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That accounts for Bus's discomfiture the day when he was 15 and a lass named Ethel crewed for him in a nip-and-tuck race. "The finish was so close I couldn't tell who had won," Bus remembers. "The other fellow called over to the committee boat to find out the results, but I couldn't hear what they told him. So I yelled 'Nice race!' And when he answered Thank you,' I assumed he had won. Next thing I knew, Ethel was standing up, shaking her fist at the committee boat and screaming 'Ya blind bum, ya!' at the top of her lungs." They were some lungs even then. Ethel's last name was Merman. Says Bus: "I sailed away from there just as fast as I could." As it turned out, he was the winner.
No Regrets. Mosbacher graduated cum laude from Choate, went on to Dartmouth, where he majored in economics, settled for C's, became known as a deft hand with a bridge deck and dice, and led the varsity sailing club to two straight national intercollegiate championships. Commissioned an ensign in the Navy in 1943, he applied for the Small Craft Training Center in Miami. The Navy, in its infinite wisdom, sent him to radar school instead, but Bus finally wrangled a transfer to the carrier Liscome Bay—a transfer that fell through when doctors found he had a hernia. He has no regrets: Liscome Bay was later torpedoed off the Gilbert Islands, and went down with most of her crew.
For Bus, the first postwar years were mostly business, buckling down to help his father manage the family millions (real estate, oil, natural gas), sailing only occasionally and then just for fun. When he finally did return to competition in 1949, Bus did it with a broadside: he skippered a 33-ft. International One-Design sloop to victory in the Amorita Cup in Bermuda, then sailed a 6-meter to victory in the British-American Cup at the Isle of Wight. As the song goes, it was a very good year: at a Manhattan cocktail party that September, he met Patricia Ryan, a pretty, dark-haired public relations assistant. "Neither of us ever had another date with anyone else—as far as I know," says Bus. Pat was no sailor, but she set out to learn: 14 months later, she and Bus were married.