THE SUNSET OF CONIBEAR Cook always won the prize for the ugliest outfit.”4414 1968 Season The 1968 Penn Varsity Eight battled all season long with Harvard University, but they had to do so without the services of Gardner Cadwalader. The reason was that Gardner had been busy the previous summer. Cadwalader: “Ted Nash floored me early in the spring of my freshman year [1967] by asking if I wanted to race in the European Championships and Pan American Games. He said he wanted to pair me up with the biggest, strongest, toughest, manliest senior in the boathouse. “Me? A freshman? “That fellow had huge arms, didn’t talk much, slicked up his hair like James Dean, rode a big, black Harley Hog and was married to a beautiful blonde wife. Plus he was a member of the biggest, strongest, toughest, manliest fraternity on campus. “‘Are you sure about this pairing, Ted?’ “So I teamed up with a fascinating, wonderful and powerful man named Robby Meek, and we went on to some great adventures and some very interesting international regattas all that summer. “And every night, my partner read from his Christian Science Bible. “Penn was full of interesting characters, and we were on the USA Team with fellows from Harvard who became great friends, and we met Harry Parker for the first time.”4415 Cadwalader, the storm-scarred 1967 Jayvee 7-seat Robby Meek, and coxswain Jay Fuhrman ‘65 capped their summer by winning the 1967 Pan American Games coxed-pairs event in Winnipeg. 4414 Purdy, personal correspondence, 2007 4415 Cadwalader, op. cit. Meek: “I have a 32” inseam. So did Gardner. We were the same length in the water. He was only 6’0” tall, and I was 6’4”. I stroked that boat. Jay Fuhrman was the coxswain, and he was so true blue. “The way Ted Nash handled us, I just loved it all. When he coached, he got so excited about it, and he threw himself into it so completely, that in my opinion looking back on it, it almost spoiled us, and I missed his coaching so much when we went to France for the Europeans in Vichy while he had some commitment in Mexico. I just needed his motivation . . . and it wasn’t there. He wrote, but it we missed him so much. Plus, as soon as we hit France, I got diarrhea and lost fifteen pounds overnight. That didn’t help.”4416 After all that, Gardner understandably took part of the following autumn semester off. When he rejoined the team, he was already hopelessly behind the others in cumulative points. He started at the bottom, and even by the end of the spring never made it past the Pickle Boat. Expectations were high at the Penn Boathouse for 1968. Above all, it was an Olympic year, and Joe Burk had had a long but frustrating career at the Olympic Trials: as an athlete, second in the eights and second in the singles at the 1936 Trials, then the overwhelming world favorite in the single for 1940 before the Olympics were cancelled. As a coach, he had assembled the world’s best eight of 1955, but they were a bit off the pace in the Olympic year of 1956. In 1964, Joe put together a talented graduate boat that was beating absolutely everyone until they were overtaken by the emerging speed of Vesper and a couple of other crews only shortly before the Trials. 4416 Meek, op. cit. 1215
