Penny, my SWIMPAL, and I were sitting at the table and talking about boats after watching a segment on the Speedvison channel. YUP, on occassion they will show something about boats and wooden ones at that. We got talking about when we were still in prep school. I would ride home on the bus when Penny and my swimming practices did not coincide. The bus ran along the Brooklyn waterfront, and one day I looked up from the book I was reading and saw a neat boat on the pierhead, all set up on blocks. The next day I got off the bus at that stop and wandered in and looky-looed around the boat.

Fellow spots me and asks me what I was doing? Told him I was interested in boats. Turns out he was a sign painter and had just bought this boat from an estate over on the Jersey side of the Hudson. We chatted for a bit and it was decided that starting the next aftetnoon I would begin working as an unpaid apprentice helping to restore a 60 foot Rumrunner with dual Liberty engines and a huge barn door rudder. The booze was not hidden below decks, rather the false stack was constructed similar to the drum magazine of a 'tommy gun'. Several levels, spring loaded would hold anumber of cases of booze and theCoast Guard was none the wiser. The boat was kept in the family after prohibition but scarcely used, gradually it got forgotten and sank at its moorings. The sign painter bought it with the idea of retiring to Florida, and using the boat as a liveaboard.

I spent every hour I could working on that boat with the painter and his wife. He was the one who introduced me to MYERS RUM at the corner bar, a typical longshoremens hangout. Tile floor, little shaker bottles with  red pepper juice in it and the longshoremen would shake a few drops into their beer mugs and in the back the steam table with meatloaf-pot roast, etc..

How he conned the wharf finger into  letting him campout and restore that boat on a Brooklyn dock I will never know. I graduated that year and went out to East Hampton for the summer when I returned Penny and I went back to see the couple and the boat was gone. We inquired at the saloon and were told that he had floated the boat and moved it to one of the creeks near Coney Island. We tracked it down and located an address for him. He had died several weeks earlier and his wife had it up for sale.

All that spring Penny would ride the bus after she got home from her activities to be with me and help out on the boat with the fellows wife,cleaning out the interior from years of lying in the mud.

Never did learn what was the final disposition of that boat nor who designed or built her.

Just remember that she had Liberty engines, monel fuel tanks, mahogony hull, bronze fastening, and that neat stack.

Shucks, memories can be neat, or so says I.