This is about my favorite habit, sailing and driving boats, which I have disregarded for the decade of these Chronicles . It seemed to me, as I began to write these essays, that I should share the topics about radiology and not focus on my favorite pastimes. But now that I have passed my eightieth birthday, here is what I am as eager about as writing.
By the time I finished high school, I was a serious swimmer. So I got a job as a teacher in a boy’s camp on an island where everyone and everything had to be ferried from the landing via small boats. I drove outboard power boats. The next summer, I was a lifeguard on a state park that also had a large boat harbor and a franchise of sail boats. I learned to handle the sail boats and spent my spare time taking people out sailing. That same summer, I met people who owned larger power cruisers. One owner even let me live on his boat the whole summer at no cost. In the next summer, just before returning to college, several of us sailed some 300 miles to the far end of the lake and back on 19-foot Lightning sailboats. And a week later, I helped a boat owner take his large cruiser across the Ohio and up the Mississippi Rivers to St. Louis, Missouri. The next summer, I helped him take his cruiser home from Chicago down the Illinois River, back into St. Louis.
For graduate school, I was accepted at the University of Wisconsin. It is located around five lakes. The university had a sailing club, which I joined immediately. A few weeks later, I was president of the sailing club and very active until the lake froze and thawed in the spring.
A year later, when I was in the Army, I was assigned to a headquarters in Chicago. As most of you know, this is on the south end of Lake Michigan. I was able to find a friend who got me aboard several racing sailboats. Also, the colonel who commanded the unit where I was attached involved me to help him buy a power boat. I helped him work on it and then take it from Chicago down the Illinois River to St. Louis and then down the Mississippi, up the Ohio and into the Tennessee River. Two years later, two friends and I bought a used, somewhat decrepit sailboat with a mooring in one of the Chicago harbors. We worked on it for 3 years and then sold it. And the next year, another friend, a Navy reservist, obtained a large aluminum sailboat that I helped race, including my first Mackinac race from Chicago to the north end of Lake Michigan, some 300 miles. I made another decade of Mackinac races, some in Lake Huron.
By that time, I was working for the American College of Radiology. To my delight, I began to make friends with boat owners. Whenever I had to go to San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, New Orleans, Boston, Galveston, or any other harbor, I would go a day early and sail with my friends. And I still sailed in Chicago.
In 1969, I was transferred for the American College of Radiology to Washington, DC. That was only 45 miles from Annapolis, Maryland, base of the US Naval Academy and one of the major sailing centers in the country. For some years, a friend working at the Navy Center would take me along on some of its boats. Then, my friend left the Navy.
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