JUNE 3, 2025 – (Cont.) Beginning my sophomore year of high school, I transferred from Sterling School in the Green Mountain State to Interlochen Arts Academy, located in the wilds just south of Traverse City, Michigan. The campus lay between Duck Lake and Green Lake, each a sizable body of water conducive to small craft navigation. As part of our phys ed class during the weeks of accommodating weather, we learned how to sail aboard a fleet of Alcort Sunfish and Snipe class dinghies—all of which were equipped with daggerboards (Sunfish) or centerboards (Snipes), allowing us the full range of the points of sail, not just running, as had been the case with the Alumacraft up at the lake the summer before. A minute into the first class I was smitten by the sport. As far as I could tell, it was the next best thing to skiing.
The next summer I was determined to acquire a Sunfish for sailing on Grindstone Lake. As Mr. Thrifty-to-a-Fault, Dad wasn’t interested in appropriating any funds toward the pursuit. After all, why buy something when you could make your own out of materials at your disposal in store and in plain sight? Mother wasn’t as frugal as Dad, but she didn’t dare subsidize whimsical enterprises without Dad’s approval. I would have to mow for hire a million lawns or . . . two lawns—Mrs. Gage’s next door and the Moore’s across the street—half a million times between June 1 and August 1.
As things turned out, I mowed the two lawns twice a week and talked Mother into an allowance for mowing our lawn plus other household chores.
The other half of the equation, of course, was the expense side—the cost of a Sunfish. Back in those days, of course, there was no internet, no Google, no FB marketplace. There was the phone book, or more precisely, the Yellow Pages. I looked up “Boats” and found a place in White Bear Lake and several around gigantic Lake Minnetonka, but all were beyond the range of my bicycle, and I was still a long way from getting my driver’s license. More critically, a new Sunfish cost a fortune, and the want ads in the paper produced no used prospects.
An alternative arose, however, inside the Sears Roebuck catalog stored on a shelf in the den. For a third of the price of a new Sunfish, I could purchase a “Fleetwind,” a lateen rig, and otherwise in the same class as a Sunfish. The total cost, delivered to our driveway, was just under $300.
I’d scraped and saved but was $100 short, and my earnings projections—calculated and re-calculated repeatedly—wouldn’t get me to $300 before I’d have to return to school in the fall. With August fast approaching—the month Mother and Dad (and my sister Jenny and I) would spend at the lake—I felt desperate. I couldn’t talk to Dad about the Fleetwind, but I knew I could bend Mother’s ear and possibly twist her arm. My ace in the hole was her affinity for boats. My wild card was her oft-stated support of “free enterprise.” This phrase, I knew, she got from Dad, but it fit neatly into the business legacy established by her grandfather and expanded by her father—a nationally recognized “mover and shaker” in the moving and warehouse industry (of course!).
I sat down with her one afternoon and explained my goal (sailing on Grindstone Lake yet that summer), my need (investment capital), and my proposal: I would sell her “shares” in my sailboat “enterprise,” with dividends in the form of “rides whenever she wished.” She took the bait and told me to “make up a stock certificate” for her to hold in safe-keeping. She’d fund her investment out of her piano teaching earnings, she said—her way of communicating that Dad wouldn’t have any veto power over her decision. Her subscription to my nautical dream put me on top of a big cresting wave.
Giddy with success, I decided to raise additional working capital from a source over which I had influence: my kid sister Jenny. In her case, however, I made up a stock certificate in advance to show that she’d be “getting something” for her money. I didn’t think she could be enticed by my dividend plan alone or at all, since she was more in Dad’s landlubber camp than in Mother’s nautical lane. In any event, I managed to persuade Jenny to let go of a few dollars from her cash-on-hand savings that would otherwise have been frittered away on candy at Matheny’s corner store.
With the requisite funds in hand, I rode my bike to the small Sears outlet two blocks north of Main Street in downtown Anoka and placed the order for the Fleetwind. Delivery was scheduled for just a few days out. (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
