Like most English rivers, the Charles was too narrow for all competitors to begin at the same time, leading organizers to structure the races so that rowers would start at intervals of approximately 10 seconds and race against the clock.

“We were reasonably sure that it wouldn't work, that it wouldn't appeal to anybody because it was the wrong time of year, but we set up and decided to try it out,” MacMahon says.

Following the first-ever Regatta—which covered 3.2 miles and passed under six bridges—an IBM computer cataloged the boats’ times into 12 racing divisions.

In the featured “four with cox” race, the Harvard boat of Paul Gunderson, Geoff Picard, Harry Pollock, and Bill Weber—which had represented the United States at the Tokyo Olympics during the summer of 1964—finished second after covering the tricky course in 19:14, 10 seconds behind the winning Penn boat.

“Harry Parker always liked to do long rows,” says Gunderson, who now works as a surgeon in Enumclaw, Wash. “So doing the Head of the Charles was pretty routine for us.”

In the individual races, two rowers representing Eliot House—senior Paul Wilson and junior Larry Fogelberg—won the college singles competition and the 155-pound senior singles division, respectively. (Initially, Harvard houses would enter their own teams because the Ivy League refused to allow its rowers to participate, fearing this would set a dangerous precedent for offseason competition.) Wilson would go on to win the championship singles race in every year from 1967 to 1970.

“[The first Regatta] was pretty low key,” Parker says. “It was cold and windy, but it happened, and it turned out there was a lot more interest than they had anticipated, and it started growing right away.”

RAPID GROWTH

Crews from the Union Boat Club, the University of Wisconsin, and a number of other organizations were added to the Regatta for its second year as attendance soared thanks in part to a misunderstanding.

“The first year certainly nobody came to watch [the race],” MacMahon says. “But afterwards US Rowing printed a manual which reported on rowing activities for the year, so I had to write about the Head of the Charles Regatta. My opening line was ‘Countless thousands lined the shores,’ which was supposed to be humorous, but people believed it and took it literally. A lot of people who weren't there [the first year thus] thought, ‘I better go to this Regatta.’ So it became sort of the thing to go to."

By 1967, 450 oarsmen were competing, already making the Regatta the largest in North America. The race grew to 600 participants the following year, with schools from as far west as Santa Barbara, Calif. taking part.

“It has become for rowing what the Boston Marathon is for running,” The Crimson wrote of the Regatta in 1968, noting that every Ivy League school besides Cornell was represented following the lifting of the league-wide ban on fall varsity crew competition.

In 1968, Harvard won its first Paul Revere Point Trophy, which was awarded to the college, club, or school with the highest number of overall points.

“For quite a while at [the] Cambridge Boat Club, they would rig or skew the points system so that they always won,” Parker says with a laugh. “Then they began to be a little bit more transparent and fair about it, and we began to win quite a few [Revere Trophies], largely because we have a lot of entries.”

Such success was abundant in the final Regatta of the decade, when Harvard oarsmen won the three major team races against an increasingly large field. By 1970, the event had grown to include 900 competitors in 232 boats representing 48 rowing clubs, colleges, and high schools from the United States and Canada.