The Press: The Water Boys

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Away from their grey skyscraper office on Manhattan's teeming 4?nd Street last week, the editors of a thriving monthly magazine got ready for a weekend of work without a mutter of complaint. One editor was off to Newport, R.I. to sail his 58-ft. yawl Caribbee in the 466-mile, 30-boat race to Annapolis, Md. The editor of the magazine headed for Norwalk, Conn., where he climbed aboard a launch and ran the weekly sailboat race of the Norwalk Yacht Club. Two of the magazine's ad staff were out on Long Island Sound racing their 19-ft. Lightning-class sloops. For all of them, the weekend on the water was the same mixture of work and editorial play that keeps them glued to their jobs despite the lure of better pay elsewhere. Their magazine: Yachting (circ. 45,675), a salty log for U.S. pleasure sailors.

From the sea blue of its cover, framing a color painting, often of a ship under full sail, through more than 150 pages laden with enticing boat ads, articles and pictures, Yachting is more than a pleasure sailor's handbook. Every issue is loaded to the gunwales with first-person true-adventure tales of men against the sea that are read as avidly by landlubbers as by yachtsmen. More than 75% of Yachting's articles come from yachtsmen (rate: $105 per 3,500-word article) who, with the help of Yachting's editors, set down their experiences with loglike authenticity. For the more practical-minded, the magazine runs boat plans and tips on everything from racing to cooking eggs Benedict in a ketch's galley.

At the Helm. No Yachting staffer is happier with a deck underfoot than the magazine's 81-year-old Publisher, Herbert L. Stone, a small (5 ft. 6 in.), ruddy-faced, crinkle-eyed sailor who has been going down to the sea in yachts ever since he was a boy in Charleston, S.C. In 1908, after working up to be assistant paymaster on the New York Central Railroad, Stone changed his course abruptly. At 36, he took the helm of Yachting, which his friend Oswald Garrison Villard, publisher of the New York Evening Post and the Nation, had started the year before. Editor Stone decided to make Yachting more popular by doing the same for yachting: he gave a big boost to ocean racing, revived the famed Bermuda Race.

Stone, who still shows up almost every day at the office, has owned 18 small boats (i.e., less than 41 ft.) in his lifetime, now finds it "more comfortable to let my friends invite me to sail with them" instead of keeping his own boat. Publisher Stone has a simple explanation for Yachting's doubling of its circulation since the war. Says he: "There are more pleasure boats in the water than ever before. Once a yachtsman was a rich man who owned a big yacht with a paid crew. All that is changed now. A yachtsman today is anybody that owns a pleasure boat larger than a rowboat. The small yachtsman is the backbone of yachting."