Boat U.S. - March 2009 - (Page 70)

“Don’t worry, Willie,” young Martin promised his disappointed pal. “We’ll keep saving up and come back.” True to his word, armed with the deposit, the boys excitedly rushed back to the rental office a week later. Even now, 66 years later, the painful memory of what happened next still etches sadness into Bob Martin’s face. “The man said, ‘I don’t know why you keep coming down here. We’re not going to rent to no n ’ The tears came rolling down my face. I ran home and told my mother, and she said, ‘Bob, that’s just the way things are.’ I remember saying, ‘Momma, when I get a real job, I’m gonna have me a boat.’” Though still only 12, Martin asked the daughter of the pharmacist if he could use her garage on Capitol Hill as a workshop. She agreed, so long as he cleaned and stoked her furnace and did odd jobs. “I was determined,” he says. In the drugstore at work was a magazine stand where Martin devoured issues of Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. One day he came across plans for a kayak canoe. “It was a boat, shaped like a canoe, but ribbed like a kayak,” he says. He tackled the framework with relative ease. A white shoemaker named Jimmy, who lived around the corner from the workshop, noticed what the boy was doing and offered to help. “When I had the frame made, and the canvas cut, Jimmy said he’d sew it for me so it fit like a glove. He taught me how to waterproof and stretch it.” Together they took the 14-foot boat to the water in Jimmy’s small pickup. “Jimmy probably weighed about 250 pounds. I was about 110 pounds soaking wet,” Martin laughs. But the boat floated, and Bob Martin was well and truly BoatU.S. Magazine March 2009 hooked. He continued to build and buy bigger and faster boats. Then in 1962 he bought one too big to keep at his house. By now, some of his friends had built boats too, and Martin had formed a club, the D.C. Mariners, with his young son Chubby as secretary. They’d go from house to house to hold their meetings, occasionally having them in the back of one of the members’ vans. Great Minds Think Alike Lewis T. Green and Bob Martin, the onetime teacher and his pupil, were about to have a serendipitous reunion. By the 1960s, Green’s Seafarers Yacht Club in D.C. was falling on hard times, and experiencing something of a defection. “In the beginning Mr. Green had lots of doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs, people with a little money,” says Martin. “But as they bought bigger boats, they didn’t want to be on the Anacostia anymore.” That resulted in many members uprooting and reforming in Annapolis. That breakaway group, the Seafarers Yacht Club Of Annapolis, formed in 1949, is still thriving, and will celebrate its half-century anniversary this year. Back on the Anacostia, the original Seafarers Yacht Club was in danger of closing. Green was about to retire from his job, his wife was ill, and he wanted to move out of the city, but he was equally determined to preserve the precious piece of ground for which he’d fought. Bob Martin, meanwhile, needed somewhere to dock his boat, and approached his old teacher Vintage photos courtesy of BoB Martin’s collection

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Boat U.S. - March 2009

Boat U.S. - March 2009 Contents Reader Forum Boat U.S. Reports What’s New In The Brew? The Perfect Paint Job Launch Into Spring Boats Gear Wheels One Mom, Two Teens, No Exit So, Nigel Had This Idea Ice Devices It Was A Club Of Their Own Expanding The Boating Universe Tech Connection A Case Study In Getting Results Let’s All Do This Together Classifieds Member Benefits/At Your Service

Boat U.S. - March 2009

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