EXETER, N.H. (AP) – Ernestine Bayer’s first contact with rowing was as a spectator and supporter – accompanying her husband Ernest, an Olympic rowing medalist.
At the time of her death last month, she was known as the mother of women’s rowing for the generations of athletes she trained and her persistence in bringing the sport to the international state. Bayer, 97, died of pneumonia Sept. 10 at a hospital in Exeter.
A Philadelphia native, Ernestine Steppacher met Ernest Bayer while he was training for the 1928 Olympics on Pennsylvania’s Schuylkill River. They both went by the nickname “Ernie.” Ernestine Bayer was her husband’s constant companion during his training, but it would be years before got a chance to row herself.
One day in Philadelphia she saw a woman taking out her boyfriend’s boat, and she asked her husband whether she could try rowing, too. After 10 years of her pleas, he relented, but there were consequences. “Men wouldn’t talk to my husband because he permitted me to row,” Ernestine Bayer told the Boston Globe in 1992. “Permitted me. Can you imagine?”
She went on to found the Philadelphia Girls Rowing Club in 1938, along with 16 friends and co-workers. It was the first competitive women’s club in the United States, said her daughter and sole survivor, Tina Bayer. In 1967, Ernestine Bayer, then in her late 50s, persuaded U.S. rowing officials to select her club as the first American crew to participate in the European women’s rowing championships in Vichy, France. The team came in last, but her perseverance in seeking international opportunities for women’s rowing culminated in the inclusion of women’s rowing at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Eight years later, the women’s team won the gold medal.
For her pioneering efforts, Bayer became the first woman inductee in the National Rowing Foundation’s Hall of Fame, the first female recipient of the U.S. Rowing Medal for service and feats in the sport and first woman to win U.S. Rowing’s Carlin award for service.
The Bayers moved to Stratham in 1971 after Ernest Bayer’s retirement. Ernestine Bayer brought her pioneering energy to New Hampshire – she founded the Alden Ocean Shell Association, a recreational group. The Bayer family helped turn women’s rowing into a varsity sport at the University of New Hampshire.
Sunday, rowing teams from the University of New Hampshire, Phillips Exeter Academy, Great Bay Rowing Club and members of the 1984 women’s Olympic gold medal team joined Tina Bayer for a flotilla on the Squamscott River to remember the rowing legend.
Former rowing student Liz O’Leary was at the flotilla.
“She was such a gracious, wonderful woman,” said O’Leary, a UNH graduate and head rowing coach at Harvard-Radcliffe. “She made me work hard and encouraged me to do things I had no idea I could do and she was right. In your life you are glad to know someone like her.”
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