Hemingway's Boat (10 page)

Some of that almost sounds like a description of Hemingway's own body mass: the lumbering athlete who could surprise you with his quick feints. Once more, how intuitively Hemingway had chosen. He'd found a boat, located a company, in synch with himself, probably much more than he ever knew. Call it again the phenomenon of easy first luck—built, of course, on all the hard work of looking, investigating, intuiting.

The majority of Depression boat manufacturers in America had their yards in the Northeast or in the Great Lakes region or along the Atlantic Seaboard—it remains pretty much true today. (There was another boat-building community on the West Coast, and Canada also had its clot of wooden-boat makers.) Then as now, boat sales tended to follow the wealth of the country, so the greatest concentration of manufacturers was in the New York metropolitan area. But it's both pleasurable and instructive to pick up old boating magazines and chart the place-name geography of North American boatbuilding.

As with most thirties manufacturers, Wheeler didn't have its own dealer network. (Chris-Craft, the General Motors of the industry, was the great exception.) Wheeler had a few distributors around the country, but mostly it sold its products—certainly in the thirties—either at the annual boat show in New York or straight from the factory floor. Wheeler never went to its customers so much as its customers came to Cropsey Avenue. For a brief time, after World War II, the company had its own showroom on Park Avenue—one of the things that helped take Wheeler down.

The “factory floor” at the foot of Cropsey was really a jerry-built collection of wooden building berths and tin-roof assembly sheds, some of which hung out precariously over the unprepossessing stream, next to a drawbridge. Just across that drawbridge, with its scrolled ironwork, on Coney Island itself, were some five-cent Depression thrills named the Cyclone and the Thunderbolt and the Loop-O-Plane: Wheeler's artisans built their wares in the shadow of Coney's amusement dreams. When they built boats on the north side of this creek and slid them into the water, a drawbridge was crucial, so that the bigger Wheelers could get through and out into the bay.

When they launched the new boats in this water, the idea was to get them out of it as quickly as possible. “If you left them there a week or ten days, the hulls would start to turn purple,” Wes Wheeler told me. Nonetheless, if it could talk, this maligned channel of once-navigable water (minimally navigable, it is said by New York historians) would have its tales. Today, all that exists of the historical strait between the two bays is the little ribbon of pollution on the creek's western edge, running perpendicular to the foot of Cropsey. On the snow-crusted winter afternoon when I stood at the edge of the supermarket's parking lot and stared at the water, trying to see a just-wet
Pilar
bobbing in it, seven decades past, Coney Island Creek had a grocery cart without wheels washed up on its trash-strewn bank. The water looked swollen, pea green.

The phone number here used to be Esplanade 2-5900.

They used to have planking races here. They'd put the Swedes on one side of a hull, the Norwegians on the other.

When you're building a boat, the keel gets laid down the middle. The frames come up the side, vertically, then the horizontal planking, over top of the ribbing. The Egyptians were doing this—planking on framing—five thousand years ago. At Cropsey, the oak frames sometimes got bent hot right on the boat—the boards were grabbed piping hot by the artisans from the portable steam boxes that had been pulled up alongside the hulls. Whether you're in the framing or planking stage of boat construction, you're essentially trying to follow the natural inclination of an organic material, something that has its own specific grain, its unique anatomy. (In Japan, when sawyers are examining a tree trunk, they speak of “reading the wood.”) It's true that a new shape is being willed and forced by the shipwright, but in an even truer sense the shape has already grown into the
boards before they're in the shipwright's hands. So the shape is predetermined, you might say, and the true builder must respect this idea and work with it, not go against the nature of things. He seeks to be guided by the inclination of the wood itself as he creates the curvy, swooping, shadowy angles and shapes.

They used to squash bananas on the launching rails here. It was easier this way to get the finished boats into the water. The rails, made of wood, ran from the shop floors down the bank and into the creek. The banana-squishing was a cheap and ingenious Depression way of greasing skids. Even so, Wheeler must have used up a ton of bananas, because it's a fact that this nearly always financially threatened company produced a lot of boats in its gaudy, roller-coaster, roughly half-a-century history. No one seems to have a precise count of how many boats got built, but three thousand is a figure that Wheeler descendants like to cite. And it should also be noted quickly that not every Wheeler, whether a pleasure boat or some type of military craft during war years, was produced at the Brooklyn plant. Every time the boating world wrote off the company, the company seemed to find a way of coming back, in a slightly different incarnation, with a slightly different legal variant on its well-known name. At least once, after a bankruptcy, the Wheeler family, or members of that family, took over another boatyard and just started in again. In this regard, and some others, too, you could compare the bounce-back and up-and-down commercial and legal fortunes of Wheeler boats to the bounce-back and up-and-down life and literary fortunes of the man who bought
Pilar
.

At Cropsey, its mother yard, Wheeler had a furniture shop, a machining shop, an upholstery shop, a sawmill, and a four-room hospital with a full-time doctor and nurse. For a time, during World War II, this company had its own fifty-six-piece marching band, made up largely of employees who wore uniforms embroidered with corporate insignia. A day or two a week, the band would saw away on a stage in the middle of the yard while the rest of the workforce—in metal hats and coveralls with “Wheeler” stenciled on the back—ate lunch out of black pails. Sometimes the programs went out over the radio—Wheeler had its own broadcasting operation for a few years. Actually, this part of the Wheeler legend isn't directly connected to Cropsey Avenue, but to a second and larger yard, which got thrown up on the eve of war, at Whitestone, Long Island, on the East River. Almost overnight the company payroll had leaped from a few score prewar master boatbuilders making pleasure craft in Brooklyn to a workforce of six thousand, round-the-clock shifts, seven days a week, at two
sites. The company had ceased all private-boat production so that it could produce 83-foot wooden Coast Guard cutters at Cropsey and 136-foot wooden YMS antimagnetic navy mine sweepers at the Whitestone facility. Sometimes, as the band played, and before everybody turned back to the work, the progenitor and founder—he of the Palmer-perfect penmanship and wild hair and outlandish mustache and absurd pork-chop sideburns—would pass through, handing out watches to the boys who'd soon be going overseas.

Howard E.—which is how he was addressed when he wasn't being called Pop Wheeler—was married to Edith Berentha Clayton Wheeler. She was a vital part of this company, too, in on all major decisions, known to keep an eye on the books and personally sign checks. Judging by photographs and family recollections, the matriarch, at least in middle age, was great-bosomed and tended to dark clothes and bomber hats with stickpins in them that must have scared the bejesus out of her many grandchildren. She was easily the sternest Methodist of them all in this close-knit clan of boat-making Methodists who'd come out of English Methodism, and who'd settled, in the early years of the century, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and who'd later moved to Flatbush.

Everybody in the extended family had something or other to do with the advancement of the boatyard, even if it was only showing up at banquets during World War II when the navy or the Coast Guard or the army was awarding another “E” pennant for production excellence. Mother Wheeler was known to tolerate no drinking or smoking in her presence—even Coca-Cola was sinful. It sounds a little like the repressive, God-fearing, Oak Park household presided over by the bomberish Grace Hall-Hemingway in the first and second decades of the century, when her recalcitrant first son was straining for escape.

In 1961, outsiders took control of the business and sent the Wheelers into exile. Some family members tried to start things anew, unsuccessfully. But in the hot heart of it, from, say, the mid-twenties to the late fifties, the Wheeler story, which is first and last a family story, seems so, well,
American
, meaning that it was ever boom to bust and back to boom again, its highs so high, its lows so low.

First and last, the old man seems to have been a salesman, so maybe it wouldn't have truly mattered whether the product was frying pans or toasters. He was born in 1869. The family myth is that he'd started out in his
newly married adulthood, before the turn of the century, building houses with a brother-in-law in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. He is said to have owned one of the first gas stations in Brooklyn. He got interested in boats and bought a small piece of property at Twenty-third Avenue on Gravesend Bay in Bensonhurst. World War I came along, and America's entry into it, and the salesman-visionary caught a train to Washington and bid on a contract for 110-foot wooden submarine chasers. He'd never really built a big boat before, but he ended up building nine chasers—and when six of those were finished ahead of time, he got contracts on four more, as well as commissions on tugs for both the army and the navy. All the Wheelers lived at the family boatyard. As the younger sons finished school at Erasmus Hall, they joined their father in the business, putting on the apron and getting knee deep in shavings in the mold loft, taking college classes at night for engineering or drafting or naval design.

In the postwar economy, Howard E. was making large plans for his little company. “War Plant Builds Pleasure Boats” was the headline in the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
in May 1919, six months after the armistice had been signed. Under the headline was a nice one-column feature on the boatyard. Not even two months later, Wheeler had suddenly gone into receivership. The founder made an arrangement with his creditors, though, and stayed in business; part of his brilliance. In 1921, there was a terrible fire. He had no insurance. But since he had nowhere to go but on, he borrowed money, mortgaged whatever else he had, convinced an acquaintance to stake him.

For the next several years, the Wheeler company—essentially the Wheeler family—built and sold rowboats and small sea skiffs. In 1924, the yard exhibited its first boat in a national motorboat show—a twenty-foot launch. By 1928, the yard at the foot of Cropsey was producing and selling between fifty and sixty pleasure boats a year. Its name was growing in the field. By 1930: seventy-five boats. The business was always short of working capital, but this fact didn't hurt its reputation in the industry. By 1938, Wheeler was producing the fattest sales catalog in the national boating industry. By 1939, the company's production and sale of motor cruisers in the thirty-eight-foot range was said to number 225 boats.

Another war was looming. There were more trips to Washington, DC, by the builder (and the builder's sons) to secure contracts: picket boats, cutters, minesweepers, rescue tugs. To satisfy the banks, whose officers had made large loans for the construction of the Whitestone yard, a new company was formed—Wheeler Shipbuilding Corporation. Soon admirals were journeying from the capital to both plants to present pennants
and to read telegrams of congratulation from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. The Wheeler women, black-gloved, wearing huge corsages, exploded bottles of champagne at the bows of the new boats—and these pictures get prominent display in the
Eagle
and the
Herald Tribune
. There were black-tie dinner-dances attended by military brass. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia appeared at christenings, jawing with the old man—Howard E. was now in his seventies—on flag-draped podiums in the middle of the yard, making speeches that defied syntax and went out live over WNYC.

But if you live by fat government contracts, you can die by them, too. What happens when the war is won and six thousand people are on the payroll and your federal contracts are shutting off like water from a spigot? Wheeler tried to seize the postwar public's imagination with a sleek new pleasure craft called the Sunlounge. Howard E. opened a showroom right around the corner from the Waldorf, an expensive dare. Other boat companies were doing it, too. Think of plate-glass showrooms on Park Avenue with gleaming yachts inside and people on the sidewalk staring at them with bewildered expressions: it's a
New Yorker
cartoon. For the launch of the boat that would save the company, Wheeler brought in B-list movie stars and Broadway folk and local broadcast personalities. A fifteen-minute program on April 24, 1946, went out over the local affiliate of the American Broadcasting Company, WJZ. Reading a transcript of this old radio show—a copy is in Wes Wheeler's basement in Stamford, Connecticut—you can sense the great giddiness of a country returning to leisure. You can also sense how Wheeler had bet the ranch.