Listen to the Zoom conversation, or read the transcript below.

March 9, 2022

Some editing was done for clarity

Nancy: Really good to see you again. Before we start, I want to put in a plug for the value of reunions. One of the reasons that I decided to interview you was that, as you recall, we connected the very end of our 40th reunion after most everyone had left. As we talked, we discovered that we had both been at the same dude ranch, the Triangle X, in Cody WY in the late 1960s. You were there in 1967, 1968, and 1969; I was there for just two weeks in 1969. It’s where I met my husband. It was really fun in the course of our reunion to make that connection and to learn about your boat building.

Warren: What I remember about that meeting was there were two people who were still cleaning up when everybody else had left—you and me—and then it turned out that we had been to the same ranch. I thought you had been recruited, as I had, as a young East Coast neophyte to go off to the West and learn how to ride and rope and go on pack trips and stuff like that. We did our secret Shoshone handshake—it was truly remarkable we were both there. The son of the ranch owner, the guy I worked for, remarked to me when I was out there that East Coast people do not know how to sweep and here we were, sweeping away, and I was using every technique he had taught me.

You’ve taught at the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport RI since 2003. Tell us just a little bit about this school and what you do as a senior instructor of the boat building and restoration program, which sounds very official.

Well, sometimes I am pretty sure the “senior” means that I'm ancient, but it also means that I teach the second year of a two-year boat building program here. They didn't want to call me managing instructor or first-year instructor or many of these things, so they came up with “senior” and I thought it looked official, so I stuck with it.

My program is a two-year program, but the first year some may never have seen a boat or done any woodworking, or they might have arrived on a boat from Washington State and done all kinds of woodworking. We have people who are just looking for an alternative to whatever they're doing, or career changers, or maybe they’ve decided they just have to make something. They have to have a high school diploma. In the first year they make a 12-foot Beetle Cat.

Since the school was started for restoration—it’s the International Yacht Restoration School—you have to have an old boat; then slowly but surely they will learn the techniques to build a boat, restore a boat, and then, in the end, a brand new Beetle Cat is launched in the spring. Well, they've done that for eons—making the Beetle Cat—so it's pretty fine-tuned that first year and it really does provide them with the basics of the whole program.

Then they come to me, and we usually do different boats every year. I think the shortest has been eight feet and the longest is 38 feet so it's a big range. The real difference in the second year is that through research and all kinds of sources of information we actually generate all our own information. They do use some patterns in the first year but in the second year we have to generate everything, the teams are bigger, people have to really get along. It's less ambitious than it used to be—the lengths have diminished to around 24 feet at most—but students learn that you really have to go for it to build a boat, so that's my job.

All I do is prod them and make sure that they know what they might want to be doing. It's a gift to me, really, because I get to build all kinds of things I never would have gotten a shot at in my own company and I’ve met really remarkable young people who had whole lives before they arrived here and then we're all thrust into this program together. It’s been a gift, I have to say.

You've told me that in the summer you teach in two weeks what you do in two years at the school, that you’re connected with some summer program too.

Yeah, Wooden Boat magazine has its own school—the Wooden Boat School—and in 1987 I helped my cousin teach a course up there. He's smarter than I am—he and his family sailed to Tasmania, and I was left holding the reins, so I continued to teach up there. Only during COVID did I miss a year since 1987. That’s truly an eclectic group that shows up there. and it really isn't the same program in two weeks that I teach here because nobody would ever come here! But yeah, it's very compressed. It's all the same language and theory and the food is fabulous so that's why I go.

You sent me an article that was just fascinating, even though I didn't understand much of it. It describes the process you did of recreating an older boat design. Can you give us a nutshell—the steps you had to go through because this client wanted to essentially duplicate this amazing boat from the past?

I’m pretty sure that’s the Alerion.

Yes.

Within the Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts area the name Herreshoff rises to the surface all the time. Nathanael Herreshoff was basically a design genius and his brother also had an incredible ability to run a company successfully. So you have a genius designer and his brother who can run the business and so the Herreshoff manufacturing company produced exquisite yachts from late 19th century up to 1945. Anyway, for that project we replicated Nathanael Herreshoff’s personal boat, this 1912 design Alerion, and there were a lot of hoops to jump through. We had to get permission from MIT because they hold the rights to the plans, and we did tons of research. Mystic Seaport has the original, and the original is always a great boon to any project. You can rush down there and check things and make sure you're doing them correctly. I had a fabulous owner and his wife: as a pair they were the perfect clients.

The ones who wanted you to build the boat?

Yes, and it was pretty funny because I had submitted three designs for them, but when the guy showed up my at shop he said, “I didn't know you existed”—of course I'm in a barn behind my house. Anyway, when he chose Alerion, which I had always dreamed of building, I basically called my wife and said, “Listen to this—can you believe he's gonna go for it!” I was absolutely ecstatic.

I have to admit it took three years to build. I did squeeze that article out of the process but it sort of set the course because having that in my pocket and coming here, it showed—and I’ve dragged my students through all these steps—where you find the information, whom do you speak with, and it sort of broke ground for me. I had already practiced the Herreshoff techniques with a smaller boat, but then that one came along and set the mark. I had my own shop for about 13 years I guess, which I found harrowing. I didn’t have that genius business brother, I just winged it—terrible!

Just a couple of nights ago my husband and I were at a gathering with a guy who had lived on the East Coast for a while. He was talking about the sailing and boating he’d done, and when he found out that I was from Massachusetts, he turned to me directly while mentioning Herreshoff, like I would recognize the name, and because of my talk with you last week I actually knew what he was talking about! It was very bizarre.

Well, like you said about Williams, you have to go far afield to get out of the cloud, or under the light anyway. It’s the same with Herreshoff: they’ll find you everywhere with that name, even in France.

Speaking of Williams, you mentioned when we were talking earlier that your English major has informed your teaching. Can you say a little bit about that?

Well, it might sound self-serving, but I mentioned to you that my wife Jackie was an English professor, and I would make outlandish statements, like “all of life is in literature,” and she would basically be able to cite every instance that would verify that. That's the difference between the romantic reading English literature and the pro.

And the Prof.

Yes. and the Prof. I find that you know these young people here and they might have had a bumpy go in school. or it just wasn't necessarily for them, and then they come here and make something and pretty much light up. I did OK in school and I went to Williams and I read all those books, but at the end of it, I just needed something concrete: I had to make something. So that's when I built the boat with my father, and he said it almost caused our divorce!

But anyway, you learn a lot about empathy reading literature, and I just think that I get an understanding of what some people are up against. It also provides a whole element of entertainment if you can sort of pull things out of books you've read and slide them into a discussion about cutting a rabbet in the stem of a yacht [a rabbet is a groove cut into the piece of wood—the stem—that forms the bow of the boat and receives the ends of the planks. Its shape is generated by drawing the boat out full scale, lofting]. It just provides another whole dimension. I think empathy provides us with perspective that I truly appreciate. I'm glad that I got the chance to read all those books and have those wizard professors and also it got me married to an English professor, so how could you go wrong?

You told me a little story about what Bob Bell had said to you.

It was a Williams event in Providence with Bob Bell—Paul Streicker [a Williams alum in Providence] organized it—and you got to have lunch with Bob afterward. He was part of Fort Hoosac, he was our professor or whatever, I don’t remember the title. He had sort of known me, and when he found out what I was doing, he said, “I kind of suspected you’d do something like that.” I don't know how he ever suspected such a thing but it's kind of cool, like a stamp of approval, so I'll go with that.

What made you decide you wanted to go to reunions? I don’t know how many reunions you’ve been to, but I’m curious about what made you decide do that.

Well, to backtrack a bit—my father was an ardent Williams guy. When I was a kid, he gave me a toy football with purple laces that was about less than five inches long. You wound it up and it played “Yard by Yard.” Basically, my initial academic career was to make sure I could get into that school. After I graduated, he asked me, “So what did you get out of it?” I said, “One thing I do know is I have some remarkable friends and I'm gonna have them for life.” He said, “You got it, you did OK,” which sort of was my father in a nutshell.

When I ended up going to Maine to learn how to build boats, once again we sort of had a discussion. I’ve gone to Williams and I'm going to build boats and he said, “Well, if you do this, all I ask is you do it 100%. Don’t just goof around and build a few boats and then wonder what you did. Go for it.” He never saw this place—my mother did—but it's one of those things I'd sure like to show him because this is 100%.

So the friends…it’s why I go to reunion. I just like to check in on people and we swept the floor together and I actually I found it fun. I didn't want to admit what I did [boat building] for a long, long time and now that “makers” are OK. I guess I'll go to another reunion. I really enjoyed going and seeing what people did and what they're up to. I think that's what's cool about Williams: because of its size, you really sort of know people you might not have met or hung around with when you were there, but you had this shared experience—it may have been torture but it was a shared experience. You can start your initial conversation as if you hadn't let up on the last one, which I find kind of reassuring.

That's great—thank you! I couldn't have said it better. That’s exactly why I go to reunions: it's not about revisiting the old times, it's about seeing what these people who were interesting back then are doing now, like you with the boat building. I think it's just absolutely fascinating and I'm really glad we had this opportunity to talk. I know others will enjoy watching this.

I guess we better show at the 50th, huh? Yeah, we better show our faces at the 50th! Thanks so much.