Wooden Boats

That first wooden boat show was more than a fortunate circumstance for Nat and Ross. It represented the future of this small industry, and the extraordinary influence of WoodenBoat magazine. Any initial success that Nat and Ross enjoyed building wooden boats on Martha’s Vineyard in the early 1980s must acknowledge to a considerable degree Jon Wilson and his magazine. Without that magazine there would have been no show focused exclusively on wooden boats, where Nat could display his talents to a concentrated gathering of wooden boat advocates and sell his second Canvasback. And just as the show brought together builders and sailors of wooden boats, the magazine likewise created an intellectual gathering among these people. Nat sold his third boat through an advertisement in its pages. Everyone who cared about wooden boats read the magazine with gratitude in the early days. Each current editor of the magazine can identify the first issue he laid hands on and recall the jolt of amazement and thanks he felt at its existence. WoodenBoat would ultimately set the standard for and become the arbiter of all matters related to wooden boats. It would pass along stories of yards and boats throughout the world; discuss issues of boat construction, concerning wood and tools and joints; and offer boat plans, boat advice, and technical problem solving. It would become the town crier of the wooden boat world, transforming what had been a largely unknown, disparate, and isolated collection of backwoods carpenters into an elite class of practitioners of a venerable and worthy craft. Because the boats in its pages were truly beautiful, the magazine had the power even to turn the wooden boat builder into an artist. Nat still says that one of the biggest effects of the magazine for him was that it legitimized and helped to explain what many of his contemporaries might otherwise have considered curious, eccentric work.

Jon at the time, 1974, was a boatbuilder in Pembroke, Maine, with a wife, a child, and a cabin-cum-boatshop where they all lived. They had lived in a teepee while Jon built their dwelling. It was rough going out in the woods, trying to live off the land and build boats, even for a healthy young couple moving into their late twenties. Jon felt isolated during the building of the three boats that were the extent of his solo building effort, but even more ominous than his own struggles was his growing realization that when he did venture near civilization, it was increasingly difficult for him to find people who cared about wooden boats. He was building boats, he realized, against the backdrop of an industry that was quickly becoming extinct.

And here the strangest thing happened: Jon Wilson thought he could do something about it. This would have seemed bizarrely out of character to anyone who’d known Jon growing up. Jon Wilson had been a misfit his whole life, a runt, the guy who didn’t fit in, who hated school, got into trouble, and dropped out of college before his freshman year was half over, and now he was a small-time boatbuilder, just twenty-eight years old, with a few small boats to his name and a cabin in the woods. His life story had never been one of “I can do this”; rather, it had been one of “I don’t think I can do that.” To this day Jon Wilson can’t explain why on earth he would think he could do anything at all along the lines of preserving an entire industry.

“I think it was more ignorance than anything,” he says now, “but I just didn’t have any doubt. Partly it was that it didn’t matter what the scale was. If I just did something, it would be a good thing. It didn’t have to be a raging success, just anything to help, a finger in the dike, anything to stem the tide. I could do that, and furthermore I would love to do that. That was the other part, that it would be really great to do. It would be a great thing to do. I would love to put my curiosity and my experience, such as it was, to stemming this tide.”

So he had a model for his newsletter, and he also had a voice to emulate—that of John Gardner, an assistant curator of small craft at the Mystic Seaport Museum, who also wrote for and helped to edit a magazine called National Fisherman. Gardner was a teacher, a public speaker, a historian, a boat designer and boatbuilder, a man greatly admired and beloved for his intelligence, his benevolence, and his advocacy of small wooden boats. That was what Jon Wilson loved most—the way Gardner advocated for small wooden vessels, boats that were accessible to the amateur builder. And Jon thought, The way he’s an advocate, I want to be an advocate.

Jon ran into a problem as soon as he tried to get material for his newsletter. Boatbuilders are not typically the most loquacious of people—they build boats, they don’t contribute to newsletters. They aren’t writers, and they don’t rely an awful lot on the written word. If Jon could have traveled the country visiting boatyards, he’d have been able to gather the information he wanted, but that wasn’t possible. And in the meantime, standing in the woods in Pembroke and shouting would have elicited a greater response than he was getting by means of the written word.

“I didn’t know how many pages of advertising I might need; I didn’t know that I would need advertising. I didn’t know how to do a financial analysis. I didn’t know how to do a business plan. The only thing I knew was that the publisher of National Fisherman told me that he thought maybe half its readers were interested in traditional boats as opposed to fishing. So that told me that maybe there were thirty thousand readers who were interested in traditional wooden boats, so maybe we could get ten thousand readers. Maybe. My wildest dreams were thirty thousand readers.”

To move in his mind from a newsletter to a magazine was an easy jump for Jon, because while he’d always maintained a respectful but adversarial relationship with books, he adored magazines. Read them all, learned from them, embraced them. If they’d used magazines in school instead of textbooks, Jon might have been a Rhodes Scholar instead of a flunk-out. It wasn’t the content so much as the vehicle itself that he seemed to understand and love. Here was a boatbuilder, after all, who subscribed to—and read—not only the Journal of the American Medical Association but also other national favorites such as Overdrive, a periodical for independent truckers, and the Draft Horse Journal.

Jon and his then-wife, Susie, sold their restored Alden ketch for eleven grand, borrowed $3,500 from friends, and published 13,000 copies of the first issue of The Wooden Boat in the fall of 1974. It was a collection of relatively crude photographs, a few articles, and a message to “fledgling boatbuilders with an impassioned determination to build fine wooden boats,” written by the editor: “There has been, until now, no contemporary journal published which addresses itself entirely to the areas of owning, building and designing wooden yachts and small boats. To the future of these young people, embarking on a career that will bring them not riches, but satisfaction, this magazine is dedicated.” Jon took those words, and boxes of issue number 1, to the Newport, Rhode Island, sailboat show that September.

Subscriptions grew steadily as Jon, Susie (then the mother of two boys), and a staff of four put out the magazine in a Maine cabin that for six months had no electricity or running water. A photograph of Jon from those days is familiar to most readers of the magazine. He is clearly in his late twenties. A dark beard fills out his narrow face. He’s seated on a log by a tree in a wool cap, a checked wool jacket, workboots—every bit the backwoods Down Easter. Behind him, attached to the tree, is a telephone box. He cradles the receiver to his ear, pencil in hand, notebook on knee, apparently in the middle of asking an eager reporterly question: he is the Boatbuilder-Journalist covering the industry from within the Maine woods. The image is now encased in glass beside the reception desk at the offices of WoodenBoat, part of the Jon Wilson iconography.

Among the chief qualities of wood, in addition to its ability to float, is its inclination to burn. In 1977, fire struck the old wooden house that WoodenBoat by then used for its offices (an unstable neighbor named Carlton eventually confessed to arson, Jon says). The editors had just finished pasting up issue 16. The building was almost completely destroyed—as were the boards for the forthcoming issue and all copies of back issues—but the photographs and manuscripts for number 16 were saved, and ultimately Wilson and company were able to reconstruct it.

Fire, according to those who have endured it, is a terrible and horrifying experience, particularly when you lose your own possessions, the work of your own hands. Part of your life burns in that fire—it’s that powerful and that emotional. But Jon was not devastated by the fire. Those people who asked whether he was going to continue bewildered him. Doubt didn’t flicker in his mind. They might just as well have asked him if he now intended to jump off a cliff. Indeed, he emerged from the fire like a tempered blade. Before the fire, the WoodenBoat venture had been serious, but it had retained in a way the feeling of being a lark. Who were they, anyway, to think they could put out an industry-changing journal? There was so little at risk that failure was not a big concern, and neither Jon nor his few employees knew what the magazine meant to its readers. Jon describes his own attitude as “Whatever.” The fire burned all that up, showed him exactly how important this business was, and it remains the watershed event in the history of the magazine. Its biggest revenue generator had been lost in the fire: the back issues. Jon had had no idea—this was an incredible fact, back issues. People who discovered The Wooden Boat’s fifth issue, or its tenth or fifteenth, were buying all the ones that had preceded it. People were saving this product that Jon had always thought of as being inherently disposable (Ginny Jones was among them; to this day she has in her library every single issue of WoodenBoat magazine, 147 of them by the time Elisa Lee’s backbone is set up).

After the fire—arguably the best thing that ever happened to the magazine—and Jon’s unthinking conviction that he would continue to publish, all manner of providential help seemed to flood in. Jon and his staff found temporary offices and began to rebuild, changing the design of the magazine, shortening its title, creating a logo. Joel White and a fellow Mainer, the writer and wooden boat advocate Maynard Bray, materialized to offer them a dwelling in Brooklin that might serve as their new quarters. And soon Jon hired a proper publisher so he could devote himself entirely to the editorial side and leave management and business to someone who knew about such matters. Within two years the magazine turned its first profit. Circulation was growing now by about 10,000 per year. By 1981 the company was able to purchase an extraordinary estate, with a huge brick house painted white, and a brick barn and boathouse. That same year Jon realized his dream of creating, under the umbrella of the company, a school to teach the building of wooden boats, soon to be followed by a summer sailing school. In 1984 the magazine’s circulation hit 100,000. It was only then that Jon Wilson believed his magazine was a success. Indeed, it had a life of its own.

Nat Benjamin had begun building James Taylor’s gaff sloop at about the time of the WoodenBoat fire; he finished it, and helped inaugurate the G&B yard with its launching, when the magazine was well on its way to financial success and industrywide prominence. Each year thereafter, G&B put out a new Benjamin-designed boat. As the fourth was being completed, John Evans, Nat’s old friend and crew from the crazy Sorcerer days, happened to visit the Vineyard and spotted at a hardware store a newspaper clipping about Nat Benjamin, whom he hadn’t heard from in a decade—Nat Benjamin, the article said, was a boatbuilder right here in Vineyard Haven. Evans, who had become successful in the New York newspaper business in the intervening years, got in touch with Nat and asked him to consider building him a boat. Nat picked up a stick and started drawing it in the sand right there on the G&B beach. A year later, Evans’s 23-foot gaff sloop, Swallows and Amazons Forever, was launched from the G&B rails. Then came Liberty, the 40-foot sloop, and after that Lana & Harley, at 44 feet, Nat’s first schooner, a design he named Joan Ellett, after his mother. (Nat may say he didn’t get along with her from the day he was born, but those youthful battles seem to have made Nat’s reconciliation with his mother, herself an artist—a painter and sculptor—all the more profound.)

WoodenBoat had created a collective voice in the industry, an influence that by 1984 appeared to be ubiquitous. It would showcase builders like Gannon & Benjamin and educate and inform people about wooden boats and wooden boat technology, both ancient and new; it would describe in words, drawings, and photographs these boats’ significance—their power and their beauty and the sense of them. It gave G&B and every other subject covered in the magazine an audience that eventually would become worldwide.

Nat’s success wasn’t entirely the result of WoodenBoat magazine, of course. His success, in large measure, resulted from the force of his personality, experience, and convictions. And perhaps from the fact that he was just plain blessed. He and Pam hadn’t sailed into Penobscot Bay and chosen to set up camp in Pembroke or some other rocky Maine wilderness. Nat sat down to build boats on Martha’s Vineyard, an island that was a haven not simply for run-of-the-mill celebrity in a celebrity-glutted culture, but rather for a refined sort of celebrity—writers, journalists, politicians, artists, a brand of intellectuals who were receptive to Nat’s own artistic intelligence. His boats didn’t live in a vacuum; they were on glorious display cruising Vineyard Sound, on view all summer long for some of the country’s wealthiest and best-known people. Walter Cronkite would come out to say a few words at a launching. Or David McCullough. Nat would chat easily with Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes about how not enough attention was paid to islands struck by hurricanes, or to those solitary sailors lost at sea, including a close friend of his. Ted Kennedy, who himself owns a wooden boat, Mya, remains a friend of the boatyard. Movie stars and pop singers wander through to have a look. In 1993 Hillary Clinton, introduced to Nat by a mutual friend (such are his friends), would ask him to take the First Family sailing during the family’s Vineyard vacation. Bill and Hillary had such a good time that they would call Nat the following summer to see if he was free to do it again. For Bill and Hill, of course he was. In turn they invited Nat and Pam to the White House.

Raised in an upper-middle-class family with roots extending back in American political history to Peter Stuyvesant and New Amsterdam, Nat apparently developed enough comfort and ease in that company to discourse easily in the privileged society of presidents and senators, celebrity journalists, pop music icons, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historians. He is furthermore articulate and convincing when he speaks about the importance of wooden boats and gaff rigs, an argument he makes with the supporting evidence of his own life from the age of nineteen.

Not only did Nat have the good fortune to find and stay on the perfect spot of earth for what he wanted to do, he also had the good luck to meet another man who had found the same thing and who shared his appreciation of the elemental appeal and fundamental sense of traditional wooden vessels. Ross Gannon would become the power-house worker, the diesel engine of the operation, with his ingenious mechanical mind and rugged spirit, and he would be happy to leave Nat to the celebrities and politicians, preferring to dwell inside the work.

And so they would form a team that seemed as unlikely as it was inevitable: Ross Gannon, a man from another century, building boats from another century; and Nat Benjamin, the designer-artist and salesman of the wooden boat, so savvy and charismatic that he didn’t just sell such boats, he sold the whole ideology of them, he sold a belief system, a way of life, a philosophy based on simplicity, wholesomeness, and self-reliance. At the same time, Nat maintained the outlaw persona that he was evidently born with, the renegade spirit that had refused all schooling and led him south to Texas and life as a cowboy, then to the Caribbean, and then to Malta, where he found his ship and his destiny in Tappan Zee, an old wooden boat that carried him across the ocean and became in many ways a metaphor for all that he would become, and a critical source of his understanding of and belief in the truth of the wooden boat.