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Coach Austin Meeks, Choate 1916 and Woody Tappen, Choate 1925.
IN 1913, TRUSTEE NATHANIEL BISHOP OFFERED A BOATHOUSE , two fours, and oars for a rowing program.
By the end of the 20th century dozens of coaches and thousands of boys and girls had rowed for the School. But it hasn’t been easy. Community Lake was no Amazon when I arrived in 1954. It was down to half a mile, shallow, weedy, and heavily polluted. For mileage, Yalie Austin Meeks (Choate 1916) took the varsity crews to Yale. The boys responded with five Yale Interscholastic Championships in the 1920s. Rowing against top American school crews like Kent, Culver, Browne and Nichols and Tabor, along with the Columbia, MIT, and Princeton frosh, Choate repaid Yale with Woodruff “Woody” Tappen 1925, who went to Yale and won two races against Harvard. It was a 20-minute trip to New Haven Harbor, but 45 minutes to Derby, where Yale moved its rowing in 1923. In 1937, Choate’s faculty told Meeks to bring crew home, built him a $15,000 boathouse on Community Lake, and made Choate rowing intramural. The teams were named Bishops and Tappens from 1937 to 1954, and the sport remained popular, with a quarter of the School rowing, a higher percentage than at Yale. But the intramural rowing standard wasn’t that high, and Meeks persuaded then-Headmaster Seymour St. John to resume interscholastic competition in 1954. Winning was hard, with only a half mile of practice water for the fours and eights (but easier for single sculling). The short lake did not keep Peter Johnson ’64 from learning to scull, and then winning U.S. and Canadian schoolboy singles and doubles championships in 1963 and 1964. In the Diamonds at Henley in 1964, he was narrowly defeated by Argentine Olympian Alberto Demiddi. Johnson’s success on the short lake inspired later Choate scullers to win the New Englands 10 times.
From left: Austin Meeks 1916, Leonard Brown 1916, Lindsay Faye 1916, and Dudley Walker 1917, with Allen Johnson 1918, coxswain, in front.