Left: it’s several years since Peter Harken raced his own E-Skeeter Honeybucket… after finding a secret crack in the ice into which he piled painfully at high speed. Iceboats and scows have inevitably been a big part of the story of a marine engineering company based among the lakes of the midwest. With the powerful mainsheet purchases an iceboat needs to generate leach tension and mast bend, the reduction of friction is everything. This vintage stern-steerer (above) is decorated with Harken’s early ball bearing blocks
Notice the red line on many of our prod-
ucts that is a trademark of ours and recog- nisable. Our wonderful old Italian engineer Luciano Bonassi, now deceased, who hand drew with pen and ink thousands of our drawings in Italy came up with that red line. I used to marvel just watching and work-
ing with him drawing up a new idea. He could draw a 50mm line without measuring it. He could almost draw up a whole compli- cated internal assembly of a winch without measuring any part of it, really amazing. I’ve seen him design and produce production drawings of one of our smaller winches in one working day, unbelievable! They don’t make ’em like that any more! And talking about design, my beautiful,
talented wife, Edit, a very smart PhD Doctor of Dermatology, is right now in Milan, the heart of fashion in clothes, shoes and furni- ture. She’s in there looking and buying so I better get to the plant and work because it’s going to be expensive! Above all, more shoes, always more shoes. But she does have a good eye so she always looks pretty damn good in all that stuff – as opposed to me with my clothing coming from one of our ‘high-fash- ion’ midwestern department stores like Farm and Fleet where I can buy guys’ good stuff, like tyres, a battery charger and jeans under the same roof. Pretty neat, eh, except my wife is not impressed for some reason. SH: Some of the Milan shops can be pretty scary… PH: Oh yeah, very scary and if you don’t want a heart attack I’ve learnt not to ask Edit what the stuff costs!
We’ve just built a new house right next to
Pewaukee Lake, which ended up as a two- year process in total because we were heavily involved in the whole thing every day. It’s a completely modern house and we did a lot of design ourselves, along with a great builder from our yacht club and the architects. My wife did lots of the interior design
and, man, was I shocked at the price of that interior stuff, especially lighting and the furniture she picked in Italy and had shipped here. After lots of pain watching my finan- cial ability going into the toilet I stopped asking the cost of stuff and all became peace- ful and stress-free, with a happy loboto- mised look on my ‘What me, worry?’ face!! As usual with whatever she does, she did
a super job on the open-style interior for which she’s now receiving lots of accolades. In the meantime, her old Dutch-born frugal husband stands on the street at the end of the driveway with a tin cup and on his shoulder a little monkey with a little red hat beating a little brass drum! SH: So frugality is your middle name… PH:Olaf and I started out 50 years ago with almost zero money building dinghies and every expense, as we grew, was looked at: ‘is it good value?’ So, yeah, we were frugal for a long time and still basically are to this day – I still look at things in terms of whether they’re good value or not. We fly economy even if I could fly busi-
ness class because business class is bad value for just a more comfortable seat and edible food – even on long overseas flights. Besides, our employees fly economy so naturally we
do. Now take shoes, shoes are bad value to me, but a necessity and I wear the few I have until they fall off. But shoes, and lots of them, in my wife’s mind have an entirely different meaning of value which I won’t get into because I’m not that dumb! So it’s hard to get out of old habits and I’m still an old tight wad regarding stuff I deem bad value. SH: So Harken Inc, big company, small start but always the reputation for innovation… PH: So far it’s been an interesting trip! And a few steps along the way still stand out. The big one that really got us started was
the Ball Bearing block with the plastic balls. And that was purely accidental. I was at the University of Wisconsin on a swimming scholarship and, being a very undisciplined kid, regardless of the great upbringing of my WWII ‘Greatest Generation’ parents, I spent most of my so-called academic career, choke, choke, living the utopian university life of experiencing and doing everything except going to class which I did do only on occasion to hopefully pass final exams. My grades directly reflected my interest in
academia but, man, did I have a good time. Competitive swimming is a great sport but not a very brain-busting tactical sport. I mean, what do you think about while pounding your guts out going up and down the pool except pain? I’d been doing it since 4th grade and if you want to be a top swimmer the coaches don’t want you to do any other sport that would stiffen your loose fish-like body. That was OK while I was living in the Philippines, but here I was in
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