BY SHERRY CONOHAN
Staff Writer
WEST LONG BRANCH — An emotional Wendy Lansbach Boglioli, winner of gold and bronze medals in swimming at the Olympic Games of 1976 in Montreal, received Monmouth University’s distinguished alumni award at a convocation of students and faculty on Founders’ Day.
At the presentation in Pollak Theatre on Oct. 13, Marti S. Egger ’81, president of the Alumni Association and a university trustee, praised Boglioli as a fearless competitor who held numerous American swimming records, an inspirational speaker and coach, and an exemplary community leader.
“You have made contributions to the field of athletics and the greater society,” Egger said. “You have taught us that through hard work and dedication, dreams can come true.”
Boglioli told Egger in response that she had put “a lot of memories” in the citation she read, which looked back over her career as a young swimmer in Wisconsin, her days at Monmouth, her achievements at the Olympics, her job as a long-term care insurance specialist at GE Financial and her family.
“I’ve been very fortunate to have the medals that very few people do have,” she told the assemblage.
But for all the medals she won as a swimmer, she said choking up, receiving the school’s distinguished alumni award held a very special meaning.
“As I met with the athletes this morning, it hit me that the reason I came to Monmouth was not about swimming,” she said. “I had faith in a person — Dick Steadman.”
She was referring to Monmouth’s legendary swimming coach, who had recruited her.
“As soon as I arrived on campus,” she added, in August 1973, “I felt I fit in.”
Boglioli, who attended what was then Monmouth College from 1973 to 1976 and received an associate degree, said later in an interview that she came to the school without ever seeing it.
Born in Merrill, Wis., she grew up in the small town of Land O’Lakes, which she noted even today only has about 600 people, and graduated from Eagle River Union High School. She said Steadman, who had followed her swimming career as she competed in meets in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, would telephone and write letters to her talking up Monmouth.
“He loved Monmouth,” she recalled. “I think some of my greatest memories are those small meets that we had, getting on the bus and traveling to meets. Dick found a way to make all of that happen. We had a good swimming team that he built into a great swimming team.”
Boglioli said she loved the “flavor” of the school — as it was then and as it is today.
“I mean, look at it now,” she said as she strolled through the campus. “They kept it very small, even though it’s growing hugely.”
Boglioli spoke highly at the convocation and afterward of the great educational program and wonderful professors she had at Monmouth. She referred specifically during the interview to James Mack, who taught biology, and Lauren Woods, who taught theater.
“I mean, here’s a man — a TV personality, who’s done soap operas — who was teaching,” she said. “I had the opportunity to learn under him. These were just great things.
“Dr. [Richard J.] Stonesifer was our president (1971-79) and he was very supportive of the athletic program,” she added.
Boglioli recalled the Saturday morning practices that Steadman had for the swimmers and how they would see members of the New York Knickerbockers practicing while there.
“You would see Earl the Pearl. You saw Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley,” she said. “Over here you were exposed to a lot, which I thought was very unique for a small school. I loved it.”
Boglioli, who is married to Bernard F. Boglioli Jr., a 1976 graduate of Monmouth College, and has three children, now lives in Sammanish, Wash., outside Seattle, but gets back to West Long Branch every year or two to visit her husband’s brother, William J. Boglioli, and his family.
William Boglioli is a councilman in West Long Branch.
Now 49, Boglioli said she still swims for recreation and to stay fit at a pro club near her home, but after briefly engaging in masters’ meets she gave up competitive swimming. She laughed and quickly said, “no, no, no” when asked if she had any desire to swim the English
Channel as Steadman’s daughter, Nancy Steadman Martin, did this summer. She knew Martin in college.
“I have no desire to do that,” she said. “But that was great.”
Boglioli learned swimming from her mother, who was a competitive swimmer at the state and national level into her late teens and early 20s, and her father, who was not a competitive swimmer but had been in the Army and was a boxer. They were her coaches for 17 years.
“We swam in this little lake near our home, a mile away,” she said. “It was really cold. And then we swam in this little pool, which was 17 yards long.”
Boglioli said she never intended to try out for the Olympic team when she came to Monmouth, but with Steadman’s encouragement, she did. She brought home the gold medal in the 4×100 swimming freestyle relay, which the Americans won in a time of 3:44.82, defeating the renowned East German team, and won the bronze medal in the 100-meter butterfly with a time of 1:01.17.
She said while her times would still put her in the top 20 swimmers 30 years later, she’s amazed — and admiring — of the much faster times the swimmers are posting today.
“They’re just so good. The technology is so good,” she said, adding with a note of caution. “But it still takes great swimmers with great discipline.”
Although Boglioli no longer competes, she still enjoys the competitive atmosphere vicariously though her daughter, Taylor, 15, who’s a cyclist ranked in the top three nationally.
She said it’s fun to egg on her daughter in her races, but also hard.
“Because I’m like, ‘Why can’t you go faster?’ But I have to shut my mouth because they are the things my mother used to say,” she explained. “I go, ‘Wendy, stop.’ But it’s been fun.”
Boglioli also has an older daughter, Bonnie, who just graduated from the University of Washington as a Russian studies major, and a son, Bernie III, who’s a sophomore at a local community college. Bonnie is married, and Boglioli and her husband have a 4 1/2-year-old grandson.
“So it’s been great,” Boglioli said. “They make me feel old. But they make me feel young. It’s fun. It’s very fun.”
Boglioli shared the stage at Pollak Theatre with Paul S. Doherty Jr., ’67, the immediate past president of Monmouth University’s Board of Trustees, and L. Carl Brown, Garrett professor of foreign affairs emeritus at Princeton University, who received honorary degrees.
Brown, the convocation speaker, is an historian of the modern Near East and North Africa with a special emphasis on the Arab world. After laying out a synopsis of the history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East over the last century and a half, he said the irony of the United States suggesting democracy in that region today is that democracy preached by anybody else has a better chance of catching hold.
“Where does this lead us?” he asked rhetorically about the present situation in Iraq. “I am not talking about cut and run. … We do have to somehow establish a decent state structure and then get out just as soon as we can.”
That comment drew enthusiastic applause from those in the auditorium.
Boglioli told the students in the audience they were part of a great institution.
“But they know that,” she said in her closing remarks at the convocation. “And if they don’t know that now, they will.”