Fo’c’s’le

Well, old girl, you've come a long way. No, for once I'm not talking about CONTENT, but that other old girl, WoodenBoat. When I think back on the beginnings of WoodenBoat, though, I can't help but recall my early days with CONTENT, for it wasn't very long after WoodenBoat started that CONTENT took ownership of me. There's another link. Before there was a CONTENT (for me) and before there was a WoodenBoat, my good seawife and I put out a little newsletter called Classic Boat Monthly, which was to have a real part in the genesis of WoodenBoat. Classic Boat Monthly was similar in aims and readership to WoodenBoat, but there were some crucial differences. Our little publication was gotten out on a large dining room table after I returned home in the evening from my 9-to-5 stint at toiling in another vineyard. We edited, corresponded with authors, sought advertising, prepared the "mechanicals" for photo offset, haggled with printers and typesetters, folded, addressed, and mailed each issue—all in monthly frenetic seizures of activity that never seemed to end until 4 a.m. Finally, just as we were beginning to climb out of the debit side of the ledger, enough was enough, and with a sad but relieved sigh, we ceased publication. I was becoming exhausted and my wife had acquired the horrific ability to recognize individual subscribers' names and to unerringly pair them with their associated zip codes. One must only sink so far. The pain of saying goodbye to old subscribers was eased just a few weeks after laying Classic Boat Monthly to rest by the arrival of Jon Wilson at the kitchen door of our house in New City, New York. How he found our whereabouts or tracked us so quickly I have never known, but there he was, looking like a graduate student in anthropology, or an editor with an idea for a new publication. In each, the haunted look of the fanatical searcher is the same. Jon was after two things. First, he wanted me to write a humor column for his new baby. I was pleased at the prospect of keeping in touch with some of my old friends from Classic Boat Monthly. (After all, when you know someone intimately enough to know his zip code, you kind of hate to lose touch.) The opportunity to write for WoodenBoat seemed to me to be a way of letting those subscribers know that I was, in a manner of speaking, still alive. The second thing Jon wanted was to buy our list of subscribers. My reaction to that was somewhat more ambivalent. I was delighted, of course, at the prospect of getting unlooked-for money out of our defunct publication, but there did seem to be something ghoulish about selling subscribers' names. Somehow it reminded me of the classic scenes from the old days of the Cape Horners, when a dead sailor's "gear" was auctioned off at the base of the mainmast. A person's name (to say nothing of his address and zip code) seemed too personal a thing to sell like Paddy Doyle's boots. On the other hand, we got, I recall, 10 cents a head for the list, so we grabbed the dough and ran. Since then, I have watched WoodenBoat's progress with something like the pride of a midwife observing the growth of a talented youngster in whose first few days of life she had once played some small role. I remember looking at one of those early issues and thinking, as I looked at its handsome illustrations and typography, "Well, by Godfrey, at last someone's doing it right." I continued to have doubts about the magazine's survival, though, fo