Rowing Club

Antal Bocsardy back-paddled from an algae-covered inlet of the Schuylkill into the early evening light on the river, oblivious to the heron wheeling overhead, the thin wisps of cloud and the other scullers. He would return an hour later, sweat-soaked, his shirt tucked behind his seat. Struggling up from the double-keeled boat, he accepted help into his wheelchair, but insisted on powering himself up the steep concrete ramp to the boathouse. "Please, that's the exercise of it," he said, declining a hand.

WANTED: Women, athletic and adventuresome, to join virile, semi-serious Irish-American oarsmen for cruises off the scenic coast of Camden. Apply first Thursday of each month, 7:30 p.m. Irish Pub, 1123 Walnut St., Phila. The gentlemen of the Philadelphia Celtic Curragh Club are in agreement: A few good oarswmomen would really get the fledgling club moving. "Yeah, we're very anxious to recruit some women," says team manager Bob Doordan. "It makes it interesting to have mixed crew races.

WITH EIGHT men working in unison to overcome that next challenge, rowing might be the ultimate team sport, and no one knows this better than Saint Joseph's Chase Powell. Less than 2 months after losing his mother to cancer, the senior rower will rejoin his teammates on the Schuylkill this weekend to compete in the prestigious Aberdeen Dad Vail Regatta for the fourth time in his college career. "I told my coach that I wanted to be there for the team in any way possible," Powell said.

David Krmpotich's first rowing coach was a man named Henning E. Peterson, whom everybody just called Pete. By the early 1970s, Peterson's Olympic dream had long since eluded him, but it never quite died. The dream was his legacy to his oarsmen. Pete taught his boys at the Duluth (Minn.) Rowing Club to row on tired old hydraulic machines that were, like himself, remnants of a decade when the Duluth Boat Club and its oarsmen were kings of the city. Peterson rowed on the senior eight that the Duluth Boat Club planned to send to the 1920 Olympic Trials, but he fell ill and lost his seat.

J.B. Kelly was entertaining guests at the Vesper Boat Club last week when he paused to describe the sad state of the venerable boathouse before the completion of recent restorations. "The foundations along one side had sunk 12 inches," said Kelly, president of the club and the grandson of John B. Kelly, who remains the most famous name in Philadelphia rowing more than eight decades after winning three Olympic gold medals. "You didn't have to have beer to feel you were tipsy," Kelly said.

On the west edge of town, not far from the hustle and bustle of the County Courthouse, lies an oasis of sorts known as Broomall's Lake. The quiet stillness that settles over the pristine lake property this time of year - with its silvery trees, clubhouse and dock - belies a rich history that has surrounded the site. The lake has hosted Olympic swimmers, drawn large crowds for its Fourth of July events, lured youth in the search of a swimming or fishing hole and attracted ladies and gentlemen in their Sunday best for a rowing jaunt.

Diane DeLuca has done just about everything at the Vesper Boat Club on Boathouse Row. A former officer and board member, she's also set up parties, swept the floors, scrubbed the locker rooms, sorted the mail, written thank-you notes and, in her words, "picked hairballs out of the shower. " Now, she is the president of the venerable club along the Schuylkill, the first woman to hold that position in Vesper's 124-year history. Last night, friends and fellow rowers held an informal reception for her at the club's Jack Kelly Memorial Boathouse, named for one of its most famous members.

As she does nearly every day in good weather, Hilary Armstrong pushed off from a dock on the Schuylkill and used her powerful arms, legs and torso to begin rowing her four-person boat. That in itself is a miracle. Four years ago, doctors told her she wouldn't be able to row after her car hydroplaned on a slick road and hit a telephone pole, rock and tree, leaving her with three shattered vertebrae, fractured ribs and a collapsed lung. But today and tomorrow, Armstrong, 21, will set the pace for her St. Joseph's University varsity four in the Dad Vail Regatta after powering back from her near-crippling injuries.

As she does nearly every day in good weather, Hilary Armstrong pushed off from a dock on the Schuylkill and used her powerful arms, legs and torso to begin rowing her four-person boat. That in itself is a miracle. Four years ago, doctors told her she wouldn't be able to row after her car hydroplaned on a slick road and hit a telephone pole, rock and tree, leaving her with three shattered vertebrae, fractured ribs and a collapsed lung. But today and tomorrow, Armstrong, 21, will set the pace for her St. Joseph's University varsity four in the Dad Vail Regatta after powering back from her near-crippling injuries.

Slowly but relentlessly, Jamie Dean's world darkened. By the time he was in fifth grade, the genetic eye disease with which he was born - retinitis pigmentosa - had stolen away some of his peripheral vision, and he was no longer able to read quickly. By 10th grade, he was no longer able to sight-read at all. Yesterday, as Dean relaxed under a canopy at the Dad Vail Regatta alongside the Schuylkill with his teammates from Wake Forest, he described his vision as "kind of like looking through a needle hole in a piece of paper.

WITH EIGHT men working in unison to overcome that next challenge, rowing might be the ultimate team sport, and no one knows this better than Saint Joseph's Chase Powell. Less than 2 months after losing his mother to cancer, the senior rower will rejoin his teammates on the Schuylkill this weekend to compete in the prestigious Aberdeen Dad Vail Regatta for the fourth time in his college career. "I told my coach that I wanted to be there for the team in any way possible," Powell said.

As she does nearly every day in good weather, Hilary Armstrong pushed off from a dock on the Schuylkill and used her powerful arms, legs and torso to begin rowing her four-person boat. That in itself is a miracle. Four years ago, doctors told her she wouldn't be able to row after her car hydroplaned on a slick road and hit a telephone pole, rock and tree, leaving her with three shattered vertebrae, fractured ribs and a collapsed lung. But today and tomorrow, Armstrong, 21, will set the pace for her St. Joseph's University varsity four in the Dad Vail Regatta after powering back from her near-crippling injuries.

As she does nearly every day in good weather, Hilary Armstrong pushed off from a dock on the Schuylkill and used her powerful arms, legs and torso to begin rowing her four-person boat. That in itself is a miracle. Four years ago, doctors told her she wouldn't be able to row after her car hydroplaned on a slick road and hit a telephone pole, rock and tree, leaving her with three shattered vertebrae, fractured ribs and a collapsed lung. But today and tomorrow, Armstrong, 21, will set the pace for her St. Joseph's University varsity four in the Dad Vail Regatta after powering back from her near-crippling injuries.

J.B. Kelly was entertaining guests at the Vesper Boat Club last week when he paused to describe the sad state of the venerable boathouse before the completion of recent restorations. "The foundations along one side had sunk 12 inches," said Kelly, president of the club and the grandson of John B. Kelly, who remains the most famous name in Philadelphia rowing more than eight decades after winning three Olympic gold medals. "You didn't have to have beer to feel you were tipsy," Kelly said.

When the eight women in the South Jersey Rowing Club's top boat are in sync, the blades on their oars drop into the water at the same time, swiftly pulling them down the Cooper River. It looks effortless and beautiful. From the banks, anyway. "I have some blisters," Devon Mitchell said as she examined her hands before a recent afternoon practice. Like all rowers, the 17-year-old Shawnee High School senior wraps athletic tape around her calloused mitts to protect them. "It looks bad, but it's just a part of rowing.

Slowly but relentlessly, Jamie Dean's world darkened. By the time he was in fifth grade, the genetic eye disease with which he was born - retinitis pigmentosa - had stolen away some of his peripheral vision, and he was no longer able to read quickly. By 10th grade, he was no longer able to sight-read at all. Yesterday, as Dean relaxed under a canopy at the Dad Vail Regatta alongside the Schuylkill with his teammates from Wake Forest, he described his vision as "kind of like looking through a needle hole in a piece of paper.

They may never row together again, but Vesper Boat Club's elite women's eight have taken the first strokes toward reestablishing the club as a national and even international rowing power. Vesper, perhaps as venerable as any athletic institution in the country, won the Stijlroen Cup for the women's eight championship at the Royal Holland Beker International Regatta in Amsterdam on June 29. Coach Todd Craun, a former national champion and member of Vesper's men's eight in the 1970s, coached and recruited the crew of Amber Carrier (coxswain)

Baseball was still a curiosity, not a national pastime. Horse racing, with all its gambling, attracted an unsavory crowd. And there wasn't yet a single 18-hole golf course in the nation. In the decade before the Civil War, rowing was the sport of choice for America's aristocrats, particularly those living in the old cities along the Eastern seaboard. An astonishing crowd of 50,000 had lined New York harbor in 1824 for a row between British and American four-man crews. Boston's Brahmins gathered for weekend races along the Charles River.

If the growth of crew continues at its current rate, traffic jams on the Cooper River will resemble rush hour on the Ben Franklin Bridge. The Moorestown Rowing Club, in just its second year, includes 78 rowers. Students from Moorestown High, Haddonfield, Moorestown Friends, Cinnaminson, and Lenape represent their respective high schools in competition, but they train together on the Cooper River under coach Jennifer Wesson. Just two years ago, before the club had an official name or home, only a handful of rowers were involved.

Helen Muldowney Kiniry, 84, a founder of the Philadelphia Girls Rowing Club and a community volunteer, died of congestive heart failure Sunday at Bryn Mawr Terrace Convalescent Center. In 1938, Mrs. Kiniry and a dozen other women formed the club and used the old Philadelphia Skating Club on the Schuylkill as its boathouse. While the women had boasted that theirs was the first women's rowing club in the world not affiliated with any men's rowing club, Mrs. Kiniry's son, William F. Kiniry Jr., said: "My mother wasn't trying to change the world; she just wanted to have fun. " Raised in a working-class family in nearby Fairmount, she and her friends spent time watching male rowers on the Schuylkill and eventually got the men to teach them.