Different strokes

Everything has changed since the first Boathouse held regattas in Arkansas

Wailing alarms jarred downtown Little Rock awake in the wee hours of a temperate spring morning 76 years ago. It was 3:33 a.m. April 13, 1938, and six decades of city history were going up in smoke.

An ominous aura glowed from the riverfront near the Main Street Bridge.

All three stories of the Athletic Association of Little Rock's Boathouse were engulfed by the time city fire companies 2, 4 and 8 arrived in trucks No. 1 and 2.

The porch-wrapped frame building atop a stone wall and piers straddled the slope of the riverbank at the foot of Main Street, between railroad tracks and the water -- near where the Little Rock Marriott's panoramic Riverview Room looks out over the city sculpture garden today.

A report in the April 14 Arkansas Gazette was accompanied by a photo of the big place vividly aflame in black and white. The reporter described spectators by the hundreds clutching the western banister of the bridge (not the span in use today but a predecessor with arching supports resembling the Broadway Bridge) as fire crews hauled hoses below them.

The roof collapsed at 4 a.m. A hose crew on the east side escaped with their lives as the walls tumbled onto the Missouri Pacific Railroad's tracks.

The caretaker had locked up and gone home at 8 p.m., and so there were no human casualties.

But the loss, estimated at $35,000, as the Gazette reported, included hundreds of silver trophies, photographs and mementos, "many pictures taken before the turn of the century" ... "several racing shells and canoes used for many years in the annual regattas."

In 2014, as North Little Rock's modern Arkansas Boathouse Club prepares for Saturday's Six Bridges Regatta -- a U.S. Rowing-sanctioned time trial event known as a "head race" and the first genuine rowing regatta in Arkansas since 1936 -- understanding why anyone might care about some old stuff that burned up in a long-ago gym fire takes a bit of study.

After all, today's rowing club is --

like other amateur athletic groups -- "about the sport," as founding member

Lynnette Watts puts it.

"It's akin to the cycling clubs and the running clubs," she says.

In contrast, the original association -- known as "the Boathouse" from its earliest days in 1882 -- was the state's first country club, as much about society as sports. It was loved by prominent businessmen and professionals whose names remain on buildings, streets, organizations: Cantrell, Terry, Conway, Townsend, Fulk, Coates, Hollis, Hill, House, Blass, Pollard, Baird, Harkness, Marre, Butler, Remmel, Kavanaugh, Penick, Tucker, Rule, Mann, Hornibrook, Healey, Fletcher ....

In an article published in 1972 by the Gazette, Clifton E. Hull (a railroad historian who died in 2011) described the club as growing from a group of "young men of the above average social strata" who were interested in water sports and who met off and on for about five years in the gentlemen's furnishing shop of P.H. Bernays and J.E. Maxwell in the marble lobby of the Capital Hotel.

In February 1882, they finally declared themselves a club, elected officers and set a $25 initiation fee and dues (according to research by historian Mary Fletcher Worthen) of $1.50 a month. That wasn't pocket change. A calculator at measuringworth.com based on the Consumer Price Index equates that $25 to at least $588 today; and the dues those 19th-century men paid would be equivalent to about $32 a month today.

They secured a lease from the city for the riverfront lot and raised bonds to build their first clubhouse (see accompanying story). Almost immediately, the club began racing in rowing boats, in the seasonally deep pools of the Arkansas River and also at national rowing events in other states, especially against St. Louis.

Over the decades, businessmen and their college-age offspring also competed on this club's football and baseball teams at West End Park, rolled tenpins and smashed handballs in the upstairs gym, boxed, played cutthroat games of Hearts, played elaborate pranks on one another at masked balls and frolicked in blackface at vaudeville reviews. The club had a library with books in Latin and Greek, and it hosted appearances by musicians such as W.C. Handy.

Most importantly, Watts says, even after the founding of the Country Club of Little Rock in 1901, it conducted the debutante balls that each season introduced what the Gazette termed "winsome and beautiful girls" to society.

Boathouse debs' faces graced ovals surrounded by filigree in the newspapers, which reported their charm, their Eastern finishing, their trips to the Continent. Boathouse regattas on the Fourth of July and/or Labor Day honored these highly marriageable girls.

EVERYBODY

Membership peaked in 1894, when Little Rock had about 25,000 residents. That high mark -- 333 white men -- was deemed too many, and membership was capped that year at 250. One would-be member who was turned away vowed he would set a bomb under the building -- and did. The blast did little damage. (Worthen learned that the bomber was identified only as the unemployed brother of the same John Barrow memorialized by the road in west Little Rock.)

In the late 1970s and early '80s, Worthen (who is now 96) interviewed dozens of former club mates and their family members for an account that eventually appeared in two issues of the Pulaski County Historical Review (in 2000). Among her sources was Hilda Cornish Coates, who at 96 told Worthen how she'd disobeyed doctor's orders in 1926 during her confinement after the birth of her son, "Jimbo," and joined the crowd to watch the club's Labor Day regatta. "People would do most anything not to miss an event at the Boathouse," Coates told Worthen.

"Everybody belonged to the Boathouse," Watts says, wryly, adding "everybody that mattered" in society.

The club excluded women, admitting them only during parties and dances until 1925, when a newly created concrete pool beside the river was opened to "the fairest of Little Rock society" one day a week. And throughout its history, black people would never have applied to be more than a porter or a caretaker.

And yet spectators turned out in the thousands.

"Today's club is open to anyone," Watts notes. It has a women's crew (the River Rats), classes for children, for the visually impaired. "The members own the equipment and share the equipment. You know, it's the people's club."

Ironically or maybe just coincidental to fancier options for public entertainment, so far, the largest crowds drawn by modern Boathouse events are well described by the word "smatterings."

GLORY DAYS

Newspapers from 1882 to 1936 sometimes mention the regattas and sometimes don't; they seem to have been suspended during World War I and the Depression. But Worthen documented at least 20 regattas between the club's founding and 1936.

Almost all the regattas were intramural affairs: Members raced one another in rowing crafts but also in motor boats. There were humorous contests, too, including umbrella and keg races, water jousting, tub races, bouts of holding one's breath while swimming across the river, fancy diving from platforms and bridges, something called the "fat man race," underwater undressing ....

At 1919's regatta, lawyer Archie House, who became Pulaski County circuit judge the next year, startled the crowd by performing a back flip off the Free Bridge (the first of three bridges at Main Street, built in 1897), and his friend Jeff Goodrum executed a swan dive.

The signature event was always a rowing race, usually from the Baring Cross Bridge to Main Street (although in 1922 the race took place at Willow Beach near Scott). Two crews and their coxswains competed in bulky, oar-locked shells they called "barges." At first these were four-man behemoths, but in 1892, the club acquired from William Glass & Son of Philadelphia two fragile and new six-man shells, which House recalled in 1917 as "a testimonial of the highest kind to the workmanship of their manufacturer."

The barges had names -- Nepestos and Atalantus -- but for regattas they were rechristened in honor of especially popular debutantes voted by the membership. Watts likes to think of these girls as "princesses." Each crew took the name of a princess and runners-up became the five maids of her court.

The girls watched their crews compete from the Boathouse veranda. In the final, 1936 regatta, Miss Eleanor Townsend and her maids, including Mary Fletcher, future historian, watched Fletcher's brother Thomas captain "the Eleanors" to victory over "the Franceses," named for Miss Frances Williams.

Regatta day was especially festive for the athletes, because they got to stop training.

In 1917, House explained in the Gazette that tradition required three heats to decide a winner, and so crews trained "long and vigorously." For the 1892 Labor Day regatta, sponsored by Miss Mamie Baird and Miss Jennie Mitchell, House wrote, "it is even said that J.F. Loughborough and R.W. Rightsell often slept in the gymnasium that they might be on the river at the break of day."

John Rauch, a member of the Carolyn Cherry crew in 1919, told Worthen that rowers were prohibited from touching cigarettes or moonshine for two months before the race. "Enforcement was strict and anyone caught cheating really got it," Rauch said. But after a regatta, it was tradition for each crew to get a gallon of booze.

Accounts from some years describe the losing team as handing over their shirts to the winners -- literally losing their shirts. The winning cox would be tossed bodily into the river, and after redressing, crews and honorees would reassemble for a festive dinner at a downtown hotel followed at 10 p.m. by a big dance at the clubhouse.

And after that, crews might go on to breakfast at the 24-hour Brier's Cafe, where they liked to compete by flipping butter pats at the ceiling.

GONE

On the downtown Little Rock riverfront today, no obvious sign remains from the old Boathouse. The modern crew's small brick clubhouse is downriver at North Shore Landing; and one cannot even imagine that the river resembles the stream those old oarsmen knew, thanks to the 20th-century lock and dam system that regulates water flow.

But a sense of the times lives on in the colorful anecdotes Worthen collected. Her handwritten interview notes are part of the "Boathouse Collection" in the archives of the Arkansas Studies Institute's Butler Center. Three boxes contain humorous letters, tea-colored newspapers, copies of the old club's somewhat scandalous newsletters from the 1920s and '30s and materials donated by Watts that document the founding of the Arkansas Boathouse Club in 2005.

ActiveStyle on 08/25/2014

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