Aquatennial
Canoe Derby Was Test Of Stamina
Minneapolis Star Tribune –
July 21, 2001
The canoe race ended
in 1960, but it still lives on in the memories of the competitors.
Gene
Jensen remembers how it was. The 450-mile canoe race from Bemidji to
Minneapolis exhausted men so much that at night they slumped on their cot in
church basements, staring into nowhere.
It's what he calls the "1,000-yard
stare," and after racing eight to 10 hours a day on the Mississippi River,
“you were so damned tired, you hoped you didn’t die in your sleep,” he recalled
this week.
Jensen, of
Brooklyn Park, was one of the premier racers in the Paul Bunyan Aquatennial
Canoe Derby, an original crew in the annual festival. The event, which ended in
1960, was a world-class canoe marathon. It never paid much and its
winners accepted their relative obscurity, but they felt good knowing they had
finished what they started.
Fifty-three years after he first
won the race at age 19 - he's now 72 - Jensen still grips a canoe paddle
in such a way that you pity the paddle; his forearm veins seem to explode. But
"the wheels fell off," he said, and he now has trouble walking.
Arthritis plagues the man credited with canoe racing's cry of "Hut!'
He won the canoe race four times: in
1948, 1949 1950 and 1960. The end of the race each year marked the start of the
festival. Now the race is a memory, and the Aquatennial holds a leisurely 7-mile
canoe "adventure."
"We wish we had our big one
back," said racing organizer Kenn Ketter, also of Brooklyn Park, who wants
to restore the race as a charity event but without Aquatennial sponsorship.
Jensen, who has designed canoes for much of his life, said he isn't involved in
such discussions.
"That marathon stuff is tough
on you," he said. As a world-class canoe racer, “you live in
obscurity your whole life. You could be a 20-time winner and 
your neighbor wouldn’t know who you
were.”
Once
the winter ice thawed, Jensen trained four days a week for the Aquatennial and
other summer races.
Jensen said he
was lucky to find his Aquatennial partner - an old schoolmate - Tom Estes.
Before Estes, he said he "couldn't find friends dumb enough to run a
450-mile
canoe race.”
After finishing the Aquatennial
derby in 1960, French-Canadian Roger Goyette said that it was a dozen times
tougher than the la Classique Internationale de Canots in Quebec, which he said
was considered North America’s best long-distance race. La Classique lasts
three days, spanning 120 miles.
Jensen once races 17 hours one way
and 17 hours back in a Manitoba marathon. With only one day of rest in between,
that race was one of the few that was tougher than the Aquatennial, he said.
Another canoe racer, Alvin
Wisniak,
69, of Brooklyn Center, said that the $1,500 first-place prize for the grueling
race was good, but it wouldn’t be nothing for all that work.” In 1960, the only
time he raced the Aquatennial, his weight dropped to from 172 pounds to 150.
Wisniak remembers the camaraderie of
the Aquatennial racers. Once a racer told him that he felt sorry for anyone who
finished last. “They must have had to work harder,” the man told him. He also
remembers that the racers who were lumberjacks didn’t like racers paddling in
the wake of their canoes. They shoveled waster, and “I thought I was going to
drown,” he said.
Jensen said he believes the event
ended in 1960 because “it wasn’t getting enough national publicity to justify
it.”
Eventually, trophies end up “in the
trash can,” he said, but he competed to be like his canoe-racing heroes. He
once watched his friend, Irvin (Buzzy) Peterson, of Brooklyn Park, race with
appendicitis. Jensen said that Peterson was so tough, “I thought he would live
until 120.”
Thus, he said, he was shocked and
saddened when Peterson died in June at the early age of 77.
By Andrew Johnson
Star Tribune Staff Writer