Circus minimus – much adventure, little drama – Part I
In all my years of writing profiles I’ve always wanted to include the sentence: ‘As a kid he ran away to the circus.’ Now, thanks to the honour of writing this tribute to Bill Mattison, who died on 25 April at 93, I can do just that… without stretching the truth even a tiny bit – Carol Cronin
After hearing so much about Bill Mattison’s amazing ability to ‘engineer and build any- thing’ I would have loved to have met him. And since he never just sat around maybe I could have watched those big meaty hands working away at one of his many skills. Scarfing a damaged iceboat plank. Repair- ing a carbon mast. Welding up a replace- ment piece for a photo developing machine. Or decorating a tiny wagon wheel for the model circus he started as a kid and contin- ued to add to for the rest of his very full life. How could one man achieve so much
success in so many different mediums, on so many different scales, from larger-than-life America’s Cup boats down to half-inch-to- the-foot scale models? Thankfully plenty of ‘Bill quotes’ and
stories survived his passing, and he was already well recognised for victories on both hard and soft water. He has been elected to three very different elite institu- tions: the US National Sailing Hall of Fame (2020), the Madison (Wisconsin) Sports Hall of Fame (2017), and the Circus Model Builders Hall of Fame (2015). And defi- nitely not because of any self-promotion. Despite winning more International
Skeeter iceboat championships than anyone else (14) as well as countless Scow trophies, and building an incredible miniature circus that includes a steam-powered calliope (which plays recognisable circus tunes), Mattison was far more likely to use his usu- ally few words to praise or encourage others. But before I get so deep into the count-
less details a worthy tribute deserves, I want to thank everyone who shared their memories with me, especially Bill’s great friend and iceboat rival Peter Harken. Linda Lindquist also performed intro-
ductions to many friends and family and graciously turned over all the material she’d pulled together for her own planned profile of Bill. And Mauretta, Bill’s widow, was kind
enough to entrust a west coast stranger (me) with the lone copy of a book that their daughter put together for her father. Any mistakes are, of course, mine alone.
36 SEAHORSE
Early achievements Bill was born in 1928 in West Virginia. In 1930 his family moved to Madison, Wis- consin, where he spent the rest of his life. There are four lakes downtown and ‘I ice- boated when I learned to walk, basically,’ Bill told a reporter in 2017. ‘First thing I had was a sled with a sail on it.’ According to his Madison Sports Hall
of Fame nomination, that sail had started life as a bedsheet. ‘For his next iceboat,’ the text continues, ‘Bill “repurposed” some iron fence posts into runners.’ (In another article Bill calls that same act ‘stealing’, before adding as justification that he was ‘putting them to better use’.)
He was equally likely to ‘repurpose’
stuff found around town for soft-water sailing, the nomination adds. ‘When old boats washed up on the shore it wasn’t long before [he and his friends] discovered that a bucket of hot road tar begged from a street crew could waterproof one of these derelicts into a fine vessel.’ But it was not sailing or boatbuilding (or
‘repurposing’) that led to his first two men- tions in the local press; it was the miniature circus he built from scratch, starting at the age of six, to give a set of cast iron acro- batic clowns (a gift from his grandfather) a suitable place to perform. According to Bill, he created the very first wagons of the
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