Joe Burk: A Rowing Coach and a Gentleman

By Dotty Brown

Ask anyone who has read The Boys in the Boat what crew came in second to the University of Washington in the 1936 Olympic trials and typically they have no clue.

Even if the reader is from Philadelphia.

The answer is the University of Pennsylvania, and rowing in that eight-oared shell was Joe Burk. He also came in second in the single sculls.

With his dream of competing in the 1936 “Hitler Olympics” dashed, Joe Burk persevered. He corresponded with boatbuilder George Pocock in Seattle about technique. He trained by himself on a creek near his New Jersey home to sustain a punishing rate of 40 strokes per minute. And he became the greatest American single sculler–racing handily toward the 1940 Olympics.

When those Games were canceled, he turned his drive and determination to battle and became a war hero. Then, for two decades, he coached crew at Penn, fostering one champion after the other.

Still, few know Joe Burk’s story.

Ed Woodhouse, whose own rowing career came within a few degrees of separation from Burk’s, has just finished the first comprehensive biography of Burk—Joe Burk: An American Ideal, now available through Amazon.

“I started thinking about all of the coaches that I’d known,” said Woodhouse, who rowed at Harvard. “And I realized that my Harvard coach, Harry Parker, was really a product of Joe Burk. And Joe Burk was in turn a product of Rusty Callow and George Pocock. And George Pocock plugs right into the great English watermen, the early scullers.

“And that got me thinking: This guy sits astride 60 years of American rowing in the 20th century.”

Also compelling to Woodhouse was Burk’s integrity, his sense of fairness, and his work ethic–character traits that resonate in the country today.

“I thought, here’s an honorable man, literally the American ideal. He was a throwback to a time when the idea of coaches was not that they were winning football games. It was that they were creating character in the athletes they coached.”

Woodhouse rowed at Kent School and then at Harvard, where his undefeated freshman eight, coached by Harry Parker, won the Thames Challenge Cup in 1974 at Henley Royal Regatta. His crew was written up by Sports Illustrated, which called it the “Rude and Smooth.”

At 6-foot-2 and 183 pounds, Woodhouse was the smallest of the “big, strong crew” that included Al Shealy, Rick Cashin, and Tiff Wood. Those men continued rowing and winning medals. Woodhouse, whose father had just died, went to law school instead.

“While I was hoping to continue to try to make the national team, I realized I had to just get on with it.”

After earning his degree at the University of Virginia, Woodhouse devoted his career to practicing law. Always haunting him, however, were the words of a Harvard section leader who graded a biography he wrote for class.

“What do you plan to do after graduation?” he had asked Woodhouse. “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to law school.’ And he said, ‘God, don’t do that. You ought to be a writer.’”

Three years ago, Woodhouse, 72, began researching Burk. While he read every news story he could find about him, the strength of his book is the many interviews with rowers who knew Burk, from Fred Lane, stroke of the 1955 boat that won the Grand Challenge Cup at Henley, to Luther Jones, a Penn freshman under Burk in 1968, the year before Burk retired.

Woodhouse himself has long known many of these rowers. He also spoke with such champions as Gardner Cadwalader, Reed Kinderman, Ken Drefuss, Howard Greenberg, Gregg Stone, and Lyman Perry.

All these men respected Burk, even when his point system worked against them.

“They’re remarkably uniform in their devotion to Burk,” Woodhouse said.

Woodhouse believes that Burk’s use of science to remove bias from his coaching is another reason to call him an “American ideal.” Burk would use a mechanical light system to measure rowers’ leg pressure in the boat and shuffle crews by flipping cards to seat the men for practice races—methods designed to select his racing crew more fairly.

“It’s hard to find truly objective scientific acts that all can agree on, and that makes Burk’s effort that much more admirable,” Woodhouse said. Burk’s use of data for decision-making risked reducing his own authority.

Burk also stands out for never holding a grudge. Woodhouse recounts a 1966 incident between Burk and Harvard coach Harry Parker, whom Burk had mentored a decade before at Penn. Harvard had just trounced Penn on the Schuylkill.

“Ever the gentleman, Burk comes up to Parker, sticks out his hand, and says, ‘Congratulations, Harry.’

“In response, Harry says, ‘Well, that settles scores.’”

The Penn captain who witnessed the scene said his jaw dropped at Parker’s apparent bitterness. But “the old master,” said Woodhouse, “took no offense.“

In researching his book, Woodhouse traveled from his home in Virginia to places that revealed something about Burk’s character. One was the Rancocas Creek, near the farm where Burk grew up and attended a Quaker primary school. The Rancocas is where Burk challenged himself to go ever faster, developing his distinctive and unconventional short, rapid stroke.

“Walking that ground and seeing how it looks, how it flows, all of that was a very important piece of seeing how solitary it was,” Woodhouse said.

The Quaker influence on Burk was also huge—“that sense of modesty, self-effacement, evenness of temper, regardless of circumstance,” Reed Kinderman observed.

Another pilgrimage was to the remote rustic cabin that Burk and his wife built by hand in Montana after he retired from Penn. In traveling there, he followed the route–from the Spokane airport through Idaho to winding Wyoming roads near the Canadian border–that so many of Burk’s protegés also took to visit him until he died in 2008 at 93.

“I kept wondering, What was Joe doing finding that place, since he’d spent most of his life on the East Coast? And what I finally concluded was he was coming back West to the land of Rusty Callow and lumberjacks, to the land of George Pocock. I think it was, in a way, his spiritual homage to those two mentors.”   

 

Dotty Brown is the author of Boathouse Row, Waves of Change in the Birthplace of American Rowing, which includes a chapter on Joe Burk. She pointed Ed Woodhouse to Philadelphia resources for his book.

 

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