Two Georgetown Stories

Freshman Year at Georgetown

By Jack Hoeschler

I started college at Georgetown in the fall of 1960.  As those things went with my family, my parents didn’t take me to school but put me on the Zephyr to Chicago and then a cab ride over to the C&O station on S. Dearborn.  As usual, the trains east of Chicago in those days were already as crummy as all of the nation’s trains were about to become.

Because the east bound train arrived late in the afternoon, I arrived on a Saturday before formal registration on Sunday.  I was allowed, however, to have access to my room in what was optimistically called New North – clearly a single room that had been converted to a double by the inclusion of a bunk bed.  By virtue of my early arrival, I was able to choose my preferred bed – the lower – and the desk by the window.

We had communal bathrooms and showers at the end of the long hallway and on my first trip to the bathroom I ran into another early arrival, a very swarthy Italian fellow from Pittsburgh.  A brief introduction and exchange of background stories told me I was no longer in Wisconsin.  He frankly looked as black as any released slave.

The next day I met my roommate, Drew Valentine, another Italian, this time from Jersey.  Drew was a good guy but he would stockpile his dirty shirts under our bed until a month’s worth were collected to justify a trip to the cleaners.

Washington in those days was still a southern city run by the southern democrats on the House District Committee.  There was no self rule and it definitely had a quasi plantation feel.

One highlight of the District Committee’s schedule Ws the annual joint appearance of the rather tough head of the bar maid’s union and the somewhat older but equally type casted head of WCTU – the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  They were annually joined at the hip to object to any possible change of the old blue law that did not allow a restaurant or bar patron to carry a drink from the bar to a restaurant table whenever it became available.  The committee chair always had great fun showing obsequious southern courtesy to the two ladies and eventually ruling in their favor.  The newspapers took equal delight in showing a picture of these two ordinary adversaries joined in mutual effort is a common cause.

1960 was an election year with Jack Kennedy, a Georgetown resident, running against Richard Nixon. There was little security in those innocent days for office seekers and one day Drew Valentine returned from an errand to Wisconsin Avenue, the commercial heart of Georgetown describing how he had spent a pleasant 20 minutes playing jacks with Caroline Kennedy, the would be president’s 4 year old daughter on the stoop of the Kennedy townhouse on N Street.

On January 19, 1960, the even of Kennedy’s inauguration, about a foot of snow fell on DC bringing the place to a complete halt in those days before the Metro.  To someone from Wisconsin, it was humorous to hear the public service announcements that the snow plows were waiting for the snow to stop before beginning work.  The next day the army cleared Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House and then the inbound side of the street from Kennedy’s Georgetown home to the White House.

The main problem was that in their rush to clear Pennsylvania Avenue of cars (many had simply been abandoned in the middle of the street due to gridlock) no one made any record of which cars were deposited where and for more than a month, those who had left their cars on Pennsylvania were forced to cruise the side streets looking for their cars.

On inauguration day I put on warm clothes and my winter boots to walk down to the Capitol (which I reached after the speeches were finished) and then to the White House.  There I was able to sneak into the back of the Presidential reviewing stand (albeit after the Kennedy’s had left) to watch the last two hours of the parade.  Such, again, was the very laxed level of security in those days.

I would similarly sneak into performances by the National Symphony at Constitution Hall by using out-of-date ticks of the same color, or tearing a good ticket in half for a friend and me to use as if we had already been inside and were just showing our stub to regain entry.  Usually, however, most of the museums and concerts were free.  All of this made Washington, D.C. a wonderful place to go to college.

I Join the Georgetown Crew

During my sophomore year at G.U. I had planned to use an early January break we had to go skiing in Pennsylvania but that year the snow never came and instead I found a group of guys working out each day in the gym prior to being able to get on to the river to row.

Like most fellows those years (especially those not from the East) I had no experience with crew as a sport. Nor did I have much interest – I just wanted to work out and they were doing a very good job of it. As the week went on, I showed myself pretty good at most of the exercises and the various tests. As a result, they invited me to join the crew when they were ready to get on the water.

The G.U. crew was a very new sport. It had been started a few years before by the crew coach at George Washington University (“GW”) who was looking for some competition for the G.W. crew. As a result of the enthusiasm shown by the G.U. recruits, the coach quit his paying jab at G.W. and transferred to G.U. to coach an all-volunteer, unfunded program. When he was subsequently transferred by the state Department to Iran, the G.U. rowers advertised in the Washington papers for a new, unpaid coach. They got really lucky and landed Don Cadle, the deputy director of the administration at NASA and another buddy of his from Oxford (where they were both Rhodes Scholars) after Don had graduated from Yale, where he had stroked the varsity brat.

Don was an exceptional and inspirational leader and under his direction the G.U. crew was becoming a real force in small college rowing.  As importantly, his wife was the heiress of a German thread magnate and she was willing to help fund Don’s obsession with the crew by paying for gas and motors for the launches, specially made uniforms for the crew and a host of incidental costs.

For our part, the oarsmen paid our own travel, food and lodging expenses for out-of-town regattas and raised operating money by various activities like handling storage, shipping and unpacking of student clothes and belongings.  We would get up every morning at 5:00 a.m., make sure no one overslept and then arrived at the river at 5:30 to row until 8:00 a.m.

While I was one of the stronger performers in the gym, I had to learn to row before I cold be placed in a competitive shell.  One worked his way up by challenging higher placed oarsmen to a “row-off” where the shells rowed twice, with the challenger and the challenged exchanging seats to see whether there was a noticeable difference in the performance of the boats.  By that method I eventually ended up in the first boat during my first year.

That year was significant because we went undefeated with a championship medal at the Dad Vail Regatta in Philadelphia – the premiere small college race.  (The Ivy League schools along with Washington, California and Wisconsin all rowed in the Eastern Springs for their, more established trophy.)  To mark our undefeated season, we followed the English tradition of burning our old boat in celebration.

Don Cadle was a master of invoking and establishing traditions as a result of his time at Oxford.