ON Mentors and Mentoring

I wrote some like this in the WB forums and I am posting a new one here.

Hope it is enjoyed.

On Mentors and Mentoring


MENTOR as my Oxford Concise defines one as: an experienced and trusted advisor.

I was fortunate to have several in my apprenticeship days. Alec Davidson of Anderson and Christofani, Matt Escobar from Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Phil Clarke a boatbuilder and fine woodworker of Mantoloking, New Jersey.

I was but a 'green pea' just starting my apprenticeship at A&C when Alec took me under his wing. Physically he would remind one of Barry Fitzgerald, the noted character actor in films of the 1940's and 1950's. Small in stature with a quick grin and an unhurried attitude towards things yet the canny wink that bespoke of knowing just how to do a job. Above all he had that principal defining quality that all good mentors should have, patience along with a sense of humor.
Alec was from the north of Ireland whilst my ancestors were from the south of Ireland. That had no negative effect on our relationship rather, it gave us a common link to build on. Alec was full of those little tricks of the shipwright trade that make a tough job that much easier. When we would be confronted by a particularly difficult job he would say, "aye Laddy Buck, Me and Thee and We, aye all three of us will work it out and be on time for tea too, I'm thinkin".

Matt Escobar was a metal worker and a perfectionist in the true sense of the word. He was always looking to improve some tool or impliment he had acquired during one of his frequent trips to the salvage yards of the San Francisco Bay Area. His self built house and shop in Sonoma, California was the result of his efforts. For example he found two Monel tanked gas fired hot water heaters. After he got them to his shop and inspected them, he found that there was nothing wrong with them beyond clogged burners. He fitted new ones and installed the heaters in his house. One for domestic hot water and the other for the hot water radiant heat system he designed and built for the home.
Matt had begun his apprenticeship in metalworking in one of the several custom body shops in the Los Angeles area that built special car bodies for the movie stars at that time. He was a whiz at welding, metal shaping on the English Wheel, forging parts for his home and shop. When I first met Matt, he had just torn down his 1956 Ford pickup truck for a rebuild. He had laid several large canvas sheets on the floor of his shop and as he cleaned each piece he would bring it in and lay it in order on the canvas. He took every part of that truck apart, every nut, bolt and body part. Each was cleaned in the method it required, be it sand blasting, glass beading, paint stripping, thread chasing etc..
As each piece was done it was immediately given a coating of primer paint and put in an oven he had found in one of his forays in the salvage yards just for that purpose. The primer would be slow baked onto the piece and when set would be placed in its position on the canvas. Only when each piece was cleaned and primered did he begin on the engine. That too received the very same treatment, piece by piece.
I was flattered and proud when he came to me and asked me to make a new bed for the truck out of Apitong.

Phil Clarke I met when we moved back to the east coast when my father suffered a debilitating stroke. I needed a job and being a stranger to the area knew nothing of working opportunities. I made a couple of visits to local lumber yards inquiring about woodworking jobs in the area, the New Jersey shore around Spring Lake. One fellow mentioned a small boatbuilder and woodworker a few miles south on Barnegat Bay by the name of Phil Clarke. He said he was always swamped with work and might be interested in someone like me who was acquainted with wooden boats.
I drove to Phil's shop and introduced myself to this grey haired bespeckled crusty old man and he asked me a few questions of a boatbuilding nature. I guess I answered them to his satisfaction for he then asked me to come into his house for a cup of coffee. So began a warm close relationship with Phil that lasted til he died.
He had a way with tools, a fine eye for good work and, a canny knack of sizing up potential customers.
When a person would stop by his shop, just off a busy road from the beach front , he would listen, make a few sketches, rub his chin and give a ballpark price on the item in question. The person would either balk at the figure which in that case Phil would thank them for stopping by and show them the door or, if the prospective customer seemed agreeable to the price he would bring out his "book" and write down the info and stick the sketches to the page with a stapler. The "book" I am talking about was a ledger Phil entered all info for a potential job in.
He never set a completion time but rather he would say something like...'I am busy for the next X weeks but when I get caught up I will call you and make more definite arraingments, agreed?'. This was accepted by 99 % of the folks.

Now, what happened was this, Phil would really be busy but, he did not do work in the order it came in the door. He would complete one job, dig out the 'book' an scan the pages. He was looking for something a bit different from what he had just completed. He would then call the prospective customer and the conversation would go like this..."hello this is Phil Clarke down Mantoloking way. You recall that xxx you inquired about me making for you? Well it so happens I have some time for it right now, still interested?". If in the affirmative he would then mention a price. Always a bit higher than the ballpark one. If there was agreement he would give an approximate date of completion and so ended the conversation. He didn't ask for deposits and he rarely got 'stiffed' on no shows. If he did,he put the item in a smal showroom adjacent to his shop for the many lookie-loo's that dropped by in the summer months. The price tag on the item in the showroom was a bit higher than the price quoted to the original customer. He did this after someone told him that a smart alek had deliberately not picked up an item because he knew it would wind up in the showroom and at that time Phil was putting a price just abit lower on it to get it out of the place. That person had a fill-in stop by, look at it and pay the lower price, with Phil non the wiser but a bit poorer.
Phil was the one who got me the Barn Restoration job, besides farming out other stuff to me.
Thanks Phil you saved nay you helped me put bacon on the table that cold winter on the Jersey Shore!

PAX

 

Lovely anecdotes, Dave. I have to run off to Halifax right now, but when I return this evening, I'll repay you with a story about my meetings with David Stevens, the noted schooner builder of Lunenburg.

 

Well, I didn't make it to Halifax, but I did promise a story, so here goes...

I don't know if the way I earned my profession is better or worse than any other, but it seems to have served me reasonably well. At least I seemed to have not fallen into some of the more common traps. You see, I came to the boat design biz via a rather round-about manner.

When I was in High School, during the summer vacations I went to sea. I worked on an old tub of a ship that carried dynamite from Nova Scotia to South America, and rum from the Caribbean back to Nova Scotia. I never decided which was the most dangerous leg of the trip, but I learned about seamanship and ships from sailors who early in their careers had worked on pure sailing ships such as commercial fishing and coasting schooners. There was lots of time on watch and below for them to regale a polliwog with tales of "real" ships.

When I got out of high school, I was all a'thrilled of makin' ART in the form of photographs. Not the commonplace, mundane (profitable) weddings and babies stuff, but award-winning gallery and commerical stuff. Adams, Stieglitz, Karsh, et al. So, full of youthful piss 'n' vinigar, off I went to technical art college and thence to set the world on fire. In the end, I didn't gain fame as a photographic artist, but I did get a good indication of the technical side of good art, and a bit of the essence of visual design. I found out why things that look good look good.

Having had my fill of academia and the commercial art world for a while, I went to work, alternating between going to sea on oceanographic research and fishing vessels and building aerial cable TV systems. Lots of hard work and bloody hands, plus the chance to travel a lot. Learned how to drink, saw how easy is is to be seriously hurt by your working environment, and understood how to be part of a cohesive team. One of the fellows I sailed with was the closest thing to a real "Popeye the Sailorman" that I have ever met - born on a full-rigged ship, a professional sailor since he was fourteen, held an international master's certificate endorsed for sail only, more tattoo's than the circus painted lady, and an absolute wizard with rope & wire. He taught me the "Zen" of ships, though he didn't use such a lubberly term.

At twenty-six, I got the chance to go back to university to study naval architecture, a topic that had become increasingly of interest during my sea-time. I studied about stability and strength of materials and arrangements, all the time wondering how those classmates of mine could comprehend the essence of these subjects when they had no experience on a ship to relate it to; no visceral reality of it. You gain so much more appreciation of the need to get the numbers right when calculating the strength of a single-fixed-point column when you remember that this is what makes the stanchion strong enough to keep yer butt on board when a big greenie comes on deck and tries to take you home with him. I learned a lot about ships and boats in school, but realized that it was greatly enhanced by the sea-knowledge I had acquired over the previous decade. That realization made me think about how much else I didn't know about ships and boats -such as how to build them - due to lack of first-hand experience.

Upon graduation from university, I took my newfound realization of how dumb I was to heart and rather than rush right off to a junior design job in an ivory tower, I opted to self-assign myself to working in boat construction for at least two years before I went a-designin'. I was very fortunate in that things were hoppin' in my home area, and I got the chance to work at several shops in short order, usually as a grunt labourer assisting a knowlegeable builder. It was everything I expected it to be: I got taunted as "college boy", was given all the crappy jobs, was usually launched from my job on the day the boat was launched from the shop, etc. But in two short years I got to work with many craftsmen in shops that built traditional wood boats, wood-epoxy boats, aluminum boats, and fibreglass boats. And I learned more about how dumb I was. Here I was with two college degrees and a passport with about thirty national stamps in it, and on just about any given day some old codger with a Grade 8 education could confound me with his knowledge of some aspect of building a boat. Would I ever know enough to design a boat?

One day, I summoned up the courage to go out to the home workshop of David Stevens, who was about half-ways through building another one of his beautiful cruising schooners - Kathy Anne II, if I recall correctly. I had no defined reason to see Mr. Stevens, but was merely hoping that by being in conversation with him some pearls of wisdom might be shed along with the sweat of his brow, and that I might gain some enlightenment from being splashed by them. Knowing that Mr. Stevens, though a polite and gentle man, did not suffer fools well or long, I was more than a bit worried about how I would present myself. After all, this man was the grand-master of traditional Nova Scotia schooner builders and had displayed his skills at the World Exposition in Montreal in 1967, during which HRH Prince Phillip of Britain asked if he could be introduced the this fine craftsman. How the hell did I expect to be given the time of day?

Mr. Stevens met me at the fence, and listened patiently while I stammered out my ill-defined mission. He invited me in to look at the yacht in his shop, and explained with words and gestures of his huge hands how the remainder of the unfinished boat would look. We finished the boatshop tour in short order and as we were standing in the doorway of the shop admiring the view along her graceful hull, he asked the dreaded question; "So you know a bit about boats, do you?" I knew this question was coming; it always does. How was I to answer it to this man, who was almost triple my age, with twenty-five times the years of experience that I had in this field, yet was, when compared to me, woefully under-educated. I sensed that further conversation - on this day and any other - turned on my next sentence or two. Flattery isn't very good currency in Lunenburg County, and boasting is worth just about as much. Pointing out our disparate ages and education level would not do much good, nor would sycophancy. I wanted to learn from the man, and he had no good reason to teach me anything. So I said what motivated me to seek him out in the first place:

"Mr. Stevens, I learned a lot about boats in school, and a lot about them while I sailed on them, but the closer I look the more I realize that I don't know near enough. I came here today to talk to a man who has had a lot of time to maybe make sense of that."

Mr. Stevens looked at me a bit, smiled a bit after a while, and finally said, "Would you like to come to the house to meet my wife and have a glass of lemonade?"

I met with David on several occasions after that day, and he was always generous and gracious and I always came away with knowledge that I would never have found out about in books or classrooms. Things like how to cast keelbolt through-holes in a lead keel so that there is no boring or cleaning up to do, or how to take the cup out of a plank, or how to test a timber to tell if it is sound enough for a spar. Unfortunately, he died a few short years after our initial meeting, so I never got the chance to ask as many questions as I wanted to, but I figure I got about ten years of education out of the short time we spent together. He was so very quotable in his direct, South Shore way. The two things he said to me almost every time we met have guided me in my relationships with all the boatbuilders whom I have met and who build to my designs are;

"Anybody can take a few hours or days and get some book-learnin', but it takes years to get some useful hand-learnin'. "

and

"Even the lowest person in the boatshop knows something about a boat that you don't."

Thank you, Mr. Stevens, I try to be a better designer by taking those pearls of wisdom to heart every time I walk into a boatshop.

 

Nice one Mike!



I have Schooner Master in the bookcase right alongside this here electronical doo-dad.

 

What a great idea for a thread - and thank you both for sharing such wonderful stories.

 

Dave & Michael...you've both been great cyber-mentors. In the past couple of years, I've learned things from both of you (and a surprisingly small handful of others) that I couldn't have picked up in a book. Thank you.

 

I was fortunate in my early years as a machinist to have a couple of mentors who would constantly amaze me with what they knew. Those years set the pattern for the rest of my life. One was often heard to say, “If you want to know it, you must do it”, that still works for me today. The little I know about boats is from books and from making mistakes and correcting them. Of course now I have many mentors from around the world.

Dave and Mike, thanks for everything.

Gary

 

Wonderful anecdotes...thanks.