(5 of 7)
Fleet Skipper. Corny also became a student at Brooklyn's Poly Prep. He captained the swimming team, played end in football, and was a 220-yd.-dash man at school. But his chief interest was dashing off somewhere to sail. At 22, he won his first Long Island Sound championship in a Larchmont Interclub Class sloop.
In World War I, Corny naturally joined the Navy. He went to the first "90day wonder" class at Annapolis, served as forward turret officer on the armored cruiser Montana, later had a destroyer hitch, and ended his service in 1919 as a lieutenant j.g. But even naval duties did not prevent Corny Shields from doing some racing. In those days, each squadron had a sailboat or so for racing competition, and in the post-armistice winter of 1918-19, when Corny was stationed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he skippered the winning 33-footer in a fleet competition.
At war's end, Lieut. Shields headed back for New Rochelle, a business career, and marriage to a New Rochelle girl, Josephine ("Doe") Lapprian. Corny made what was for him the supreme sacrifice: he sold his Interclub sloop to pay for the engagement ring. Soon he had to make another: the newly weds found that they could not afford to keep up Corny's membership at the yacht club. But by 1924, in partnership with his older brothers in the new firm of Shields & Co., Corny was able to become a Larchmont member again, and resume the winning of Long Island Sound championships.
Comes the Revolution. All through the '20s, Shields sailed and won in class after class: the old "New York Thirties" (44-ft.), the rakish six-meter sloops, Victory Class and Larchmont Interclubs. The summer of 1929 was particularly gay. Everyone, it seemed, had money for yachting: old Sir Thomas Lipton, frustrated since 1899, when Shamrock lost in the America's Cup race, was busily building the last of his challengers, Shamrock V. A new racing class, the 30-ft. Atlantic Class sloop, was hot off the drafting board of famed Designer W. Starling Burgess (Shields was to win the national Atlantic championship two years later). In the 40 ft. Mistral, Corny raced among the billowing sails of the New York Yacht Club cruise.
On Oct. 24, 1929 ("Black Thursday" in Wall Street), Shields & Co. had most of its assets in cash, happily for Shields & Co. But the bottom dropped out of the big yacht business when the bottom dropped out of the stock market. Nineteen thirty-one marked the start of the popular 15½. Snipe Class (9,514 in world waters today), and the trend to smaller boats for more people was under way. As one historian records: "People discovered that a sail was a far cheaper method of transportation than buying gas for an engine."
Trim Internationals. The America's Cup series kept going for a while. In 1937, in the last renewal, Harold Vanderbilt's J-boat Ranger whipped Briton Thomas Sopwith's Endeavour II in four straight races. Corny Shields was active, that America's Cup summer, doing some crewing on Gerard B. Lambert's Yankee, another of the big J Class boats, which raced against Ranger for the honor of defending the cup. In the Ranger's afterguard, i.e., board of strategy, was Long Island Sailor Arthur Knapp Jr., one of Corny's ablest continuing rivals for local and national sailing honors.