Part 2 of an article from Nautical Quarterly 21
More about PCB from NQ #21.
Part II
They didn't succeed. Bolger went to the combat engineers and his friend went
to field artillery. Bolger was in the 1st Cay, in the Army of Occupation in
Japan for a year, and he was, in his own judgment, "extraordinarily
incompetent," although a crack shot on the rifle range.
"When I got out I went back to college on the G.I. Bill and wasted three
more years studying History," he says. He graduated cum laude from Bowdoin,
and he took with him not only laurels but a distaste for what he indicts as
"an academic establishment that is wrecking American civilization." Bolger
describes himself as "a card-carrying Libertarian," and he feels that
students who learn on their own, and get good at something, should have the
same access to professions as students who have gone through the motions of
acquiring an academic ticket. Bolger soon sought a ticket in yacht design, a
thing that, true to his principles, seems to be granted on performance
rather than school credentials. When Bolger was back at Bowdoin, Lindsay
Lord published The Naval Architecture Planing Hulls, and Bolger wrote him a
letter that questioned some detail in the book. When he graduated, he was
invited up to Falmouth Foreside, Maine, to work as a draftsman. Lindsay Lord
was designing "very striking-spectacular-houses then," Bolger remembers. But
it was a good apprenticeship in boat design. "Doc is certainly a very
brilliant man," says Bolger of this versatile designer whose powerboats were
very adventurous in the 1940s and 1950s. "No praise is too great for his
generosity to me."
Bolger worked for Lindsay Lord for less than a year before Lord recommended
him to John Hacker in Detroit, a fast-boat wizard who was busy with
contracts for the U.S. Air Force. "It was, for me, a gathering of
confidence," Bolger says of his months with Lindsay Lord, "and that was one
of Doc's talents." With Hacker, Bolger needed all the confidence he could
get. The company that had contracted the rescue boat for the Air Force-the
Huron-Eddy Corp. -was what Bolger describes as "a menagerie of boat
designers." The boat was the largest hull that Hacker had ever designed, a
90-footer, and it had three Packard engines with vee drives and with the
props under the engines. Hacker had designed raceboats like this, and the
project should have been a piece of cake, but the old man seemed to be much
too responsible to the Air Force. "Jim Eddy, who was in charge of the
weights, would come in and tear his hair over the extra structure that
Hacker kept putting into it," Bolger remembers.
Bolger remembers a lot more illustrative things from his months with Lindsay
Lord and John Hacker, and from part-time work for Francis Herreshoff as a
draftsman when he came back to Gloucester from Detroit in 1952, but the most
significant things he took from these short apprenticeships may have been
attitudes rather than lessons in structure or mathematics. Lord, Hacker and
Herreshoff have all been described as geniuses, and all three were
independent men with inventive turns of mind, eccentricities, and an
indefinable ability to work through a complex of requirements and
possibilities to lines on paper that represented more than a sequence of
problems solved.
It would have been a stroke of luck for any student of yacht design to have
worked with one of these men; that Bolger worked with all three is
extraordinary. And it seems to have been luck-"I went after them," he says,
"but it was luck that they held still for it." Yet Bolger claims his
brother, Bill, and boatbuilder Nicholas Montgomery as his real mentors. "My
brother brought me up to boat design, and taught me to be critical," he
says. Nicholas Montgomery, whose boatyard in Gloucester is now run by his
son and grandson, with Phil Bolger as in-house designer, was "a thinker and
an experimenter," Bolger says. Montgomery was an old school
designer/boatbuilder who worked with carved models, and Phil Bolger haunted
his yard as a boy. "I used to sit at his feet, and he would lecture me on
boat design," the designer says, smiling through his beard at the memory.
Bolger sent a design for a clean-lined 32' sportfisherman to Yachting in the
fall of 1951, and it was published in the January, 1952, issue. This first
published design elicited "a satisfying amount of correspondence- probably
three letters," and it caused Bolger to set up on his own in the house in
Gloucester with stock designs for "mostly powerboats, with a few rowboats."
None of these early designs showed obvious influence from Lord, Hacker or
Herreshoff. The powerboats were lean and angular; the rowing boats-among
them the original of the Gloucester Gull rowing dory-were plywood versions
of dories and dory skiffs. They were original conceptions, and they were
typically simplified in line and structure.
In the middle to late 'fifties, Bolger worked up some production boats, two
of which began to make his reputation and one of which tore it down. Bolger
freely admits mistakes and disappointments in the boats he designs, and he
does it in print. Mistakes are nature's way of telling you you're still
learning. He designed the first Striker sportfisherman, and he learned some
things about steel construction from the builder. The first Striker was a
24-footer, and Bolger, like Hacker with the Air Force boat, designed a
complicated frame structure to be covered with 14-gauge steel. The
Nassau-Suffolk Welding Company, which built the boat, used heavier plating
for a monococque structure and dispensed with the framing scheme except to
use it as a jig. The hull oilcanned in only a few places during its
shakedown run, and "the builder much improved the job," says Bolger. Those
first Strikers, with rakish, patrol-boat lines and clean planes of steel and
later aluminum, were very beautiful boats. "They didn't sell very well
because they didn't run very well," says the designer, "but they looked
wonderful."
Bolger had been designing sea-skiff types in the 'fifties, too, and in
1956-57 he designed a carvel-planked 31-footer for Egg Harbor that was a
thorough success. "My boast is that it was about two years before any of
them came on the used-boat market, and then they sold for more than they had
originally." After this, he says, "pride ran before a fall." His friend
Terry Kilborne came to him with a scheme "to build boats in Japan where
boats can be built cheap." The result was the Out O'Gloucester 30, a "very
radical design." It produced what Bolger describes as "the worst day I ever
had." When launched, the first of these cruising/fishing powerboats "was 5
inches down in the stern, wouldn't steer, reached for the moon in trim."
Fortunately, Yachting came out that month with an article by Ed Monk on
shingles to correct trim problems in powerboats; we did exactly what Monk
recommended, and it worked."
Bolger designed powerboats for Striker until the mid-1960s, and at the same
time he produced a series of power "dories" and "sampans" for Captain Jim
Orrell's Texas Dory Boat Plans. These were dead-simple flatiron/sharpie
types in lengths from 15' to 45' for cheap and simple home construction in
plywood, and they were exceptionally well-behaved boats despite their
shoebox shapes. They were built all over the world-a slick 15-footer as a
family boatbuilding project by the keeper of the Eddystone Light in St.
Helens, Tasmania 110 boats from 18' to 30' built by native fishermen on
Wallis Island in New Caledonia; hundreds more built by handy and
penny-pinching customers in the U.S. A man in Rhode Island wrote Captain
Orrell about his Bolger-designed 17' "Sampan Express:" "In rough water, it
is unbeatable, and consistently puts the stock boats to shame in both speed
and handling. In three-to-five-foot chop, while others are hanging on and
hoping, we continue on at ¼ throttle. Surfing down the big ones is quite a
thrill, and with the tremendous bow buoyancy no need to worry about digging
in.
Bolger's interest in simple boats made from developable materials such as
wide planks of pine or sheets of steel, aluminum or plywood goes back to
that Masonite boat with the kite sail, although it has been influenced by
such academic and/or purposeful exercises as Howard Chapelle's researches
into sharpies and the worldwide success of the Texas Dories. Bolger feels
that he has had more experience with sharpie types than anybody alive,
experience that has included crewing a Star boat for years; owning sailing
sharpies. dories and flatiron skiffs for decades; and designing hundreds of
plane-sectioned hulls that gave good service. "It's a thing I can do-so I do
it," he says, which expresses not half his belief in sharp-form,
shallow-draft boats that go together simply and go against the ancient
orthodoxy of round sections as the only able form for boats with seakeeping
ability or even comfort in a bay chop.
Part III to follow...
Part II
They didn't succeed. Bolger went to the combat engineers and his friend went
to field artillery. Bolger was in the 1st Cay, in the Army of Occupation in
Japan for a year, and he was, in his own judgment, "extraordinarily
incompetent," although a crack shot on the rifle range.
"When I got out I went back to college on the G.I. Bill and wasted three
more years studying History," he says. He graduated cum laude from Bowdoin,
and he took with him not only laurels but a distaste for what he indicts as
"an academic establishment that is wrecking American civilization." Bolger
describes himself as "a card-carrying Libertarian," and he feels that
students who learn on their own, and get good at something, should have the
same access to professions as students who have gone through the motions of
acquiring an academic ticket. Bolger soon sought a ticket in yacht design, a
thing that, true to his principles, seems to be granted on performance
rather than school credentials. When Bolger was back at Bowdoin, Lindsay
Lord published The Naval Architecture Planing Hulls, and Bolger wrote him a
letter that questioned some detail in the book. When he graduated, he was
invited up to Falmouth Foreside, Maine, to work as a draftsman. Lindsay Lord
was designing "very striking-spectacular-houses then," Bolger remembers. But
it was a good apprenticeship in boat design. "Doc is certainly a very
brilliant man," says Bolger of this versatile designer whose powerboats were
very adventurous in the 1940s and 1950s. "No praise is too great for his
generosity to me."
Bolger worked for Lindsay Lord for less than a year before Lord recommended
him to John Hacker in Detroit, a fast-boat wizard who was busy with
contracts for the U.S. Air Force. "It was, for me, a gathering of
confidence," Bolger says of his months with Lindsay Lord, "and that was one
of Doc's talents." With Hacker, Bolger needed all the confidence he could
get. The company that had contracted the rescue boat for the Air Force-the
Huron-Eddy Corp. -was what Bolger describes as "a menagerie of boat
designers." The boat was the largest hull that Hacker had ever designed, a
90-footer, and it had three Packard engines with vee drives and with the
props under the engines. Hacker had designed raceboats like this, and the
project should have been a piece of cake, but the old man seemed to be much
too responsible to the Air Force. "Jim Eddy, who was in charge of the
weights, would come in and tear his hair over the extra structure that
Hacker kept putting into it," Bolger remembers.
Bolger remembers a lot more illustrative things from his months with Lindsay
Lord and John Hacker, and from part-time work for Francis Herreshoff as a
draftsman when he came back to Gloucester from Detroit in 1952, but the most
significant things he took from these short apprenticeships may have been
attitudes rather than lessons in structure or mathematics. Lord, Hacker and
Herreshoff have all been described as geniuses, and all three were
independent men with inventive turns of mind, eccentricities, and an
indefinable ability to work through a complex of requirements and
possibilities to lines on paper that represented more than a sequence of
problems solved.
It would have been a stroke of luck for any student of yacht design to have
worked with one of these men; that Bolger worked with all three is
extraordinary. And it seems to have been luck-"I went after them," he says,
"but it was luck that they held still for it." Yet Bolger claims his
brother, Bill, and boatbuilder Nicholas Montgomery as his real mentors. "My
brother brought me up to boat design, and taught me to be critical," he
says. Nicholas Montgomery, whose boatyard in Gloucester is now run by his
son and grandson, with Phil Bolger as in-house designer, was "a thinker and
an experimenter," Bolger says. Montgomery was an old school
designer/boatbuilder who worked with carved models, and Phil Bolger haunted
his yard as a boy. "I used to sit at his feet, and he would lecture me on
boat design," the designer says, smiling through his beard at the memory.
Bolger sent a design for a clean-lined 32' sportfisherman to Yachting in the
fall of 1951, and it was published in the January, 1952, issue. This first
published design elicited "a satisfying amount of correspondence- probably
three letters," and it caused Bolger to set up on his own in the house in
Gloucester with stock designs for "mostly powerboats, with a few rowboats."
None of these early designs showed obvious influence from Lord, Hacker or
Herreshoff. The powerboats were lean and angular; the rowing boats-among
them the original of the Gloucester Gull rowing dory-were plywood versions
of dories and dory skiffs. They were original conceptions, and they were
typically simplified in line and structure.
In the middle to late 'fifties, Bolger worked up some production boats, two
of which began to make his reputation and one of which tore it down. Bolger
freely admits mistakes and disappointments in the boats he designs, and he
does it in print. Mistakes are nature's way of telling you you're still
learning. He designed the first Striker sportfisherman, and he learned some
things about steel construction from the builder. The first Striker was a
24-footer, and Bolger, like Hacker with the Air Force boat, designed a
complicated frame structure to be covered with 14-gauge steel. The
Nassau-Suffolk Welding Company, which built the boat, used heavier plating
for a monococque structure and dispensed with the framing scheme except to
use it as a jig. The hull oilcanned in only a few places during its
shakedown run, and "the builder much improved the job," says Bolger. Those
first Strikers, with rakish, patrol-boat lines and clean planes of steel and
later aluminum, were very beautiful boats. "They didn't sell very well
because they didn't run very well," says the designer, "but they looked
wonderful."
Bolger had been designing sea-skiff types in the 'fifties, too, and in
1956-57 he designed a carvel-planked 31-footer for Egg Harbor that was a
thorough success. "My boast is that it was about two years before any of
them came on the used-boat market, and then they sold for more than they had
originally." After this, he says, "pride ran before a fall." His friend
Terry Kilborne came to him with a scheme "to build boats in Japan where
boats can be built cheap." The result was the Out O'Gloucester 30, a "very
radical design." It produced what Bolger describes as "the worst day I ever
had." When launched, the first of these cruising/fishing powerboats "was 5
inches down in the stern, wouldn't steer, reached for the moon in trim."
Fortunately, Yachting came out that month with an article by Ed Monk on
shingles to correct trim problems in powerboats; we did exactly what Monk
recommended, and it worked."
Bolger designed powerboats for Striker until the mid-1960s, and at the same
time he produced a series of power "dories" and "sampans" for Captain Jim
Orrell's Texas Dory Boat Plans. These were dead-simple flatiron/sharpie
types in lengths from 15' to 45' for cheap and simple home construction in
plywood, and they were exceptionally well-behaved boats despite their
shoebox shapes. They were built all over the world-a slick 15-footer as a
family boatbuilding project by the keeper of the Eddystone Light in St.
Helens, Tasmania 110 boats from 18' to 30' built by native fishermen on
Wallis Island in New Caledonia; hundreds more built by handy and
penny-pinching customers in the U.S. A man in Rhode Island wrote Captain
Orrell about his Bolger-designed 17' "Sampan Express:" "In rough water, it
is unbeatable, and consistently puts the stock boats to shame in both speed
and handling. In three-to-five-foot chop, while others are hanging on and
hoping, we continue on at ¼ throttle. Surfing down the big ones is quite a
thrill, and with the tremendous bow buoyancy no need to worry about digging
in.
Bolger's interest in simple boats made from developable materials such as
wide planks of pine or sheets of steel, aluminum or plywood goes back to
that Masonite boat with the kite sail, although it has been influenced by
such academic and/or purposeful exercises as Howard Chapelle's researches
into sharpies and the worldwide success of the Texas Dories. Bolger feels
that he has had more experience with sharpie types than anybody alive,
experience that has included crewing a Star boat for years; owning sailing
sharpies. dories and flatiron skiffs for decades; and designing hundreds of
plane-sectioned hulls that gave good service. "It's a thing I can do-so I do
it," he says, which expresses not half his belief in sharp-form,
shallow-draft boats that go together simply and go against the ancient
orthodoxy of round sections as the only able form for boats with seakeeping
ability or even comfort in a bay chop.
Part III to follow...