Mr. Howard Runyon (Photo: Mr. Michael Aldridge).
Howard Runyon, also known as “H” or the Spanish pronunciation, “Ah-Chay,” is a man who has experienced many lives.
He grew up near the coast of New Jersey, just south of New York City, which “you could see on a clear day from the highest point of his town.” He grew up with three siblings, a sister and two brothers who worked at Northwood for many years but retired a few years ago. A fond memory of his was playing in the saltwater river beside his home, sifting through the sand with nets for treasures and creatures.
For his last three years of high school, he attended Middlesex School, where he found his love and passion for rowing, much like his father. After high school, he attended Yale University, which he picked because it was “probably the most famous place that had admitted me.” He mainly focused on rowing in his first two years there, which altered his academic path. But after a bit of trouble in the rowing department, he left college for a year and a half, returned, and completed two more years before graduating.
While away from school, he spent much time thinking about what he wanted to do with his life. He explored outside on a bicycle journey and a snowshoe expedition in the White Mountains. Before he returned to university, he took classes at a small local college near his hometown to improve his grades. Then he decided he wanted to be a mountaineer, worked in a tent factory in Wahington, and climbed on weekends. He returned in the summers between his last two years of college with a degree in philosophy.
After undergraduate studies, he moved to New York to try to get a job in publishing or filmmaking. He got a publishing company job when he decided to apply to film school simultaneously and got into Colombia University’s filmmaking school. He completed courses in two years but took another two and a half years to complete his thesis.
After film school, he was hired by a friend to proofread McGraw Hill medical textbooks, which he did for a few years while also working on selling his film school thesis. People hired him to help develop their films, but no projects ever took off. He had done this for around seven years but decided to move with his then-girlfriend, now his wife, who wanted to attend business school in Chicago. While there, he lost his passion for filmmaking and regained his passion for cycling, which he once did at home. He raced bikes professionally and worked on screenplays to make some money. He decided to retire from racing when the risk of injury became a more significant threat. He didn’t want to give up sports entirely, so he was hired by a rowing club in the summer and was later hired by the University of Chicago to be their head coach for four years.
After their daughter was born, they moved to Spain to study flamenco music and guitar while his wife studied dance. They lived there for four years and moved back to the States, where Runyon was hired to work at Northwood beginning in 2005.
Runyon has a deep connection to the history of the crew at Northwood. Though he didn’t start the crew program, it was created sometime in the 1920s and operated until until 1955. In Runyon’s words, the program’s demise is “unbelievable.” One night in the winter of 1955, all the crew equipment disappeared and later appeared at Dartmouth because “somebody somewhere” decided it should go to them because of their building collapsing, ending rowing at Northwood for forty-five years. He has now been the crew team leader for almost eighteen years.
He describes his favorite moments at Northwood being when he first sees a student start to like and grasp what they are learning and when a rower begins to get the sport and learns to navigate the intricate boat. He also enjoys the residential aspect of getting to know students and teachers outside of the classroom and his interactions on campus.
In his free time, he still enjoys bicycle riding, rowing, running, and walking in the woods with his “peculiar” dog Aries (a new guinea singing dog), who he adopted from a Northwood alum.
