Mr. Badger Makes the Boats Go

WHAT looks a bit like a badger, except for the perpetual cigar drooping out of his mouth and the recently added mustache, is a badger. A Wendell Badger, to be exact. You can find this Badger near the water. Badge, as he's called, has been with the College for 27 years, the last 18 as boatman for the Dartmouth crew.

Coming to work for the DCAC in 1950, he ran into rowing eight years later when Pete Gardner, then the new coach of the crew, asked him to help repair shells during the winter. Gardner would take injured oars to his own home to work on while Badger split time between the boats and his duties in Alumni Gym. By the end of that year, Gardner convinced Badger and the DCAC that the crew needed a full-time boatman - and that Wendell was the man for the job. It didn't take much convincing. Badger grew up with wood; his father and grandfather both were cabinet makers.

Time has shown Gardner correct in his judgment. For those who have rowed for Dartmouth, Badger has become a legend, a pleasantly crusty legend, and he's also become an internationally renowned boatman. In 1970, he was boatman for the United States national team at the World Championships in Canada, a position which he also held at the Pan American Games in 1971 and this past year at the Olympics in Montreal. When asked if he feels honored by being selected for this position, he grins sheepishly and says, "I enjoyed the traveling."

Sometimes Badger comes on mock-ferocious, growling at oarsmen who stray out of line. Whatever his mood, he is unfailingly serious about his work. He doesn't like things to get in his way. One acquaintance says, "Even though Wendell is totally in love with rowing, if he had his way there would be no oarsmen - they wear out equipment." He does worry about the shells, and it seems to take something out of him every time he sees seriously injured equipment.

Still, there is something soft, even warm, at the core of Mr. Badger. He likes doing things for other people. One day he will be helping two former Olympic oarsmen with the mold for miniature plastic-resin oars that they hope to make and market. Or perhaps he will be repairing old broken oars so that he can give them to seniors as mementos of their rowing and their association with him. A former lightweight captain is getting married this month, and Badger is making some furniture for him. Sometimes his softness is a matter of intentional neglect. Not long ago, two oarsmen wanted to take a launch out to do some water-skiing. They kept badgering him, until he finally told them they could take the launch out, but not ski. The strain between wanting to let them go and knowing his job would be on the line if they got hurt was apparent. When the boys said, "Well, we better bring along a rope in case we want to tie up to a tree, and a couple of skis in case the engine fails and we need something to paddle with," Badger could only bring himself to say, "You just better not tie up to any trees until I've gone to lunch - and I don't want to hear how well the paddles worked."

Badger is kept busy from February, when he has to ready the shells for spring training, through November, when the docks come up for the winter. There is national-team business in the summer, and the rest of the time he spends keeping the Dartmouth equipment and the oarsmen's psyches in good working order. This means a lot of Friday nights in the boathouse making last-minute adjustments, and many weekends spent with the crew.

Someone once commented that Badger has the life - three months off during the year, his own hours down at the boathouse. But the essence of this good life is that he has filled those months and mornings with projects that interest him. He is not one to sit around home watching soap operas. Until two years ago, he made a series of oars which he called "Badger Blades." They sold well, and they are quite handsome, but Badger just got tired of making them, and turned to other pursuits.

Badger is no amateur with wood. He has his own shop over in White River Junction where he makes fine antique reproductions, mostly on a custom basis. He also makes beautiful lamps out of antique wood planes, which he steals from his own extensive antique tool collection. One room in his home is lined on four walls by 500 planes. He has plenty of other kinds of tools. New England is the perfect place to find such relics, but Badger complains that they are getting scarce. One wonders why.

Badger also hunts in the fall. He got his deer as usual last year, but it has been a couple of years now since he's downed a bear The cigar smoke has probably kept them out of range.

When he's not been hunting or working in his shop, he has found the time to work his way up to 32nd Degree Mason, which as he points out, "is as high as you can go, unless you're someone like the President." Badger plays bugle and trumpet for the Shriner's band.

For all the 27 years that he has been at Dartmouth and three more as well, Badger has shared his life with his wife Elsine. They have no children of their own, but instead about a hundred adopted kids now that the crew program includes women. And oarsmen can be children, as Badger will be happy to tell you. He remembers one student who got cut from the squad and smashed his blade on the ground, saying, "If I can't row with this oar, no one can." What does Badger think of the women oarsmen? He finds them, as a group, prettier than the women Dartmouth rows against, and he's pleased to note that they take better care - "knock on wood" - of the equipment than the men do.

Badger pampers his children in other ways. Crews bet their racing shirts on each race, the winning team getting the shirts off the backs of the losers. When Dartmouth wins, Badger picks up the Dartmouth racing shirts and keeps them until the next regatta. That way, shirts disappear only when races are lost. After one victorious race, Badger "forgot" to pick up Dartmouth's betting shirts. Evidently he was so surprised at this, particular victory that he forgot that the oarsmen didn't have to give up their betting shirts to the opponents. To be more truthful, he probably just decided that the Dartmouth boys deserved an extra reward - keeping their own shirts for a change - for their efforts.

Like all master woodcraftsmen, Badger has mixed emotions about synthetics. As he says, "There's a feel to wood that you just don't get with plastic." The three new Dartmouth eights are all plastic, but Badger doesn't seem overly concerned. "I'd rather see 'em wood," he says with the most characteristic of local accents, "but the plastic boats are faster. The only thing is, I've never had to repair a plastic boat. Don't quite know what that's going to be like."

Like all interesting people, Badger has his idiosyncracies. Like grease for the oars. Sometimes an oar will stick in the oarlock unless it's lubricated. At most schools, a can of Crisco is kept around to do the job. Wendell doesn't like grease - "it's too messy" — so he won't allow the team to use it. This left everyone in a panic until it was discovered that spray silicon would do the job as well. Or consider those cigars. Badger smokes what may very well be the worst-smelling cigars made. The women's crew felt even better about getting him to stop smoking on the bus than about their good rowing at a recent regatta. When asked why he smokes such a foul brand, he answers, "Because I can't afford better ones. I had a good dollar one, from Cuba I think, the other day though." It somehow seems reassuring that he doesn't like the cigars he smokes any more than his friends do.

Badger can also be extremely stubborn. It seems that many years ago, a freshman oarsman decided that the best way to impress a recently acquired female friend would be to take her out late at night for a river cruise in one of the launches. Badger happened to drive over the bridge from Vermont that night, and he noticed that a boat was missing. So he went down to the dock and got into another launch to go hunting for the missing boat. When the freshman and his friend saw him coming, they dived to the floor of the boat. Badger thought the boat was unoccupied, but when he peered inside and saw the two of them he became furious and chewed the fellow out in a way that only a furious Wendell Badger can.

After this episode, neither talked to the other for the four years the fellow rowed. Later this boy became crew coach at a large university, and, by a twist of fate, he and his young son managed to get stuck with Badger in a truck carrying boats for the two schools. The little boy turned to his father, who still was not on speaking terms with Badger, and asked, "Daddy, how did you learn how to row?" The father glowered at Badger momentarily, and then grinned and said, "Why don't you ask Wendell?" The two men looked at each other and broke into laughter. They've been best of friends ever since.

Over the past few months, Badger has lost quite a bit of weight. Between that and the new mustache and the cigars which he really didn't smoke too often until this year, he's hardly the same man. But one guesses about him, set in his tried and true ways, that he'll always be the same Badger.