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Putting Her Oar In

Julie Holley ’87 Says Crew’s Lessons Linger
By Maryann Teale Snell ’86

Julie Holley ’87 looks pretty serious. But behind that near-scowl of concentration are a ready laugh and spirited confidence when she tells how she wound up at Mount Holyoke, and how she joined the crew team despite using a steel hook instead of a right hand.

Rewind to spring 1983, awards night at a high school in Queens, New York. Holley, on the brink of graduation, is getting several. Jean Sudrann ’39, an MHC English professor, is also being honored. She and department colleague Marjorie Kaufman are impressed with Holley and ask where she’s going to college. To SUNY Purchase, she replies, to study music. The professors tell her, “You need to come to Mount Holyoke.” After a year at Purchase, she transferred.

In browsing MHC’s course catalogue, Holley was taken with a photo of rowers on the water. Although a star swimmer and competitor in track-and-field events (she was on the winning U.S. team at the 1984 International Games for the Disabled), she had never rowed before. But she looked at that picture hard. “I said to myself: That’s what I want to do when I get to Mount Holyoke.”

Coach and Olympic rower Holly Metcalf ’81 remembers about 100 students showing up for tryouts that year. At the end of the informational meeting, a small group stayed to ask questions. Among them was Holley, who stood with one arm behind her back. As Metcalf waited for her question, Holley silently held up her hook. “I felt like I was supposed to be shocked,” Metcalf says. “But my first thought was that we should have her row starboard [she did] so she could do the feathering [a motion requiring fingers] with her hand, and tie her hook onto the end of the oar handle. From that moment, she was on the team.”

Holley, who was born without her right hand and lower arm, has worn a prosthesis since she was five. The day we meet, she’s wearing her rowing hook. “I’m missing from about here down,” she says, pointing halfway between her elbow and the hook. The rest of her forearm is in a lightweight carbon-fiber socket. She wears a harness across her upper back. Contracting those muscles engages a cable that runs to a two-piece stainless-steel hook that opens like pincers. Holley also has a machinist’s hook, which she wears most of the time; that one is heavier and has a self-closing mechanism, so things can’t slip out.

She’s never much considered the possible limitations of having no right hand. In fact, Holley suggests that the hook has given her an edge—whether fending off bullies, being unafraid to walk through rough neighborhoods, barbecuing (she’ll casually turn coals with her hook), or in her career as a journalist (during Q & A sessions, a hook garners more attention than a raised hand).

Her parents instilled in her “a fierce independence,” says Holley. “Being able to do things for myself, in spite of my physical difference, was extremely important.” But being on the crew team was different; it taught her that progress sometimes requires help from others. “That may seem like an easy lesson; but for me, it took a while to sink in,” Holley says. “Rowing is a physical manifestation of the truism ‘No man is an island,’” she says. “There are times in life when you must call upon others.”

And ten years ago, that’s just what she did. After graduation and journalism school, she started her own media company, Right Hook Productions, outside Boston, producing and hosting a television show about technology and commerce. But 1997 brought a trying personal transition—the end of her marriage—and Holley found herself reaching out to a woman she’d rowed with at Mount Holyoke.

“It was a dark time,” she recalls. Holley says she didn’t even know the teammate that well, and they hadn’t spoken since graduation. “But I sensed she had the wherewithal to help. She was in my boat at the Head of the Charles in 1986; I had relied upon her before, and I knew she would help me in any way she could. It was a profound step toward affirming the trust earned through rowing.”

For Holley, the transitions kept coming. Not long after she returned to New York, “the dot-com industry went belly up, and there went my business plan,” she says. Then came 9/11, “and my whole world view shifted. I started working for Wall Street Rising, a nonprofit founded to revitalize Lower Manhattan.”

Now based in Brooklyn, Holley has some projects of her own in the works, including reviving Right Hook Productions. She intends to create “an online archive of conversations with people in finance, law and government, medicine, and education about the impact of technology on those fields.” By spring she hopes to be podcasting on www. thetechview.com.

Another endeavor is to help disabled veterans, particularly those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, by “talking to them about being an amputee and dealing with that.” She hopes this will be a cooperative effort with the Department of Veterans Affairs. As with rowing, “it’s about a lot of things coming together. Sometimes you just have to settle in and do a power-twenty” (the number of strokes you row to get past a competitor). “When you get in a boat, you’ve got to trust the other people to row hard; you’re not the only one doing the work.”

Holley gets back to South Hadley every couple of years, including for the alumnae row this past September. She’s enthusiastic about raising funds for a new boathouse, to be constructed on six acres along the Connecticut River, just north of the longtime launch site at Brunelle’s Marina.
Holley thinks back to 1986, when she rowed in the varsity-eight at the Head of the Charles, a grueling race. She doesn’t recall how her boat did that day, but she still has a picture of it on her refrigerator. “I see that photograph every day,” she says. And, she adds, it’s a reminder that “rowing has been a great metaphor for my life.”

Maryann Teale Snell is a writer and editor in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Photo of Julie Holley during an alumnae row in fall 2007 by John Risley

LEARN MORE:

Rowing for People with Physical Challenges

The “adaptive” section of USRowing’s Web site has news for and about people who row despite physical challenges, and a list of adaptive rowing programs in the United States.

Creating Julie’s Oar

In anticipation of Julie Holley’s return to campus for the annual alumnae row, crew coach Jeanne Friedman asked Facilities Management to alter a spare oar to accommodate Holley’s prosthesis and keep her grip from slipping. Peter Cowley, who has worked in MHC’s carpenters shop for fifteen years, loves a challenge. He set his inventive mind in gear. Employing an assortment of materials (a pair of hand-crafted plastic disks, L-brackets, hose clamps, small screws, electrical tape) and “a lot of guesswork,” it took Cowley just a couple of hours to fashion the oar with two little collars spaced a few inches apart to keep the rower’s hook secure. Holley proclaimed it “Fabulous. The best oar I’ve ever had.” And Cowley says of her rowing: “I think that’s totally amazing. I’m proud of her.”—Maryann Teale Snell ’86