From the book: Ch. 20, namesake of the Hunter Marston Boathouse – from Four Years at Four, by John Escher – Rowing stories, reports and interviews

We had won the Dad Vail twice and were now lined up for the 1961 final with seven other crews. On one side was Amherst College which we had left behind in a Connecticut River fog bank earlier in the season. Poor Amherst. The person driving his truck hit a telephone pole right there on Kelly Drive Philadelphia teeming with a hundred different crews. The collision broke the bow of their boat. So we lent them the Stein.
Nearby, on the other side, adjacent, was Rollins College in Florida whose seven men began chatting.
“Hello Esch,” he said. “Look, we’ll beat you at the end of the race start.
It was Jim McDermott who I used to race with at Hotchkiss School.
His words annoyed me slightly, but reached our seven-man Marshmallow Basketball correspondent, one of the strongest people in our boat.
On the second stroke of the race, Marsh pushed so hard with his legs that he “jumped his slide”, meaning his roller seat came off its rail.
“Our time was faster than yours,” recalls a member of our Jayvee team fifty-nine years later.
“I told you that we would be ahead of you at the end of the start and we were! Jim McDermott would say at a Hotchkiss meeting.
None of these people knew that Marsh had jumped his slide, which would have been the end of the season for us, except that Marsh was an engineer and had figured out how to get his seat back on its path.
All the crews had left us. We passed Philadelphia Schools and a few others, then Amherst and won by a length.
Amherst finished second, the best they’ve ever done. The Stein… a fast boat!
The faded black line between me and the mouse surrounded by splashes is a furrow in the porcupine’s antler left by a naval artillery shell moving horizontally.
Despite any disappointment, the publicity and implications of our summer of 1960 were vast. Sports Illustrated called Brown’s IRA outcome “the biggest upset since David killed Goliath”. The New York Herald Tribune put this headline on an Irving T. Marsh story: CAL WON THE REGATTA — BROWN STOLE THE SPOTLIGHT.
My own article on the race appeared in the Brown Daily Herald Supplement, and Brown’s president, Barnaby C. Keeney, read it.
I was going to class when a secretary came down from Brown’s University Hall, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “President Keeney would like to speak with you.”
Deciding to cut classes, I climbed with her to the top of University Hall.
“Hello John,” said President Keeney. “Tell me about the crew.”
What I told him was similar to this book but shorter. At the end of the hour he told me that the Brown crew would become a recognized sport.
As Bob Olson said of everything he referred to, “You need a little experience.”
Less than a week after our top club team won the 1959 Dad Vail, I wrote the first of several newsletters entitled “STROKE: News from the Brown Rowing Association”.
It wasn’t like I had created a beautiful tricolor masthead in brown, gray and black woodblock print myself. No, I inherited it from the darkest days of Brown Crew. And like a good philistine for the following issues, I photocopied it, thus removing the beautiful gray, the always so rich brown – it didn’t look so good but it was quick and cheap.

Knowing nothing about direct mail advertising/fundraising and still feeling the joy of an epic victory, I jumped in for a full print job for this first issue.
My father, who ran an educational direct mail publishing business in New London, Connecticut, helped me lay out spectacular reprints of the Providence Journal and United Press International.
As a crew we were lucky we only smothered Menlo Park by one length and all of the schools in Philadelphia and others were close enough for a single angle shot which was breathtaking but who told the whole story.
Also, my dad deliberately inserted the phrase “the Brown Cinderella crew” into my blank solicitation for funds. And the boy made that sentence with the help of the nationwide Providence Journal. A surprisingly large contingent of newspapers came out of nowhere to decide they liked us.

One of my father’s company employees gave him the name, address, and rumored identification of a Mr. Hunter Marston in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.
And so in a long, moneyless life began my first and only attempt at fundraising. The “tip” my father received was that Mr. Marston, an executive of Continental Can Corporation, was a graduate of Brown.

wet mouse
“Dear Mr. Marston,” I wrote, “As a well-known Brown graduate with an interest in sports, I thought you might like a copy of this newsletter.”
It would be nice as long as we both understood that he was the graduate and I was the undergrad.
A few days later, I received a long envelope from Mr. Marston and opened it in philosophy class. Bill Engeman and I sat in the back row of the Sage Hall conference room. The philosophy professor, curious if not displeased with the sudden commotion at the back of the room, did not rush towards us like a schoolteacher would to snatch the envelope from my hands. Obviously, he was the kind of person who didn’t need to know everything about everything.
Inside the envelope was a check for a thousand dollars made out to the Brown Rowing Association, “seed money” as a Brown fundraising veteran would say sixty years later.
Then came oars with a shell which Mr. Marston authorized me on the telephone to name “Hunter.”
Although I never met Mr. Marston in person, Bill Engeman and I drove to Watch Hill one day to retrieve an old shell hanging from Mr. Marston’s spare shed.

I think my favorite experience as a student-athlete was practicing my freshman year, when I was still very new to the sport of rowing. It was a practice at the beginning of the spring season, and my boat was the first to launch, so we were alone on the Seekonk. It started snowing and we were warming up in Pawtucket on a quiet, peaceful river. It was a rare moment of beauty in an otherwise quite industrial and somewhat neglected landscape. — Julia Lynn, brunette student in 2020