Sport: Boat Fever

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The fever has strange symptoms. Men who scarcely ever fixed a leaky faucet or pushed a lawnmower are busily hosing decks, rubbing brightwork, varnishing mahogany, bailing bilges. Many a suburbanite, discouraged by the relentless march of Detroit's forced obsolescence, now happily lavishes on his new boat the loving care he once gave to his car. As a status symbol, the new boat has become a rival of the second car and the swimming pool—and on average, costs about the same.

Sense of Power. What is the mysterious force that makes fervent boatmen? A boat is self-sufficient in a way that modern civilization rarely provides. It can be more isolated than the remotest tourist cabin, and it can be more comfortable. "Out there," says one boatnik huskily, "a man's a boy and a boy's a man. When you're out of sight of land, life loses its complexity; it's just you and the sea, and suddenly 'north' is important to you."

To millions, the answer is a lot simpler: prospering middle-income families with new leisure time and dollars have merely found a happier way of life. Traffic has killed the once pleasant Sunday drive in the country; not everybody can play golf, and those who do are growing increasingly weary of the first-tee queues that start before dawn. Most of all, boating has become a full family affair, in which the Mrs. has happily turned from golf (or fish) widow to first mate. Says Mrs. Howard Mordue of Highland Park, Mich., whose husband owns a 25-ft. Chris-Craft: "Howard likes to be captain. At home I'm the boss, but on the water he takes right over. The kids like to take orders. It's the one thing we can do together as a family where Howard doesn't get bored. We go to the zoo—he gets bored. We go on a picnic—he gets bored. We go boating —and it's an adventure every time."

Color Schemes & Curtains. The man who perhaps more than any other put the U.S. family afloat is a lean, greying Midwesterner named Harsen Alfred Smith, 51, board chairman of the Chris-Craft Corp. From Pompano Beach, Fla. Harsen Smith runs a complex of nine U.S. plants that turn out more than 8,000 water craft a year, from 15-ft. runabouts (at $1,995) to 66-ft. motor yachts ($139,000), dominating the powerboat field with sales of $40 million. More important, it was Harsen Smith and Chris-Craft that recognized, early in the 1930s, that the future of the U.S. boating industry lay not in speedboats or luxury yachts but in family boats designed for Everyman.

Chris-Craft launched its revolution in the teeth of the Depression. Boats had been pretty much a man's domain. Smith set out to build appeal for women. Chris-Craft designers worked up new ideas: bunk space, once kept to the Spartan minimum, was enlarged; cabins blossomed in bright color schemes and curtains; galleys, once closeted in deep isolation, were moved into the light and chatter of cabin life; heads (i.e., toilets), once hidden in the inaccessible reaches of the prow, were enclosed in privacy and placed amid-ships.* With mass-production know-how unmatched in the industry, Chris-Craft simultaneously managed to cut costs. The result was a comfortable cruiser that slept four, yet cost only a modest $3,500—the first time such a boat had been built within reach of the middle-income pocketbook.