Ah, camp life
I guess our drought has been broken and this will put the grass-cutters back to work again.
We’ve had a shift in the workforce at my house. It’s hard to get all of the odd places that need to be cut identified and explained, but now that my grandson does a complete job with no skips, he has decided to skip out, so my granddaughter has taken over for her brother. This costs about as much as I got paid per week at a real summer job at Alcort, a boat manufacturer in Connecticut.
We built wooden Sailfish and later they built the bigger Sunfish with a real foot well. We also boxed wooden kits for 14’ and 12’ Sunfish.
I was responsible for assembling nifty things like mast steps, centerboard trunks, dagger boards, and seemingly endless spars for the kits and the manufacture of the completed boats.
As I remember, if we had a backlog of orders we would build 10 boats a week. I made most of the loose stuff that the regular crew put together. I make might make twenty-four mast steps in one day.
Some days I cut out twenty four of each part and made complete assemblies as the week wore on. On Thursday or Friday, the spars were cut to length, sanded, and finished in the paint room. As I made parts they were sanded and delivered to the paint room. The hulls would also find their way out to the paint room as we got them completed.
The masts were made from clear Sitka spruce and we would make four inch thick pieces from one inch planks. They were rough-shaped with shapers and hand sanded with belt sanders. To smooth them out, we used small vibrating sanders. “Little Old Red” (Joe) would finish the job. We tried to keep all the sanding dust and other dirt in the assembly room and out of the paint room. The hours were 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. It took about an hour to get to work by carpooling from one place to another with about three different groups. I drove on Saturdays when we worked to 1 p.m.
Sometime along about the end of July one year, Dad decided that we had to have a rowboat to get out to the 14’ Canadian Dinghy that resided on our mooring at West Lake Road in Skaneateles.
I’d heard that Alcort used to assemble kits for 8’ square-nosed dinghies when the Sunfish business was slow.
I discussed this with Red Brian, one of the partners, and he ordered a kit for me. The finishing foreman and construction foreman agreed to help me assemble it one Saturday afternoon. The boat came out of the box and grew into a boat and in not more than an hour and a half. Everything was screwed with special boat screws. They had a double spiral threads that made them zoom in twice as fast and they were deeper, making them better gripping. Spruce and mahogany were the major wood species that we screwed together.
We had very few screws split out or other failures that might have required making replacement parts.
The boat work tapered off at the end of August and the Samuel Spalding family gathered at the camp on West Lake Road. Fire lanes and not been designated at the time, and in fact, our road was treacherous when wet because there is a sharp right turn just as the grade is the steepest. There were no paved roads to the lake in the early ‘50s and local clay turns into very greasy stuff with a few drops of water.
A trip into the ditch meant that someone had to trot up to the Harold Loveless farm and arrange for a team of horses to pull the car out. The Lovelesses had to leave their dinner or chores or come on their only day off, if it was a Sunday occurrence. Most of Mom and Dad’s friends from Syracuse or Dad’s compatriots from Crucible came on to visit on Sundays. Lots of people worked on Saturday mornings at that time.
The horses were always successful. Folks often asked why somebody’s car couldn’t pull them out.
The answer was that the car was trapped downhill from the one in the ditch and there was no way to get around it. Even if we had owned a small tractor, chances are it would have been trapped also. I remember the horse rescue was a five dollar affair for a sure.
Those ditch deals, as I recall, often ended up with at least two cars stuck. Of course that would be $10 or maybe $12 for the extra time to pull one car to the street and then come back down for the second car, plus two dollars for being so dumb as to get the second car stuck. “Ah, camp life – nothing like it.”
My dad often said it annoyed him because he had a system and he would explain in detail how to drive up the driveway when rainy. “Stay in first gear along the staight and level area, going about 20 miles an hour.
Do not shift into second gear. Turn around the sharp right turn just as it gets steep, keeping a steady speed until the grade levels out. Then you can shift into second.” Invariably, they would shift into second just before the turn and have to shift down right at the turn because of the abrupt increase in grade. All would be lost. They went into the ditch and I went off to the farm for Mr. Horse et al.
