When she was nearly eight years old, Joanne Wright wrote her first official poem. She called it “Sacred Heart of Jesus.” She didn’t really like what she had written, but her mother insisted that Joanne show the poem to her teacher at St. Matthew’s Catholic School in Conshohocken, just outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania:
Sacred heart of Jesus
I place my trust in Thee
This is the aspiration
Thou has taught to me
I try to say it often
In prayer and work and play
Sacred heart of Jesus
Teach me how to pray.
To Joanne’s complete surprise, her poem won a writing contest at her Catholic school. Joanne received a $25 prize. But the poem’s true reward was realized over a lifetime. With “Sacred Heart of Jesus,” Joanne launched a lifelong passion for putting words on a page.
Since her auspicious author’s debut in 1947, Joanne Wright Iverson has continued to write. Throughout her life, she has filled countless journals, notebooks and diaries with her beautiful, cursive handwriting, composing entries that reflect what is happening both in her life and the world around her. The words on her pages range from lyrical poetry and cryptic musings about the mundane routines of work to joyful travel narratives and family histories interspersed with deeply personal stories of love and heartache. In the 1960s, she literally wrote volumes about her efforts to promote women’s rowing as an Olympic sport, a collection of writing that she and writer/editor Margaret O. Kirk turned into a book, An Obsession with Rings: How Rowing Became an Olympic Sport for Women in the United States.
Joanne is widely recognized for her distinguished rowing career and her efforts to advance the sport for women. An avid and accomplished rower since the moment she first sat in a Quad on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia in 1959, Joanne was one of three founders of the National Women’s Rowing Association in 1963, a pivotal organization for women’s rowing that was admitted to the National Association of Amateur Oarsmen in 1964. Appointed in 1968 to be the first women’s rowing coach at the University of Pennsylvania, Joanne’s dream and her sustained efforts to see women rowers admitted to the Olympic Games came true in 1976 in Montreal, where Joanne served as manager of the women’s team that won silver and bronze medals. Still an active member and vice president of Vesper Rowing Club on Philadelphia’s famed Boathouse Row, Joanne was inducted into the Women’s Rowing Hall of Fame in 2007; the National Rowing Foundation’s Hall of Fame in 2016; and the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame in 2018.
Joanne relished every moment of her induction into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame, which took place on a chilly Thursday evening in early November at the SugarHouse Event Center. On the podium that night were 15 individuals representing outstanding achievements in nine different sports, ranging from basketball to boxing, from rowing to reporting. Ironically, there were two Iverson athletic champions: Joanne Wright Iverson and basketball great Allen Iverson, and they were greatly amused while posing together for a picture. During the dinner and presentations, Joanne sat between Reggie Leach, an All-Star hockey player for the Flyers, and Mel Greenberg, a long-time Philadelphia Inquirer sports writer. And as she listened to each individual describe their sports achievements to a rapt audience of over 500 people, Joanne was deeply moved. “The atmosphere in the room was electric. Everything that the athletes could be, they were in that moment. I could not imagine a greater tribute. To have a room full of your peers, saying ‘This is the best you could be in your life, and we recognize it.’ That was the moment. That is what the Hall of Fame is all about – that instance, when you are recognized by your peers, beyond a doubt, that you are the best of the best.”
In addition to her rowing success, Joanne has had a remarkable and highly successful business career. She began her IT career as a mainframe systems programmer at Sperry UNIVAC (now Unisys Corporation) and next served as vice-president of Electronic Funds Transfer Operations at a major bank in Philadelphia. She then founded two successful businesses, Iverson Associates and Iverson Gaming. Formed in 1984, Iverson Associates developed customized computer software systems and provided associated support services; the company worked frequently with major computer vendors, assisting on mission-critical projects to develop software applications and provide support services such as network system design consultation and network topology planning. In 1996, Joanne founded Iverson Gaming Systems (IGS) to focus on information management solutions for the gaming industry. Recognized as the leader in onboard casino management systems software, the company’s core product, SLOTMaster Slot and Player Tracking System, is installed on over 100 cruise ships around the globe; the company’s patent-pending “VirtualATM” mobile app helped change the way casino operators and patrons think about payment solutions. Headquartered in Philadelphia, IGS operates globally and is dedicated to serving clients worldwide.
Joanne is a graduate of the Wharton Management Program of the University of Pennsylvania. She was awarded the AGEM 2013 “Proven Leader – Great Women in Gaming” Award and recently earned her 1st degree Black Belt in martial arts. In collaboration with Kirk, she published her second book in 2019, Real, True Things: A Collection from a Writer’s Life. In this book’s introduction, Kirk captured Joanne’s desire to write.
“I’ve always been taught all my life not to blow my own horn, so doing this book was a lot,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “But the thing is, I have done some really wonderful things in my life. I just want to write about it and the lessons I’ve learned. Everything I wrote, I think there’s a lesson in there. The question becomes, ‘How do you pass that along?’ And I have been asking myself, ‘Why do I want to share this?’ I now realize that all throughout life, you learn things. And the way I share the things I’ve learned is to put them in a little short story. That’s what I realized I would like to do. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I don’t have children to leave behind – so you leave your writing behind. I can’t leave this life without having passed along these things to other people. I want to share them with the world.”
Now, with her Blog posts in The Real Me, Joanne W. Iverson continues to do just that.