3 January 2019
By Göran R Buckhorn
At New Year’s, HTBS received an e-mail from Lenville O’Donnell of Rowing Archives, who preserves, restores and digitizes old rowing films.
‘It’s been a fine year for old rowing films, highlighted by the 1977 Henley films from Ron Jackman, the 1959 Green Lake Crew Hawaii film from Frank Coyle, the 1929 UW Practice featuring what is probably the closest moving image of the original “Conibear Stroke”, 1958 Racing in Henley and Moscow, U.S.S.R., from the Ulbrickson Family Collection and much more,’ Lenny O’Donnell writes.
All these films can be seen on Rowing Archives’s website.
Lenny writes that preserving, restoring and digitizing film is time-consuming and expensive, and one of the reasons that Rowing Archives has been able to accomplish all this is thanks to support from the rowing public.
‘We literally have stacks of films to restore, from all over the world, and many more sitting on dusty shelves in libraries around the world. Your continued support will enable us to do even more in 2019,’ Lenny writes.
Please take a moment and donate to help Rowing Archives with this important mission. Go to www.rowingarchives.org/donate
Spread the good word to your rowing friends around the world.
Now, isn’t that a good way to start 2019?
Thank you! We do have some amazing reels waiting to be restored from our vaults and collections and libraries around the world. We actually need about $1M or a bit more to get it all done and build a proper online library, but it’s early days and a few hundred here and there go a long way towards achieving that stretch goal in the next decade. One stroke at a time…