A Last 50th
Anniversary Memory of One of
CIYC’s Ultimate
Characters
Number 12 of 12
When the Board
of Directors got into the planning details for our club’s 50th anniversary year,
I offered to write up some personal memories of certain personalities who have passed
through the club’s membership. We have been members of Caliente Isle Yacht Club
for going on 40 years now so we’ve experienced or observed them all--several real
winners, a couple of losers for sure but more than a few truly odd characters. So,
I figured that I’d have no trouble if I volunteered an amateurish effort to
write up one of these stories for each month of our anniversary year. Thanks
for the positive feedback.
If you haven’t
been paying attention, you can see eleven stories already on file at www.ciyc.org (go the “Blog” tab.) December is now upon us, thus here is story Number
12 of 12. It is of a CIYCer I knew well,
indeed very well, because he was my late father-in-law -- and a real piece of
work. Meet Fred Shaw, who with his wife,
Jo, joined CIYC back in the 1960's.
As some of you
know, I met JoAnne in elementary school. I was an older man at the time,
actually just a ten year old traffic boy but I’m pretty sure she just couldn’t
resist my official looking sweater, whistle and cap and no doubt the snappy way
I slung my STOP sign into traffic for her. Of course, she has strong memories of this
older guy. But I don’t have much memory
of that particular little girl in my cross walk every morning and afternoon. We
didn’t get together for another 11 years, eventually marrying 50 years ago, in
1968.
Early Encounters
The day after
we decided to get married, I thought it best to ask her father if taking his
daughter off his and his wife’s payroll was all right with him (ok, she was
working at the time), he being of that generation where asking a father’s permission
to take a daughter’s hand in marriage was expected. I found him where he could
be found every Saturday morning, working on his old boat docked at the Oakland
Yacht Club on The Estuary. We knew each
other of course, he being the one who gave me “the look” every time I came to
the door to fetch my date over the preceding two or so years. He was aloof as ever and after building up my
nerve, I managed to mention my intentions.
He immediately asked me if I had ever noticed the ladder stored under
JoAnne’s bedroom window. I pretty much
missed his drift, till he said “I put that there to make it easier for you two
to elope.” His humor was really dry and
he didn’t smile much so I said something dumb like “We were actually hoping
that you would pay for a wedding.” After
some quick mental math, and another long look at me, he was okay with that idea
and we got along quite well from then on.
Boater
Fred was always
working on his boat, mostly because it was built in 1948 and thus made of what
became very old and sometimes rotten wood of the kind needing constant work.
JoAnne says the boat started out 28’ long but at some point Fred wanted it
longer. So he commissioned some guy who hung out on the docks to design a
cockpit extension of about four feet. He then went about finding the wood
needed for the extension. All he could
come up with were a bunch of boards that were 6’ long. Instead of cutting the
long boards, leaving shorter boards as scrap, he told the boat yard to ignore
the careful plans he had paid for and to go ahead and make the boat 34’ long
rather than the 32’ in the drawings. Did I mention that Fred was frugal? The result, as you might imagine, was a boat 8’
wide and 34’ feet long. You could say it was shaped like an arrow. He was lucky that thing never tipped over during
those summer afternoon winds on the Bay and Delta that we all know about.
It did sink
once, however, near San Rafael and with JoAnne and her mom and their dog on
board. Mom had gone down below to get something about the time they were going
under the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, then under construction. She quickly came back up, telling Fred that
the boat was sinking. Fred, a highly opinionated and bossy type, just shook his
head and told his wife that she was crazy. “Take the helm” he said in that disgusted
tone reserved for old school husbands. When he returned, he meekly said to her
“you and kid better start bailing.” Sure enough, they were sinking pretty fast as
a plank below the water line was missing something. That situation had them stranded
on the mud in San Rafael much of one night, with the lasting result that JoAnne
has never, and will never voyage out the Golden Gate or anyplace else that
doesn’t have nearby mud to settle a boat into unless she is on a ship the size
of the Queen Mary.
Fred was known
around the club for his various oddities--extreme frugality being at the top of
the list—as in really cheap. Fred’s boat
was the only one in Caliente Harbor that was heated by a wood stove. No
electric heaters for him. He generally found the wood for his tiny wood burner in
Sam’s wood pile. Because it was scrap,
in addition to short bits of 2x4s and the like, this wood often consisted of
nasty old stuff, like busted up pilings which were made even nastier because pilings
are generally soaked in creosote, as we would say today “a known
carcinogen.” In the dead of winter, when
it can be really still in the Delta, Fred would fire up his wood stove and sit
inside nice and toasty. Outside however, were all of his neighbors who could
barely find their boats for the cough inducing and eye-watering, low-lying
smoke wafting throughout the harbor. He
is lucky he wasn’t arrested by some kind of environmental police but at that
time we were all breathing carcinogens all the time, which probably answers
lots of questions.
Fred was also
known to take a drink now and again, as in hourly when off duty. His habit
wasn’t so unusual around the club because back then Caliente was pretty much known
far and wide as a drinking club with a boating problem. In fact, most yacht
clubs were seen this way. Our parties, even up to recent times, were made all
the wilder by really cheap booze. Fred wasn’t the only old timer who threatened
to quit when the Board voted to raise drink prices by as little as 25 cents,
time and again. The old timers won those battles year after year and even up to
a few years ago, our bar sold drinks for $2 and beers for a buck. One visiting
club Commodore, when standing in front of all to thank us for our hospitality
couldn’t help but remark “the reason I love coming to Caliente so much is that
I can drink here for less than on my boat!” It is no wonder that Fred and his boating
buddies pretty much always had a drink in their hand when not at the wheel
(wink, wink.)
As he got into
his 70's, there came a time when working on that old boat all of the time
wasn’t working for Fred. After 40 years of doing his own maintenance he
actually contracted some work out to a boat yard—to a friend of his who owned the
old Hunter boatyard up in Suisun City.
There was some kind of incident involving the yard’s lift. The friendship pretty much ended when the guy
somehow managed to drop the boat while trying to re-launch it. I’m sure Fred took his friend’s apologies in
the spirit in which they were offered, but at the time he probably didn’t know
that something fundamental happened when the boat fell off the lift and onto
something very hard. A serious leak developed that Fred and other real experts
couldn’t find. Having a boat that leaked
all the time was a tipping point for Fred—he had been talking about it for a
while, but now it was time to find the old girl a new home. He tried to sell it, but no go. It was
leaking, slowly to be sure, but the near constant stream out of side of the
hull when the boat was under way was pretty much of a turn off for otherwise
interested buyers. He then tried other
means to get rid of the boat. Finally, the only buyer in line wasn’t a person
with real money. Instead, it was a local Sea Scout outfit that took it off his
hands for a $1.
Jolly JoAnne
Fred’s boat,
the Jolly JoAnne (of course), was
probably soon sold for peanuts by those Sea Scouts but it did seem to knock
around the Delta for a few years after some kind of transaction. We once saw it
on False River, looking reasonably good, sort of restored by someone. But the next time we saw it, 25 years ago, it
was in one of those horrible harbors west of Pittsburg, listing badly, looking
sad and resting in mud again which must have felt familiar to that old woody
from the San Rafael incident. The last time we saw it was in 1998 at Vierra's
boatyard on the Sacramento River -- and it was still floating!
Fred passed
away in 1996. Unfortunately, he had
dementia and was bed-ridden at the time. We would visit him regularly and every
now and then he would grab something nearby, look me in the eye and say clearly
“did you feel that?” I thought it best
to put my head where his head often was and say “yep, you’re right Fred, the
ship just rolled.” Being an active
boater for something like 70 years, his smile told us he liked that because
there can be no doubt that he was a boater to the end--and a true Caliente
Character.
Happy 50th
CIYC! You've turned out some real
beauts.
Ted Lyman
No comments:
Post a Comment