Cambridge, then and Now

In the early spring (read: late winter) of 1964, back when the Beatles were a startling new phenomenon in the pop music world, back when very few people much knew or cared where some place called "Vietnam" was located, I came with a gang of would-be Dartmouth College athletes from Hanover, New Hampshire (where the Connecticut River was still frozen) to Cambridge, Massachusetts. We were guests of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which bedded us down in the field house and let us launch our eight-oared shells from the MIT boathouse on the Charles River. We were training for the 1964 collegiate rowing season. On a calm day, as you see, the Charles was a fairly pleasant place to skim over the water... We never really amounted to much as a force to reckon with in collegiate rowing circles that year, but we worked hard at it and had fun -- and some of us damn near flunked out of the college. Eve and I went to Cambridge over Thanksgiving to spend the holiday with my daughters and their families. From our eighth-floor hotel room, we had a view of the Charles Basin that brought back some memories of those long-gone undergraduate days... Here's the Thanksgiving crew (minus yours truly, who was behind the camera, and Nora, who was slung on her father's back) on our Saturday trek from MIT to the Institute for Contemporary Art on the Boston waterfront -- a hike of no small distance on a cool, windy day. Well, I may be getting older, but I can still keep up with these kids who weren't even around back when I was pulling an oar on the dear old Charles.