesper women were winning races organized by the National Women’s Rowing Association which Iverson had started in 1963 with coaches Ted Nash of Seattle and Ed Lickiss of Oakland to encourage women’s racing.
As Gus Constant and John Hooten began training women with an eye to the 1976 Olympics, some of the country’s best collegiate oarsmen began showing up on Vesper’s dock to train with Dietrich Rose.
Among them was Jim Dietz, who had won his first gold medal at Ratzeburg, Germany, in junior competition at age 18. When he arrived at Vesper in 1972, the 23-year-old single sculler from Northeastern University was fresh off the European Rowing Championships (6th place) and the 1972 Olympics (5th).
Though he had strong ties with the New York Athletic Club, Dietz saw Vesper as the place to train. “Every kid knew the story of how John B. Kelly brought the best oarsmen in the country together to form [the 1964] winning crew,” he said. “Now Dietrich Rose, who was part of that original process, was going to attempt to see if it could work magic again.”
Jim Dietz in 1975/ Courtesy US Olympic Committee
What Dietz found at Vesper was “a revolving door where people were coming in to see if they could cut it.”
Among those landing at Vesper were Darrell Vreugdenhil from Western Washington University; Calvin Coffey who had just graduated from Northeastern; Jim Moroney, who had rowed for the University of Pennsylvania in the ‘72 Olympics; Bob Zagunis, whose four with won Oregon State’s first IRA national championship; Tony Brooks, a Harvard graduate, Potomac Club member and alternate at the ‘72 Olympics; John Mathews from Worcester Polytech; Gary Piantedosi of MIT; Michael Plumb of Syracuse University and Peter Simone of Rutgers.
They joined elite oarsmen already in Philly: Mike Staines, who had gone to Cornell and was now training with Penn coach Ted Nash; Sean Drea, an Irish kid who was attending St. Joseph’s University, as well as Mike Vespoli, Dick Dreissigacker, Bill Miller, Chuck Hewitt, JJ Forster, Jack St. Clair, John Campbell and others along with coxswains Bob Jaugstetter, Ken Dreyfuss and John Hartigan.
Kelly gave some of the men free berths on Vesper’s unheated third floor. Their stories are legendary, conditions so bad that they sometimes woke up to snow falling on them through the cracks.
Said Tony Brooks, “You’re 24 and immortal, living with a bunch of crazy guys with no responsibility and no money.” Between practices, Brooks worked in Common Pleas Court – a job Kelly helped get him. “I took home $39. We pooled the money and ate Wonder Bread and baloney.”
Darrell Vreugdenhil remembers: “JJ Forster taught me how to survive on a protein diet of cottage cheese and tuna fish on toast. We battled each other for seats on the water, but we were family and survived together off the water. It was a special event to escape the boathouse on an occasional weekend evening for a home cooked meal and friendship at the Moroney, St. Clair or other local Vesper household.”
Dietz and others on the third floor got jobs as substitute teachers with the help of Vesper’s Chuck Colgan, who worked in the Philadelphia School District. “Every morning, this one woman would have to call up substitutes,” Dietz remembered. “Eventually, she realized she was calling the same number over and over again because the number was the pay phone at Vesper. That was always her first call because there’d be six of us waiting for a job that day.”
Dietz also did a stint at the School District researching the number of male and female students at the various schools and what sports those schools had and didn’t have. Title IX had just been enacted. “We had no idea how big Title IX would be,” he said.
If the living conditions were memorable, so was Dietrich Rose’s coaching. “I had this terrible layback,” Dietz said. “Dietrich took an old coat hanger and built it into a big wire and attached it to my wash box so if I laid back it would stick me in the back.”
“Dietrich was great,” he recalled. “He brought excitement there, getting guys together and putting combinations together.” He also created a “team environment, in that nobody was trying to beat the other guy. I was the single and Darrell [Vreugdenhil] and John [Mathews] were going to be in the pair and [Jim] Moroney in the four. We just became the core unit all working out together. It was a family.”
Besides, he said, most of the men felt that if they went to the official 1976 Olympic training camp in Hanover, NH, “they wouldn’t get a fair shake from Harry Parker so this was the best option.”
For the women, the living situation was more of a scramble.
Anita DeFrantz chose to train at Vesper
The men training at Vesper “had a place to live – in the boathouse; the women had to pay rent,” said Anita DeFrantz who arrived at Vesper in 1974 with Cathy Menges (Zagunis) after both graduated from Connecticut College. DeFrantz was simultaneously training at Vesper, studying law at the University of Pennsylvania and working a night shift at police headquarters interviewing defendants. “Work was available to the men; it was much harder for the women to get support. Also, it was harder for women to get time off from work,” she said.
Some of the women, recalled Cathy Menges, lived in an apartment made available to trainees by Gus Constant – a “slumlord place,” she called it. “I’d never seen a cockroach before, but it was worth it.”
Training, Racing, Dreaming – 1973-1976
As these elite Vesper athletes trained for the 1976 Olympics, they started hitting the European and world rowing competitions. An armada of Vesper men and women, along with some who would soon join Vesper, competed in the 1973 European Championships in Moscow.
Not one of them medaled.
Dietz finished a dismal 6th in the B final. “I was poisoned,” he said. “I was very sick. I was found on the floor of my room, passed out and convulsing. When I got back to the States the doctor said it was a virus that they had never seen before!”
Among the other rowers in Moscow were Hugh Stevenson, Calvin Coffey and Mike Vespoli in the eight, which came in 6th; Jim Moroney, JJ Forster, and Patrick Hayes were in the coxless four along with Vreugdenhil and Hayes who had come to Vesper in 1973 after being cut from the national camp in Hanover, NH. For Vreugdenhil, it was an inspiring experience to go from small college rowing to world championship competition within a year and then meet Diane Braceland after the regatta. They would marry after the Montreal Olympics.
Braceland was in Moscow in ’73 racing with Karin Constant, Maureen Donahue, Lois Trench (Hines) and Pam Behrens in the quadruple coxed sculls. Behrens qualified for this major event only 16 months after meeting Gus Constant at a party.
“I was standing with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. He said, ‘Why don’t you try rowing?’” Sarcastically, she answered: “Sure! I’ll be down on Monday.” She showed up. Two months later, her boat came in second in the women’s national regatta in Seattle, then placed first in the Canadian Henley. In Moscow, their quadruple coxed sculls finished sixth in a “rough lane – windy and choppy.”
The Jonik twins raced their usual pair in Moscow. Joanne Iverson, who was now coaching at Penn, managed the women’s squad.
In 1974, Rose organized an early summer European tour for a combination Vesper/Potomac eight-oared crew. Among them were Jim Moroney, Hugh Stevenson, Bill Miller, Jack St. Clair, Mark Borchelt, Bob Jaugstetter, Tony Brooks and Terry Adams. The eight won silvers in Manheim and Ratzeberg, where they rowed in the Martini Achter ’73. Now, the Vesper men were flying. The eight won silver again at the International Regatta in Nottingham. And in his single scull, Dietz won gold. Vreugdenhil and John Campbell would join the team in Nottingham to race the pair without.
At the World Championships in Lucerne that August, the eight won gold, miraculously beating the East Germans by a second. In the boat, chosen at a national camp under Al Rosenberg, were Mike Vespoli and Hugh Stevenson. Also winning gold was the Americans’ light weight men’s eight, coxed by Philadelphia’s John Hartigan.
Otherwise, East Germany continued to dominate the games, with their single sculler limiting Dietz to second place.
Vreugdenhil rowed bow in the coxless four with Tony Brooks, Bruce Beall and JJ Forester. “We finished a strong fifth,” he said. “I was particularly proud of that result because we had made steady progress throughout the summer, the U.S. trials and every step of the world championships.”
The 1974 World Championships were historic, and not just because the United States took the most medals after East Germany. It was the first time women’s boat classes –six of them – were officially included in a world championship, though only 1000 meters long. Diane Braceland, who had left Vesper to train at the national camp in Long Beach, came in 7th in the coxed quadruple sculls. The women’s eight with Vesper’s Pam Behrens, Cathy Menges and Karin Constant finished 9th.
The Stevenson Weathershirt, won in a trade, became a business.
A business would also emerge from those games. After the men’s heavyweight eight won their race, Stevenson traded his jeans with a Soviet rower who handed over his jacket. The Soviet jacket, ideal for bad weather racing, was flexible and waterproof and Stevenson later launched a company in Philadelphia to produce the “Stevenson Weathershirt.” Boathouse Sports, which bought the company, still makes the shirt.
By 1975, with so much international competition under their oars, the Vesper men and women expectantly took off in July for the International Regatta in Lucerne – only to have their hopes hobbled by illness. “The entire Vesper Boat Club entry of 10 and Dietz were staying together, and the flu had affected everyone,” the NY Times wrote. Dietz failed to qualify for the final because of illness and withdrew from the consolation race.
Moroney and Miller struggled but qualified for the final round in the pair. “I thought I would pass out after the first 10 strokes,” Miller said. “Somehow we made it through, but I don’t know how.”
Vesper’s pair with –Vreugdenhil, Mathews, Dreyfuss – had something to celebrate –by taking the silver medal a fraction of a second behind the reigning world champion Soviet crew.
As for the women, Braceland in the coxed quadruple sculls came in 7th that July in Lucerne. Behrens and Menges, in the mostly PGRC eight, finished 9th. Also in that crew was Karin Constant, who soon dropped out of Olympic contention.
But it was that August at the 1975 World Championships in Nottingham, England, when the American women stunned the world. Joan Lind of Long Beach placed a surprising 5th. Even more astonishing, the women’s eight, coached by Harry Parker, won silver behind East Germany but ahead of other powerful Eastern European teams. This “Red Rose Crew” had no Vesper women, perhaps in part because Anita DeFrantz, feeling a loyalty to her new boat club, Vesper, had chosen to train in Philadelphia rather than go to Parker’s national camp in Boston. Instead, DeFrantz competed in a Vesper four with that advanced to the finals and finished 6th with Behrens, Menges, Alison Hayes and Valerie Campbell.
Braceland came in 5th in her usual coxed quadruple sculls; pair rowers Ann and Marie Jonik, competing for the third time in the Worlds, finished 8th.
Two Vesper men’s crews just missed medaling: Mathews, Vreugdenhil and Dreyfuss finished 5th (coxed pair); and the men’s eight were 5th with Stevenson. (Brooks and Zagunis were alternates at the games.) Miller and Moroney (coxless pair) finished 13th.
As the Olympics edged ever closer, the Americans found their rhythm at the 1975 Pan American Games that October. To deal with the altitude, Al Rosenberg “made the point of getting us over there more than a month before,” Darrell Vreugdenhil said.
Gold medals were won by Vesper’s Stevenson, Moroney, Jaugstetter, Vespoli (eight); Dreyfus, Mathews, and Vreugdenhil (coxed pair); Forster, and Hayes (coxless four).
Silver went to Dietz (single) and St. Clare (quadruple sculls).
The coxed four had gold within reach. But even eight weeks of acclimatizing in Mexico City apparently was not enough. Tony Brooks recalls that painful story: “In the four with, approaching the finish line, we were in the lead with open water, headed for a gold, when I blacked out and slumped over my oar.” Jaugstetter somehow coxed the boat to the finish without their stroke man, snagging bronze.
More playfully, others remember taunting the Cuban team with water balloons.Vesper Athletes at the 1976 Olympics
As the 1976 Olympics approached, the Vesper rowers, men and women alike, were ever more confident of their chances of medaling.
Darrell Vreugdenhil
“Our path to the Olympics as a coxed pair was never in doubt after our photo finish in the ’75 Lucerne Regatta,” said Darrell Vreugdenhil. “John, Kenny and I knew that we had a winning combination. Our success through the Nottingham Worlds and Pan Am Games only helped to solidify our confidence and commitment, so much so that Kenny invested his own funds into a new ‘state of the art’ Stampfli coxed pair.
“After the Pan Ams and season-ending Head races, Dietrich insisted that we take some time off. We couldn’t listen to that. With our stubborn oarsmen mentality, we just wanted to train harder and go faster. Through the winter, we dove right into intense training with Sean Drea under the guidance of Al Nino at the Philadelphia Athletic Club. February centered around long mileage workouts in the pair without in Florida. By March, we were beating other pairs by wide margins, so Dietrich made arrangements for us to train at the Ruder Academy in Ratzeburg. We finished this block of training by winning the German International/European Championships easily against some of the same crews that we would later face in Montreal. This turned out to be the high point of our preparation for the Olympics; all the training and traveling started to take its toll and the US trials were still weeks away.
“Training in the Philly heat was draining,” Vreugdenhil continued. “Frigging with the rigging” became an excuse, not a solution. We struggled to eke out a win in the ‘winner takes all’ US trials. Rather than building momentum in Montreal, we were limping into the Games, desperately trying to stay healthy and motivated. Predictions in Sports Illustrated had us finishing in the medals. A disastrous preliminary in Montreal weakened what resolve we had remaining; we struggled through the reps and semis, finishing 11th in the petite final.
“Personally, I found the ‘Olympic Circus’ atmosphere totally overwhelming and distracting. I try not to dwell on the disappointment of the Olympics, but rather on all the positive experiences from ’73 through ’76 leading up to the Olympics.”
Another disappointment was the coxless four with Brooks, Moroney, Piantedosi and Stevenson – the crew that had won bronze at the Pan Am games.
Vesper men in 1976 who had vied for the Olympics: Bow. Mike Staines, 2. Calvin Coffey, 3. James Moroney, 4. Phil Espeseth, 5. Gary Piantedosi, 6. Tony Brooks, 7. John Mathews, Stroke. Darrell Vreugdenhil, Cox. Bob Jaugstetter
The crew had crossed the border to Canada with high hopes but were immediately bummed by the weather. “We check in in the village. It’s in the 90s and we have no air conditioning,” Brooks recalled. Despite the heat, they won their first race. But in the semi-finals, there’s a “screaming tail wind,” he said. Between the wind and the waves in their lane and a “digger,” their boat missed making the final by three seconds. They placed 8th overall.
The loss would hang over Brooks for the next 45 years, his dream shattered. “For a moment in time, you want to be best in the world.”
“While it was incredible to be at the Olympics representing my country, rowing with those guys, getting to know them, going fast,” he said, “the downside was having not gotten gold. I was crushed for decades asking myself, ‘What could I have done differently?’” It was only after watching the blustery weather and wave conditions at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics – so reminiscent of his own experience – that he finally forgave himself. “I didn’t screw up. The course screwed up.”
Pat Hayes remembered the security in Montreal
Hayes was struck by the security in place four years after the killings of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. From Plattsburg, N.Y. the caravan of about 40 vehicles was “lead by NY State troopers in the front and rear and escorted by five Huey gunships, one in the lead and two each on the flanks,” Hayes recalls. Then in Montreal, on the 25 minute ride to the rowing venue, “each bus had two soldiers onboard with automatic weapons.”
His crew with Plumb, Zagunis, Borchelt, and Hartigan coxing, finished 11th . “Our draw for the semi-finals was particularly tough with both Russia, the eventual gold medalists, and East Germany,” Hayes said.
As for Dietz, before Montreal the NY Times had called him “the best at the United States trials, which had an astonishing entry of 64 scullers.” It predicted: “If the erratic Jim Dietz is on, the 6‐foot‐7‐inch Bronx schoolteacher also has a chance for a medal.”
Dietz found himself competing against former Vesper member Sean Drea, now rowing for Ireland. The two had often raced each other, including at the ’72 Olympics. Drea, who had attended St Joseph’s University, had been ousted from Vesper in 1973 because he wouldn’t follow the coaching regime. Other elite club rowers had written a protest letter to the club’s leadership over his dismissal. Neither medaled in ’76: Dietz came in 5th in the semi-final and ended ranking 7th overall. (Drea ranked 4th)
The only American men to reach the winners’ stand at the 1976 Olympics were Mike Staines and Calvin Coffey, a surprise even to themselves. They each had started the year discouraged by separately being cut from various training programs. They finally teamed up at Vesper, but became disappointed with their coaching under Dietrich Rose and turned to Ted Nash. “If ever I saw men who would race to their top level, it was Coffey-Staines,” said Nash in Peter Mallory’s book, The Sport of Rowing. “They had no fear.”
Coffey, who was not only racing but building boats, including one in which he and Staines would race in the coxless pair at the Olympics, said he was determined to succeed. “You can’t succeed unless you imagine yourself succeeding.” Staines was less confident. “Even a few weeks prior to the Olympics, I don’t think anyone gave us a real chance of medaling. I’m not sure I would have either.”
In the semi-finals, Coffey and Staines found the strong tailwinds to their advantage and cruised in in third place. In the final, they thought they had jumped the start and slowed for a few strokes. Still, they won silver just behind the East German Landvoigt twins.
Looking back at the games which were largely swept by the steroid-pumped East Germans, Staines said, “The chance to win a gold is so rare that to have missed out because the other team cheated infuriates me.”
The American women rowers were the ones who held the spotlight. After so many years in which the US men’s rowing leadership had feared that American oarswomen would be an embarrassment to the country, they were proven so wrong.
Joan Lind of California won silver in the single, beaten only by the East Germans.
Anita DeFrantz, who had trained at Vesper, won bronze in the eight. (Stroke Jackie Zoch, of the University of Wisconsin, would later row for Vesper). Not only did DeFrantz fight to win the race, but as team captain she argued for days to get official Olympics uniforms for the women. Adidas had only made enough for the men.
“We made the United States Olympic Team and we deserved to have all the gear that was due us; all the gear that the rest of the members of the United States Olympic Team had,” she said.
Although the other American women did not medal, their performance defied expectations against the powerful and juiced up teams from Bulgaria, East Germany, and the Soviet Union.
Diane Braceland and Jan Palchikoff (double sculls) came in 5th. Sue Morgan and Laura Staines (pair) placed 7th. Pam Behrens and Cathy Menges in the four finished 6th. “Walking into the Olympic Center you could feel the blood running through your body,” Behrens recalled. “It was very emotional. I was extremely proud.”
Cathy Menges said she left the games with “a big family of fellow rowers. I think I’m more connected to them than in any other section of my life. It also gave me leadership and camaraderie and a desire to do better.”
And there were so many rowing romances. Before the games, Laura had already married rower Mike Staines, Sue would later wed coach John Hooten, and Cathy Menges would marry Bob Zagunis.
Diane Braceland, who married Darrell Vreugdenhil three months after the Olympics, said that years of training and competition, “introduced me to the life skills of deep commitment, discipline, hard work, goal setting… and instilled in me the value of being the best I could be.”
Many of the rowers of the 1976 Olympics, both men and women, would spend the rest of their lives giving back. Coaching young athletes in high schools and colleges. Providing leadership to local, national and international rowing organizations. And leading their own lives with the spirit and character that rowing, racing and teamwork had taught them.
Dotty Brown is a member of the Vesper Boat Club