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During the fall, Friday is traditionally intrasquad race day at Harvard: four boats, evenly matched, starting 10 seconds apart and racing up the Charles for three or four miles at controlled stroke rates. "It's incredibly ferocious racing," says Metz. "We took more pleasure in winning those Friday race days than actual races. There was always aggressive steering, cutting corners. Harry would penalize people 30 seconds if they took it too far. Yet at the same time he loved it; there's always this tension with him. He relied on intrasquad competitiveness to drive the whole team higher." When it came time to race another college, a Harvard crew wasn't doing anything new: they arrived at the starting line ready to compete, full out.

THE INTENSITY.
Parker's burning focus is palpable on or off the water. Some call it charisma, some would say the man is just enormously present. A third group calls him omnipresent. "He's very very intense," says Washburn. "He is unstintingly invested in the rowers' success at all times, all year long. Since this level of commitment is so rare, so unusual, you are moved by it." Clint Allen '67, who stroked the undefeated 1966 varsity, says that in the 1960s, "He could have lived in Newell. As far as I could tell he did nothing else in his life but crew."

During the '60s, the University of Pennsylvania was an arch-rival. Penn's freshman coach, Ted Nash, was, in Jake Fiechter's words, "the archenemy, a satanic figure in the Harvard view of the world." In 1970, Nash became head coach at Penn, which beat Harvard by open water that year in the Adams Cup regatta. "I can remember feeling devastated," says Steve Gladstone, who coached Harvard's lightweight varsity at the time. "Then, in the launch, I heard Harry talking to [freshman coach] Ted [Washburn], calmly figuring out ways to beat them next time around -analyzing the weak and strong points of the race. Most coaches would take at least a day to recover from a loss like that." (A week later, Harvard won the Eastern Sprints, beating Penn by half a length.)

THE SPEED.
As an athlete, Parker was a smallish (6 feet, 172 pounds) sculler who nonetheless won the Pan Am Games in 1959 and the U.S. national championship in 1959 and 1960, and who reached the finals of the 1960 Olympics at Rome, where he finished fifth. Fred Borchelt, who coached the Harvard freshmen heavyweights from 1987 to 1990, explains that "Harry used everything he had to its maximum advantage." Parker summarizes his philosophy as "applying yourself as completely as you can to making the boat go as fast as possible."

He is a true student of the sport, seeking out any advantage that will increase boat speed. According to Borchelt, "He knows every single thing that could possibly make a boat go faster." Omniscient. In the 1960s, Karl Adam's world-champion crews from Ratzeburg in West Germany pioneered advances such as interval training, shovel-shaped oars, and "bucket" rigging, which put the #4 and #5 oars on the starboard side of the boat. (Traditional rigging alternates port and starboard oars.) Parker imported these innovations, along with Stämpfli shells from Switzerland.

He also raised the bar on physical conditioning, making college rowing into a year-round sport. Parker was the first to use the ergometer (a rowing machine that measures work output) for training as well as testing. "In the '60s and '70s, Harry was ahead of everybody in training," says Charlie Altekruse '80, of the 1978-80 varsity. "As others began to learn those techniques, the competition got a lot closer." (A measure of his early dominance: during Parker's first 20 years, Harvard lost only seven regular-season races.)

Parker teaches the very es-sence of the sport: making boats go fast. That is Job #1, and there is no Job #2. "Harry has an uncanny ability to re-cognize boat speed," says Tiff Wood. "He could look at a boat and make some subtle change- alter the rigging, move someone from port to starboard-and it always worked," says Ted Tsomides. "There was nothing arbitrary about Harry's moves, they were always the right thing to do. So we developed an absolute trust in his judgment."

Workouts at Harvard are extremely efficient, tightly organized affairs. While Brown trains three or more hours daily, a typical Harvard practice lasts 90 minutes. Says Tom Tiffany '71, coxswain and cocaptain of the 1971 varsity, "The idea is: `We're doing this just a little bit better than anyone else because there are other things we have to do.' You won't have to give up your academic aspirations because you row."

Another limiting factor: 16 oarsmen and two coxswains waiting on the Newell dock for the two shells returning from the preceding practice. At some schools, fast varsities come from small programs, but rowing is Harvard's biggest intercollegiate sport; considering the freshman, lightweight, and heavyweight squads, about 125 athletes train at Newell in any given year.

The depth of the Harvard program means that no oarsman can take anything for granted. Parker selects his varsity eight later in the season than most coaches-and even then, nothing is final. At Red Top, he sometimes takes an undefeated crew and tears it to pieces, seeking a faster combination. "Harry knows how to pick boats and find combinations that go fast," says Clint Allen. "They're not necessarily the strongest guys or the best technical rowers. He's like a chemist; he can mix that potion so that it works."

One centrifuge is the seat race, which Parker may have invented, or at least refined. In a seat race, two four-oared boats race each other; then two rowers occupying the same position (the #3 seat, for example) in each boat trade places and another race is run. By comparing the outcomes of the two races, a coach can judge which rower contributed more to boat speed. "He [Parker] never lets you sit," says Fritz Hobbs '69, M.B.A. '72. "I'd been to the [1968] Olympics, and had been on two undefeated varsities-and he still seat-raced me. He wasn't going to let us walk onto that boat."

Years ago, Parker led a Cub Scout pack in Winchester, Massachusetts, where he is a longtime resident. His sons, George Parker '83 and David Parker '85, M.B.A. '91, were scouts. The pack ran a "pinewood derby"-a race of homemade toy cars down an inclined plane. "Some people were carving their blocks of wood for aerodynamics. We just had a boxy car," laughs David. "But Dad wanted it to go fast. He put lead weights in front and used graphite on the axles to reduce friction. Nobody else understood the importance of graphite." The Parkermobile went undefeated.

THE ROOTS.
The river warrior was born in 1935 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the son of Ruth Parker and builder/contractor Lambert Achilles Parker. He attended high school in East Hartford, Connecticut, where he played baseball and basketball. "I had the distinction of being the lowest-scoring center in the history of the school," he laughs. But Parker did well academically and won a Naval ROTC scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, where he began rowing to fulfill a physical education requirement. He immediately loved the sport.

"Rowing seemed to be an activity that was going to reward effort and hard work and was not as dependent on highly cultivated skills as some other sports," Parker says. After a year on the freshman lightweights, he spent three years rowing #2 for the Penn varsity. In 1955 his crew won the Grand Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta in England. "He was very, very good and one of the smartest, hardest-working fellows we ever had," says Joe Burk, Parker's coach at Penn. "Harry and the bow man would sometimes walk from the campus out to our house in Bala Cynwyd-about 10 miles-just to talk about rowing."

"Harry was very quiet, almost monastic," recalls Gene Bay, a Penn oarsman of Parker's era. "His idol was Joe Burk, who was one of those very dedicated athletes. Rather ascetic. To Joe, drinking Coca-Cola was practically like having a scotch. We didn't even have coffee ice cream on the training table!" Sometimes after a practice, Burk would dive off the dock for a dip in the Schuylkill River-in February. "He was goading us to do the same," Bay recalls. "Harry was always the first one in."

For intrasquad races, Burk let different oarsmen stroke the boats and choose their own crews. "I paid a lot of attention to who I wanted to pick, and what the order of picking would be," Parker recalls. "It was not unlike what they do in the pro football draft." Says Burk, "I found out that Harry knew almost as much about the personnel of the crews as I did."

Parker graduated with honors in philosophy in 1957. He also met his first wife, Elinor, at Penn. After college, Parker spent three years in the navy, the last half of it in Philadelphia, where he trained as a sculler for national and international competition. Burk coached Parker and raced against him in single sculls. Twenty years earlier Burk had been a world-class sculler, and was still so fit and fast that Parker cannot recall ever beating his mentor in a practice.

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