Re: Part 1 of an article from Nautical Quarterly 21 (woops)
I have no idea how I ended up replying to the original message
thereby duplicating it. My son was on the computer at about this time
so maybe he did something by accident. Apologies if this clogged
anyone's email.
Steve Hansen
thereby duplicating it. My son was on the computer at about this time
so maybe he did something by accident. Apologies if this clogged
anyone's email.
Steve Hansen
I hope this is not too long for the list. This is brought to you via the
wonders of OCR from the pages of an old Nautical Quarterly I found while
skulking around the aisles of Powell's Books in Portland, OR.
If the group likes it, the remainder will follow in two or three more parts.
Best,
John Bell in Georgia
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------
Phillip C. Bolger
Boat Designer, Gloucester, Massachusetts
By Joseph Gribbens
Nautical Quarterly 21, Spring 1983
When you call Phil Bolger on the telephone, the voice that answers says
"Bolger." It used to ask a pointed "Yes?" It is a curt, Boston-accented
voice, and there is an intimation of "What do you want?" in the single word
it pronounces, a thing that makes the caller feel that he's interrupted
something. He has. What he's interrupted is a thought process that's been
going on for 50 years, with many such interruptions but with probably no
real disturbance of its flow or its complexity.
Phil Bolger is thinking about boats, an intellectual and technical exercise
whose ideal is a purity the designer seems to prize above all things-a
rightness, an exquisite equilibrium that extends not only to what he calls
"designs that are right of their kind," but to peripheral bits of
perfection: the way the lines go down on paper, the way the parts of his
recent small boats come neatly out of 4' x 8' sheets of plywood, the way the
designer spends his workday, the way he expresses himself in person and in
print.
Bolger is precise. He is also funny, self-deprecating, easy to challenge on
dogma, free with conversation when he's in the mood for it, and oddly
anti-precise in his libertarian tolerance of new and strange ideas.
Conversations with Bolger, when he gets rolling, skip sideways from yacht
design to politics, ancient history, the space program, sex, money, any
number of things. And they are full of quotes and footnotes from H.G. Wells,
Alexander the Great, Kipling, Mary Renault, W.C. Fields, any number of
people. Although he works in a field that he claims is "really not worth the
time of really able people," be gives it his time every workday and, one
suspects, pretty much every instant, awake or asleep with dreams of an
ultimate portable daysailer or some dead-simple outboard workboat. Bolger is
inspired by thoughts of boats that will be pure and perfect, but
unbothered-so he says-by boats that incorporate the "crude solutions" he
cheerfully admits in a lot of his own work. "Some boats are better than
others; but it's not important that they be better," he says in a
conversation about the uses to which various types are put.
He means this "any sort of boat will do" in the general sense that a boat
roughly suitable to its purpose can achieve its purpose, and in the social
sense that it's good for people to enjoy themselves on the water whatever
they're in, so long as they don't get drowned. But in a very thoughtful
article he wrote for this magazine's ninth issue, Bolger described L.
Francis Herreshoff's H-28 as "a deliberate mediocrity" in concept, but a
boat that "if built exactly as designed down to the last detail (and the
details are defined on sheet after sheet of large-scale drawings). . moves
from mediocrity to a universal prototype, original essence of small cruising
boat. . . It's a haunting and frustrating achievement. Generations of young
designers and boatbuilders have tinkered with it, trying to make it faster,
or roomier, or something. The result is always a mediocrity that looks
mediocre. In context, different means spoiled. There's a lot to be learned
from studying this design; but to apply the lessons you have to start over
with a blank sheet."
In several remarks in his latest book for International Marine, Bolger
illuminates his unique, austere approach to shaping boats. Burgundy, his
sharpie variation of the L.F.H. Rozinante, is able to be built by Brad Story
for less than a third of the cost of a Rozinante on the shop floor that
looks like a Stradivarius. "'There's a catch," writes Bolger. "Rozinante is
one of the all-time masterpieces of art. For visual satisfaction, three
Burgundys don't equal one Rozinante Notwithstanding Brad's Yankee outrage
(at her cost to build), I think the Rozinante is worth what she costs. But
for somebody who doesn't have the price of a Rubens original, there may be
some merit in a Playboy centerfold "-(i.e., Bolger's lovely Burgundy).
In discussing Wisp, a canoe-form 20' sloop built by a man who gave her the
best of materials and finish, and didn't mind building three trunks for a
pair of bilgeboards and an inboard rudder, Bolger notes: "This is a
goldplater, something I'm seldom immediately comfortable with.. I tend to go
off and try to produce something cheap and expendable that will do the same
job." And writing about the angled, shield-shaped transom of Fancy a lovely
15' gaff sloop of Muscongus Bay inspiration, Bolger discusses the
uselessness of such a stern and concludes: "I've often thought of offering a
reward for a good reason why pretty girls shouldn't chew gum. A legitimate
excuse for a stern of this kind would be welcome in the same way, as it
makes me uncomfortable to draw something degraded in its action by its
aesthetics."
There is a tension here between perfect but elite little boats like Francis
Herreshoff's masterpieces and the boats for everybody that Bolger has
designed with inspired inventiveness for decades. It is a creative tension
for the designer. Bolger has drawn his share of goldplaters, and some of
them boats that were exquisitely right, when he or the client gave the work
few restrictions of time, money or materials. But yacht design is a game for
Bolger, and limitations of time, money and materials are rules in the game.
It is a game he enjoys playing, and the goal is to achieve boats that are
beautiful, well-behaved, safe in a variety of mischances, and a pleasure to
be in. They should also be simple in structure and rig, undemanding in
maintenance, and easy on their personnel. These final qualities define
Bolger's version of the game. He has applied himself to bringing simplified
and frequently cheap boats closer to his own ideals of rightness for nearly
30 years, and more than a few of his 433 designs to date have come close. A
very few, in the designer's careful judgment, have been close to perfect.
But they are different boats-the title of one of Bolger's four books for
International Marine-and they are products of different mental processes
from those which produce designed-around-the-rule IOR boats, competent
copies of traditional Yankee workboats, or even never-before-seen multihulls
and performance powerboats.
Bolger's grandfather was an inventor, which may account for his grandson's
inventive fervor in terms of genes. Among other influences, it probably does
account for his freedom and freshness of vision. Thomas Patrick Bolger came
to Boston from Prince Edward Island, an eager immigrant who "was a plumber
who turned into an inventor," according to the designer. Grandfather Bolger
invented things to be made out of steel that had previously been made out of
wood, and his principal invention -"the one that made money"-was the steel
icebox. Others were a very efficient ash sifter for coal furnaces and a
plant box that irrigated itself. "He was an ingenious contriver," says his
grandson, choosing his words precisely, and he was a man who had a safe full
of granted patents when he died. Phil Bolger's father, William A., was
salesman and business agent for the family company that sold the steel
iceboxes "all over the place," in Latin America and Bermuda as well as in
the U.S.
"My mother's people were master fishermen and vessel owners on both sides,"
says the designer, "but not in my time." The Cunningham family of Cunningham
& Thompson of Gloucester owned the celebrated fishing schooners Arethusa and
Ingomar, among scores of others, both built early in this century by Tarr
and James in Essex, Massachusetts, from designs by Tom McManus.
William A. Bolger died suddenly in 1934, and it was a crisis for the family,
although Phil, then seven years old, doesn't recall hard times. His mother,
Ruth Cunningham Bolger-still a vigorous woman at 89 who keeps the house in
Gloucester that she helped design with her husband and a perhaps overwhelmed
architect, and still plants the flower garden with its hedge of lilacs-coped
and carried on through the Depression so that her younger son never noticed
much change. "She is a woman of strong character," says Bolger.
Phil's brother Bill, who he describes in contrast to himself as "a competent
type," took a hand in his upbringing, being a fatherly ten years older, and
gave the future yacht designer his first boat. "My brother thought it would
be interesting to build a boat out of Masonite. . . It didn't work out at
all well, so he gave it to me. He had made a skate sail, which I took, and
he taught me to make the hardware for the sail and the boat in my
grandfather's shop... It didn't sail very well, but I can say that I had a
boat with leeboards, an unstayed mast and a wishbone boom 45 years ago."
Phil Bolger's "first real boat"-although the Masonite contraption would seem
to be very real in terms of influence-was a 16' Chesapeake catboat designed
by Ralph Wiley and built by brother Bill, a legacy to the younger brother
when the older went off to war. "It was a very exciting boat to sail-big rig
and nose-heavy," Bolger recalls. It was a boat that Bolger sailed until he
followed his brother into the Army. Phil Bolger is of that generation that
had its adolescence during World War II, and it is the generation that
produced the Hell's Angels and now-forgotten bouts of "chicken" on the
highways as games of courage to counter elder brethren who had experienced
The War. Bolger went to Bowdoin to study History, but he was soon seduced by
soldiering. "I called up a friend to see what he was going to do," Bolger
remembers of that first summer after a year of college. "He said he was
going into the Army, and I made a snap decision to go with ... . We were
determined to be good soldiers-infantry soldiers-to do it right." Bolger and
his friend were warned by the sergeant in charge of the exams that if they
didn't score well they would end up up the infantry, so they "tried to
figure out the wrong answers."
wonders of OCR from the pages of an old Nautical Quarterly I found while
skulking around the aisles of Powell's Books in Portland, OR.
If the group likes it, the remainder will follow in two or three more parts.
Best,
John Bell in Georgia
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------
Phillip C. Bolger
Boat Designer, Gloucester, Massachusetts
By Joseph Gribbens
Nautical Quarterly 21, Spring 1983
When you call Phil Bolger on the telephone, the voice that answers says
"Bolger." It used to ask a pointed "Yes?" It is a curt, Boston-accented
voice, and there is an intimation of "What do you want?" in the single word
it pronounces, a thing that makes the caller feel that he's interrupted
something. He has. What he's interrupted is a thought process that's been
going on for 50 years, with many such interruptions but with probably no
real disturbance of its flow or its complexity.
Phil Bolger is thinking about boats, an intellectual and technical exercise
whose ideal is a purity the designer seems to prize above all things-a
rightness, an exquisite equilibrium that extends not only to what he calls
"designs that are right of their kind," but to peripheral bits of
perfection: the way the lines go down on paper, the way the parts of his
recent small boats come neatly out of 4' x 8' sheets of plywood, the way the
designer spends his workday, the way he expresses himself in person and in
print.
Bolger is precise. He is also funny, self-deprecating, easy to challenge on
dogma, free with conversation when he's in the mood for it, and oddly
anti-precise in his libertarian tolerance of new and strange ideas.
Conversations with Bolger, when he gets rolling, skip sideways from yacht
design to politics, ancient history, the space program, sex, money, any
number of things. And they are full of quotes and footnotes from H.G. Wells,
Alexander the Great, Kipling, Mary Renault, W.C. Fields, any number of
people. Although he works in a field that he claims is "really not worth the
time of really able people," be gives it his time every workday and, one
suspects, pretty much every instant, awake or asleep with dreams of an
ultimate portable daysailer or some dead-simple outboard workboat. Bolger is
inspired by thoughts of boats that will be pure and perfect, but
unbothered-so he says-by boats that incorporate the "crude solutions" he
cheerfully admits in a lot of his own work. "Some boats are better than
others; but it's not important that they be better," he says in a
conversation about the uses to which various types are put.
He means this "any sort of boat will do" in the general sense that a boat
roughly suitable to its purpose can achieve its purpose, and in the social
sense that it's good for people to enjoy themselves on the water whatever
they're in, so long as they don't get drowned. But in a very thoughtful
article he wrote for this magazine's ninth issue, Bolger described L.
Francis Herreshoff's H-28 as "a deliberate mediocrity" in concept, but a
boat that "if built exactly as designed down to the last detail (and the
details are defined on sheet after sheet of large-scale drawings). . moves
from mediocrity to a universal prototype, original essence of small cruising
boat. . . It's a haunting and frustrating achievement. Generations of young
designers and boatbuilders have tinkered with it, trying to make it faster,
or roomier, or something. The result is always a mediocrity that looks
mediocre. In context, different means spoiled. There's a lot to be learned
from studying this design; but to apply the lessons you have to start over
with a blank sheet."
In several remarks in his latest book for International Marine, Bolger
illuminates his unique, austere approach to shaping boats. Burgundy, his
sharpie variation of the L.F.H. Rozinante, is able to be built by Brad Story
for less than a third of the cost of a Rozinante on the shop floor that
looks like a Stradivarius. "'There's a catch," writes Bolger. "Rozinante is
one of the all-time masterpieces of art. For visual satisfaction, three
Burgundys don't equal one Rozinante Notwithstanding Brad's Yankee outrage
(at her cost to build), I think the Rozinante is worth what she costs. But
for somebody who doesn't have the price of a Rubens original, there may be
some merit in a Playboy centerfold "-(i.e., Bolger's lovely Burgundy).
In discussing Wisp, a canoe-form 20' sloop built by a man who gave her the
best of materials and finish, and didn't mind building three trunks for a
pair of bilgeboards and an inboard rudder, Bolger notes: "This is a
goldplater, something I'm seldom immediately comfortable with.. I tend to go
off and try to produce something cheap and expendable that will do the same
job." And writing about the angled, shield-shaped transom of Fancy a lovely
15' gaff sloop of Muscongus Bay inspiration, Bolger discusses the
uselessness of such a stern and concludes: "I've often thought of offering a
reward for a good reason why pretty girls shouldn't chew gum. A legitimate
excuse for a stern of this kind would be welcome in the same way, as it
makes me uncomfortable to draw something degraded in its action by its
aesthetics."
There is a tension here between perfect but elite little boats like Francis
Herreshoff's masterpieces and the boats for everybody that Bolger has
designed with inspired inventiveness for decades. It is a creative tension
for the designer. Bolger has drawn his share of goldplaters, and some of
them boats that were exquisitely right, when he or the client gave the work
few restrictions of time, money or materials. But yacht design is a game for
Bolger, and limitations of time, money and materials are rules in the game.
It is a game he enjoys playing, and the goal is to achieve boats that are
beautiful, well-behaved, safe in a variety of mischances, and a pleasure to
be in. They should also be simple in structure and rig, undemanding in
maintenance, and easy on their personnel. These final qualities define
Bolger's version of the game. He has applied himself to bringing simplified
and frequently cheap boats closer to his own ideals of rightness for nearly
30 years, and more than a few of his 433 designs to date have come close. A
very few, in the designer's careful judgment, have been close to perfect.
But they are different boats-the title of one of Bolger's four books for
International Marine-and they are products of different mental processes
from those which produce designed-around-the-rule IOR boats, competent
copies of traditional Yankee workboats, or even never-before-seen multihulls
and performance powerboats.
Bolger's grandfather was an inventor, which may account for his grandson's
inventive fervor in terms of genes. Among other influences, it probably does
account for his freedom and freshness of vision. Thomas Patrick Bolger came
to Boston from Prince Edward Island, an eager immigrant who "was a plumber
who turned into an inventor," according to the designer. Grandfather Bolger
invented things to be made out of steel that had previously been made out of
wood, and his principal invention -"the one that made money"-was the steel
icebox. Others were a very efficient ash sifter for coal furnaces and a
plant box that irrigated itself. "He was an ingenious contriver," says his
grandson, choosing his words precisely, and he was a man who had a safe full
of granted patents when he died. Phil Bolger's father, William A., was
salesman and business agent for the family company that sold the steel
iceboxes "all over the place," in Latin America and Bermuda as well as in
the U.S.
"My mother's people were master fishermen and vessel owners on both sides,"
says the designer, "but not in my time." The Cunningham family of Cunningham
& Thompson of Gloucester owned the celebrated fishing schooners Arethusa and
Ingomar, among scores of others, both built early in this century by Tarr
and James in Essex, Massachusetts, from designs by Tom McManus.
William A. Bolger died suddenly in 1934, and it was a crisis for the family,
although Phil, then seven years old, doesn't recall hard times. His mother,
Ruth Cunningham Bolger-still a vigorous woman at 89 who keeps the house in
Gloucester that she helped design with her husband and a perhaps overwhelmed
architect, and still plants the flower garden with its hedge of lilacs-coped
and carried on through the Depression so that her younger son never noticed
much change. "She is a woman of strong character," says Bolger.
Phil's brother Bill, who he describes in contrast to himself as "a competent
type," took a hand in his upbringing, being a fatherly ten years older, and
gave the future yacht designer his first boat. "My brother thought it would
be interesting to build a boat out of Masonite. . . It didn't work out at
all well, so he gave it to me. He had made a skate sail, which I took, and
he taught me to make the hardware for the sail and the boat in my
grandfather's shop... It didn't sail very well, but I can say that I had a
boat with leeboards, an unstayed mast and a wishbone boom 45 years ago."
Phil Bolger's "first real boat"-although the Masonite contraption would seem
to be very real in terms of influence-was a 16' Chesapeake catboat designed
by Ralph Wiley and built by brother Bill, a legacy to the younger brother
when the older went off to war. "It was a very exciting boat to sail-big rig
and nose-heavy," Bolger recalls. It was a boat that Bolger sailed until he
followed his brother into the Army. Phil Bolger is of that generation that
had its adolescence during World War II, and it is the generation that
produced the Hell's Angels and now-forgotten bouts of "chicken" on the
highways as games of courage to counter elder brethren who had experienced
The War. Bolger went to Bowdoin to study History, but he was soon seduced by
soldiering. "I called up a friend to see what he was going to do," Bolger
remembers of that first summer after a year of college. "He said he was
going into the Army, and I made a snap decision to go with ... . We were
determined to be good soldiers-infantry soldiers-to do it right." Bolger and
his friend were warned by the sergeant in charge of the exams that if they
didn't score well they would end up up the infantry, so they "tried to
figure out the wrong answers."
Steve Hansen
DiverseArts/the Bell Jar
http://www.tiac.net/users/shansen/belljar
Vacuum technology for the educator and hobbyist
DiverseArts/the Bell Jar
http://www.tiac.net/users/shansen/belljar
Vacuum technology for the educator and hobbyist
----- Original Message -----
From: John Bell <jmbell@...>
To: <bolger@egroups.com>
Sent: Friday, November 24, 2000 8:31 PM
Subject: [bolger] Part 1 of an article from Nautical Quarterly 21
> I hope this is not too long for the list. This is brought to you via the
> wonders of OCR from the pages of an old Nautical Quarterly I found while
> skulking around the aisles of Powell's Books in Portland, OR.
> If the group likes it, the remainder will follow in two or three more
parts.
>
> Best,
>
> John Bell in Georgia
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
> ------------------------------------------------
>
> Phillip C. Bolger
> Boat Designer, Gloucester, Massachusetts
> By Joseph Gribbens
> Nautical Quarterly 21, Spring 1983
>
> When you call Phil Bolger on the telephone, the voice that answers says
> "Bolger." It used to ask a pointed "Yes?" It is a curt, Boston-accented
> voice, and there is an intimation of "What do you want?" in the single
word
> it pronounces, a thing that makes the caller feel that he's interrupted
> something. He has. What he's interrupted is a thought process that's been
> going on for 50 years, with many such interruptions but with probably no
> real disturbance of its flow or its complexity.
>
> Phil Bolger is thinking about boats, an intellectual and technical
exercise
> whose ideal is a purity the designer seems to prize above all things-a
> rightness, an exquisite equilibrium that extends not only to what he calls
> "designs that are right of their kind," but to peripheral bits of
> perfection: the way the lines go down on paper, the way the parts of his
> recent small boats come neatly out of 4' x 8' sheets of plywood, the way
the
> designer spends his workday, the way he expresses himself in person and in
> print.
>
> Bolger is precise. He is also funny, self-deprecating, easy to challenge
on
> dogma, free with conversation when he's in the mood for it, and oddly
> anti-precise in his libertarian tolerance of new and strange ideas.
> Conversations with Bolger, when he gets rolling, skip sideways from yacht
> design to politics, ancient history, the space program, sex, money, any
> number of things. And they are full of quotes and footnotes from H.G.
Wells,
> Alexander the Great, Kipling, Mary Renault, W.C. Fields, any number of
> people. Although he works in a field that he claims is "really not worth
the
> time of really able people," be gives it his time every workday and, one
> suspects, pretty much every instant, awake or asleep with dreams of an
> ultimate portable daysailer or some dead-simple outboard workboat. Bolger
is
> inspired by thoughts of boats that will be pure and perfect, but
> unbothered-so he says-by boats that incorporate the "crude solutions" he
> cheerfully admits in a lot of his own work. "Some boats are better than
> others; but it's not important that they be better," he says in a
> conversation about the uses to which various types are put.
>
> He means this "any sort of boat will do" in the general sense that a boat
> roughly suitable to its purpose can achieve its purpose, and in the social
> sense that it's good for people to enjoy themselves on the water whatever
> they're in, so long as they don't get drowned. But in a very thoughtful
> article he wrote for this magazine's ninth issue, Bolger described L.
> Francis Herreshoff's H-28 as "a deliberate mediocrity" in concept, but a
> boat that "if built exactly as designed down to the last detail (and the
> details are defined on sheet after sheet of large-scale drawings). . moves
> from mediocrity to a universal prototype, original essence of small
cruising
> boat. . . It's a haunting and frustrating achievement. Generations of
young
> designers and boatbuilders have tinkered with it, trying to make it
faster,
> or roomier, or something. The result is always a mediocrity that looks
> mediocre. In context, different means spoiled. There's a lot to be learned
> from studying this design; but to apply the lessons you have to start over
> with a blank sheet."
>
> In several remarks in his latest book for International Marine, Bolger
> illuminates his unique, austere approach to shaping boats. Burgundy, his
> sharpie variation of the L.F.H. Rozinante, is able to be built by Brad
Story
> for less than a third of the cost of a Rozinante on the shop floor that
> looks like a Stradivarius. "'There's a catch," writes Bolger. "Rozinante
is
> one of the all-time masterpieces of art. For visual satisfaction, three
> Burgundys don't equal one Rozinante Notwithstanding Brad's Yankee outrage
> (at her cost to build), I think the Rozinante is worth what she costs. But
> for somebody who doesn't have the price of a Rubens original, there may be
> some merit in a Playboy centerfold "-(i.e., Bolger's lovely Burgundy).
>
> In discussing Wisp, a canoe-form 20' sloop built by a man who gave her the
> best of materials and finish, and didn't mind building three trunks for a
> pair of bilgeboards and an inboard rudder, Bolger notes: "This is a
> goldplater, something I'm seldom immediately comfortable with.. I tend to
go
> off and try to produce something cheap and expendable that will do the
same
> job." And writing about the angled, shield-shaped transom of Fancy a
lovely
> 15' gaff sloop of Muscongus Bay inspiration, Bolger discusses the
> uselessness of such a stern and concludes: "I've often thought of offering
a
> reward for a good reason why pretty girls shouldn't chew gum. A legitimate
> excuse for a stern of this kind would be welcome in the same way, as it
> makes me uncomfortable to draw something degraded in its action by its
> aesthetics."
>
> There is a tension here between perfect but elite little boats like
Francis
> Herreshoff's masterpieces and the boats for everybody that Bolger has
> designed with inspired inventiveness for decades. It is a creative tension
> for the designer. Bolger has drawn his share of goldplaters, and some of
> them boats that were exquisitely right, when he or the client gave the
work
> few restrictions of time, money or materials. But yacht design is a game
for
> Bolger, and limitations of time, money and materials are rules in the
game.
> It is a game he enjoys playing, and the goal is to achieve boats that are
> beautiful, well-behaved, safe in a variety of mischances, and a pleasure
to
> be in. They should also be simple in structure and rig, undemanding in
> maintenance, and easy on their personnel. These final qualities define
> Bolger's version of the game. He has applied himself to bringing
simplified
> and frequently cheap boats closer to his own ideals of rightness for
nearly
> 30 years, and more than a few of his 433 designs to date have come close.
A
> very few, in the designer's careful judgment, have been close to perfect.
> But they are different boats-the title of one of Bolger's four books for
> International Marine-and they are products of different mental processes
> from those which produce designed-around-the-rule IOR boats, competent
> copies of traditional Yankee workboats, or even never-before-seen
multihulls
> and performance powerboats.
>
> Bolger's grandfather was an inventor, which may account for his grandson's
> inventive fervor in terms of genes. Among other influences, it probably
does
> account for his freedom and freshness of vision. Thomas Patrick Bolger
came
> to Boston from Prince Edward Island, an eager immigrant who "was a plumber
> who turned into an inventor," according to the designer. Grandfather
Bolger
> invented things to be made out of steel that had previously been made out
of
> wood, and his principal invention -"the one that made money"-was the steel
> icebox. Others were a very efficient ash sifter for coal furnaces and a
> plant box that irrigated itself. "He was an ingenious contriver," says his
> grandson, choosing his words precisely, and he was a man who had a safe
full
> of granted patents when he died. Phil Bolger's father, William A., was
> salesman and business agent for the family company that sold the steel
> iceboxes "all over the place," in Latin America and Bermuda as well as in
> the U.S.
>
> "My mother's people were master fishermen and vessel owners on both
sides,"
> says the designer, "but not in my time." The Cunningham family of
Cunningham
> & Thompson of Gloucester owned the celebrated fishing schooners Arethusa
and
> Ingomar, among scores of others, both built early in this century by Tarr
> and James in Essex, Massachusetts, from designs by Tom McManus.
>
> William A. Bolger died suddenly in 1934, and it was a crisis for the
family,
> although Phil, then seven years old, doesn't recall hard times. His
mother,
> Ruth Cunningham Bolger-still a vigorous woman at 89 who keeps the house in
> Gloucester that she helped design with her husband and a perhaps
overwhelmed
> architect, and still plants the flower garden with its hedge of
lilacs-coped
> and carried on through the Depression so that her younger son never
noticed
> much change. "She is a woman of strong character," says Bolger.
>
> Phil's brother Bill, who he describes in contrast to himself as "a
competent
> type," took a hand in his upbringing, being a fatherly ten years older,
and
> gave the future yacht designer his first boat. "My brother thought it
would
> be interesting to build a boat out of Masonite. . . It didn't work out at
> all well, so he gave it to me. He had made a skate sail, which I took, and
> he taught me to make the hardware for the sail and the boat in my
> grandfather's shop... It didn't sail very well, but I can say that I had a
> boat with leeboards, an unstayed mast and a wishbone boom 45 years ago."
>
> Phil Bolger's "first real boat"-although the Masonite contraption would
seem
> to be very real in terms of influence-was a 16' Chesapeake catboat
designed
> by Ralph Wiley and built by brother Bill, a legacy to the younger brother
> when the older went off to war. "It was a very exciting boat to sail-big
rig
> and nose-heavy," Bolger recalls. It was a boat that Bolger sailed until he
> followed his brother into the Army. Phil Bolger is of that generation that
> had its adolescence during World War II, and it is the generation that
> produced the Hell's Angels and now-forgotten bouts of "chicken" on the
> highways as games of courage to counter elder brethren who had experienced
> The War. Bolger went to Bowdoin to study History, but he was soon seduced
by
> soldiering. "I called up a friend to see what he was going to do," Bolger
> remembers of that first summer after a year of college. "He said he was
> going into the Army, and I made a snap decision to go with ... . We were
> determined to be good soldiers-infantry soldiers-to do it right." Bolger
and
> his friend were warned by the sergeant in charge of the exams that if they
> didn't score well they would end up up the infantry, so they "tried to
> figure out the wrong answers."
>
>
>
>
> Bolger rules!!!
> - no cursing, flaming, trolling, or spamming
> - no flogging dead horses
> - add something: take "thanks!" and "ditto!" posts off-list.
> - stay on topic and punctuate
> - add your comments at the TOP and SIGN your posts
>
>
>