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About the Book

Bitten by the Rowing Bug

Challenges of an Untamed River

Bitten by the Rowing Bug is about a rowing program on an untamed Oregon river that taught self-reliance to college students during the mid-twentieth century. It is also about a legally blind jack-of-all-trades who drove that program forward for more than thirty years.

Available on all major bookstores

ISBN: 979-8886793406

Publisher: Luminare Press

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The history of any sport captures my attention and Karl Drlica’s Bitten by the Rowing Bug is a great combination of sport history, interesting recollections, and accounts of a time that we both lived through but seems so distant now.  With women’s rowing programs so well funded today and so popular, it is instructive to remember the trials and tribulations, blood, sweat and tears which brought the sport to it’s current status in clubs, high schools and institutions of higher learning across America. At the same time that Karl was coaching a fledging program for women at Cal, I was doing the same with a handful of men and women at the University of Michigan in my sport, canoeing.  His stories ring so true to my ears and bring those sights and sounds of docks, boats and rivers alive in my memory!  It is so fortunate that the archive of material he inherited from his father and added to with his own legacy has been collected in this entertaining and important history of rowing in the U.S., Oregon and California in particular.

Andras “Andy” Toro, OLY 
Canoeing, 1960, ’64, ’72, ’76
Author of Chronicles of an Olympic Defector

Until the late 1960s, Oregon’s Willamette River was uncontrolled by large dams: every winter and spring it would flood multiple times. Debris in the river, which could include entire trees, damaged thin, wooden racing shells. Daily repair was required to keep the crews on the water. One approach was for the coaches to build their own shells using thin, but rugged plywood. Their success led to construction of World War II PT boats using plywood. 

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Left: Rowing coaches clearing flood debris from the dock, early 1950s.

Right: Coach Stevens applying plywood hull to racing shell framework, late 1930s.

The achievements of the rowing program were recognized. Three coaches from the era, two male rowers, and two women’s crews were elected to the Oregon State University Sports Hall of Fame, two men were on Olympic teams, and both men’s and women’s crews won two national titles. 

Although Bitten is largely about twentieth century self-sufficiency, it is also a rowing book: beginning rowers can use it to give their family members a sense of the rowing experience. Bitten includes first-person accounts of races, capsizing in ice-cold water, and a more recent near-death drowning of the author. Moreover, women rowers will appreciate how far their sport has come from the days when women were actively discouraged from cut-throat varsity competition. 

Coach Drlica recognized as a multitasker by major Oregon newspaper, 1977.

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