Sport: Yachts & Yachtsmen

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Depression has been a gloomy sunset gun for many U.S. yacht-owners but it has in no way curtailed Commodore Winthrop Williams Aldrich's enjoyment of his favorite sport. If the Walloping Windowblind was a capital ship for an ocean trip, so is Chase National Bank, world's largest, of which Mr. Aldrich became president when it merged with Equitable Trust, whose counsel he had been for many years and of which he had become president in 1929. Son of Rhode Island's Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich, he did his first sailing off Warwick, R.I. in a mainsail-rigged dory, his first cruising on his father's steam yacht. He graduated from Harvard in 1907, was admitted to the bar in New York five years later. As representative of the Rockefellers (his sister Abby married John Davison Rockefeller Jr.), he led the fight to oust Robert Wright Stewart from Standard Oil of Indiana. It was partly the family connection that made him head of the Rockefeller-controlled Equitable Trust. It is not probable that, like the crew of the Walloping Windowblind. Commodore Aldrich will ever be compelled to dine on the bark of the Rug-Bug tree or to traffic with a Chinese junk. A member of 18 clubs and seven directorates, including the board of American Telephone & Telegraph Co., he can have contempt for the wildest blow on shore as at sea.

When a man is elected Rear-Commodore of the New York Yacht Club, it is clear that, in the normal course of events, he will hold the office for three years, then become successively Vice-Commodore and Commodore. Commodore Aldrich succeeds Vincent Astor (who succeeded Harold Sterling ["Mike''] Vanderbilt) and will probably be succeeded, year after next, by Junius Spencer Morgan Jr. His fellow members have been pleased and amused by the crisp, business-like manner in which Commodore Aldrich conducts even such informal meetings as last fortnight's aboard the Viking.

Head of the syndicate which built and raced the cup-winning Enterprise last year. Skipper Aldrich was her navigator in the trials. He thinks her run against Yankee off Martha's Vineyard was "the greatest race of its kind ever sailed." In her races against Shamrock V. Skipper Vanderbilt sailed Enterprise but the Aldrich pennant, blue border and blue anchor on a white field, flew from her $40,000 mast. A better sailor than ex-Commodore Astor, Commodore Aldrich maintains no lavish steam yacht like the Nourmahal; his Wayfarer is a smaller but serviceable boat. Like ex-Commodore Vanderbilt, his favorite sport ashore is tennis. One of his brothers, William T. Aldrich, is Commodore of the Eastern Yacht Club at Boston. The New York Yacht Club's Commodore is an affable and patrician boatman, a lively but retiring enthusiast. His bitterest disdain is windless weather because it makes yachting "not very enjoyable."