(See Cover) A man in a flying saucer— swooping in low over the U.S. last week— would have had the best of all vantage points for seeing America at its newest mass sport. On just about every navigable body of water, from oceans to big creeks, flecks of white canvas dotted the waterscape like daisies in a field. Coming lower, the saucer man could have seen highways specked with thousands of small trailers. On each, trundling for the nearest water, rested wooden hulls, some almost bathtub shaped, others as sleek as streamlined as space ships.
In the shipyards and backyards where these hulls came from, still others remained. Their toiling owners, in various stages of undress, from bathing suits to paint-sprayed dungarees, were busy with the sailor's shore duties of scraping, sanding and painting, and devoting more loving care to the job than most of them would expend on their cars or their homes.
On the water, boats with such family names as Comet, Lightning, Star, Thistle, Raven, Rebel, Weasel and Wood Pussy were chasing each other, waiting for vagrant puffs of breeze, or just lazing along. Sometimes, in a strong puff, one or more blew over; but after thrashing about in the water for a while their crews climbed in again, bailed, and sailed on or waited for a tow. In short, as the saucer man would have been fully justified in reporting to his interstellar G2, the Americans have found a big new way of getting sunburned, soaked to the skin and happily exhausted.
Sailing in 1953 is, in fact, more than just another sport; for more and more Americans it is rapidly becoming one of the designs for modern living, something around which the rest of the week is arranged. Families haggle over whether Buddy or the breadwinner shall have the Snipe on Saturday afternoon, just as they have long haggled over whether Buddy shall have the car on Saturday night. Mothers take their nursing babes to sea with them, rather than miss a spin with the family. On Sunday mornings, when a good breeze is stirring the tops of the trees, wise churchmen with sailors in their congregations manage to keep their sermons short.
Anyone with an Itch. There was a time when sailors were pretty well confined to short stretches of blue water between Bar Harbor, Me. and Palm Beach, Fla. with a few genteel outposts in New Orleans, the Great Lakes and the West Coast. Those were the days when a wealthy gentleman, admiring J. Pierpont Morgan's 302-ft. Corsair, asked him: "How much does it cost to run a yacht?" And old J.P. bluntly told him: "You cannot afford it. Anyone who has to ask how much it costs to run a yacht cannot possibly afford to keep one."
To the elder Morgan and his generation, a yacht was a floating palace with a crew of 60 or so, who had, among other things, to be outfitted in changes of winter and summer uniforms. Since those days the definition of a yacht† has relaxed. Anyone with the price of an 8-ft. kit boat (under $40) can become a yacht owner; anyone with an itch to get out into a boat can be a yachtsman. Last week an estimated half million or so of them were sluicing along under sail, while another 4,300,000 owners of power boats of one kind or another ("stinkpots" to sailors) were chugging up & down U.S. waterways, happily laying down fumes of exhaust gas.