Senior Moments
Dear Matt:
I was pleased to see the good old Blanchard Senior given her moment in the sun. Growing up in and around Lake Union in Seattle in the 1950s and ’60s, as the Wilkinson brothers did, I, too, early on appreciated the grace, beauty, and performance of these fine sailboats. In those days they were seen regularly on lakes Union and Washington; a friend of mine was lucky enough to own one for many years.
By the early 1970s, I was fortunate, too, in getting hired on at what had been the Blanchard Boat Company yard. When the family closed the business in 1969, the shop and crew were kept in operation by a group of customers who purchased the land and facilities to maintain access to the great skill still available there, not to mention the free moorage. They named their business The Boat Yard Inc.
I started out sweeping the floors, thrilled to be around such great beauty and expertise. When my three-month cleanup commitment came to a close, I accepted an offer of a position as a boatbuilder’s apprentice, and thus began the real fun of new construction and repair, working alongside those highly talented craftsmen, some of whom had been there since World War II.
One of the guys I soon met, who stepped up to show the apprentices the craft, was Dave Mullens, an Arizona native. Dave had packed his car the day after high school graduation to drive to Seattle and enroll at what was then the Edison Boat Shop, one of two schools at the time teaching marine carpentry in the Pacific Northwest. He completed the two-year course, then taught by Earle Wakefield, and located on Lake Union at the foot of Stone Way. He had rented a houseboat on the lake nearby, enabling him to walk to school and also putting him right next to Vic Franck’s Boat Company, itself a 40-some-year-old family boatbuilding business. Soon enough, Dave hired on at Vic’s, working there for about two years until a disagreement with the boss caused him to pack up his tools and head up the lake to Blanchard’s, one of several Lake Union yards well known for their fine work.
With so much going on around the lake in those days, qualified shipwrights could easily transfer to a different yard and be eagerly accepted. Within a few more years, I came along, met Dave, and got to hear the following story.
Everybody at the yard of course knew of the many fine craft Blanchard had built over the years, and we all loved the Seniors and Juniors. As a matter of fact, even with the Blanchard family gone, the original hull molds for the Senior were still there, hanging on the wall. But this was the early 1970s, marking the point in the Seattle boatbuilding industry that the change was coming, and composites were moving in. We called it fiberglass, and although most of us loved the wooden-boat trade, those days were numbered. In the winter of 1974, a horrible fire burned the R&H Boatyard to the ground, right across the lake from The Boat Yard, including destruction of what turned out to be the last wooden boat being built on Lake Union, ending a nearly 50-year proud tradition of fine marine craftsmanship on the lake.
As the now out-of-work R&H boatbuilders showed up at our shop the following Monday, Dave finally told me about his start at Blanchard’s. His very first day there, he said, the shop foreman pointed at those Senior molds and told Dave to “cut ’em up.” He couldn’t believe it, loving those fine craft as we all did, but this was his first day on the job and he could ill-afford another run-in with a boss. So cut them he did, a sorry task, one that meant not only would we not be building any more Seniors but also ensuring that no one else would, either. Many there felt the latter was the real reason they were destroyed.
Dave left The Boat Yard a few years later to commence a 35-year spell teaching boatbuilding at what was then the Gompers branch of Seattle Central Community College, the successor to the Edison Boat Shop. Capitalizing on the local reverence for the Seniors, Dave always shared the story of their end of the line with his students, boosting the Blanchard allure and his own notoriety as he sent his grads off to jobs on the lake, to shops like Vic’s, The Boat Yard, Jensen Motor Boat Company, and more.
A hearty congratulation, too, to the Wilkinson brothers, for their considerable commitment to saving such a fine old vessel. Without your magazine, ILLUSION may well never have made a recovery at all, perhaps ending her days right where she started, on the shores of Lake Union.
Gordon Sanstad
Island Boat Works
Langley, Washington
Dear Matt,
It was gratifying to see the article in WB No. 301 on the Blanchard Senior Knockabouts and the Wilkinson brothers’ restoration of a derelict Knockabout to commemorate the Senior Knockabout that their parents owned when the Wilkinsons were boys. One excusable error in the article was the mention of Norman C. and his father, Norman J. (N.J.), being partners at the time the Senior Knockabout was designed. In 1933, N.J. did not have a partner. Indeed, he never had another legal partner after splitting with the Johnson brothers (Johnson Bros. & Blanchard, 1905–15) up to his premature death in 1954, and certainly not young pup Norm who would have been 21 or 22 years old in 1933 and was an employee of the N.J. Blanchard Boat Company at that time.
As a “stinkpot” classic boater, it took me a while many years ago to work up the courage to get to know Norm (who himself became a “stinkpotter” in his senior years). Even in the most cordial conversation his voice tended to sound gruff, but during his mid-80s we became fast friends and I was fortunate to have recorded his many recollections, some of which were published 25 years ago in the book Knee-Deep In Shavings. That brings me to mention a serendipitous connection with Miles and Beryl Smeeton, who were mentioned in WB No. 301 in the obituary of John Guzzwell in Poulsbo, Washington, last August. Coincidentally, the Smeetons were also friends of Norm and are mentioned on Pages 174–75 of Knee-Deep.
Although I was never a “ragman,” I have a well-worn Senior Knockabout pennant on a wall in my house.
Steve Wilen
Walla Walla, Washington