Opposite: in his element… Bill Mattison suits up for another Skeeter race, the helmet bearing witness to the endless knocks received before the much later introduction of some basic driver protection. As for the gloves, substance over style was a lifelong mantra. Above: probably the most famous Class A stern-steerer of all time, Mary B won eight Northwest Iceboat Championships between 1949 and 1992 (sic) – the latter after being immaculately restored with the assistance of many of her original builders including Bill Mattison. Built of Sitka spruce, this 39-footer weighs in at nearly a ton – she is now owned by the Ice Boat Foundation of Wisconsin
Mattison Brothers Circus out of ‘Kraft Cheese boxes, with Chinese checkers for wheels.’ In 1941 he set up the show on a street corner with the help of two friends, and the teenagers collected a few bucks from passing admirers that were donated to charity. The Wisconsin State Journal noted that even in its first incarnation the show was electrified, lit with Christmas lights and cooled with air-conditioning… A year later the same paper ran a front-
page article about Bill’s increasingly elabo- rate mini-circus (well below a huge head- line promising ‘tremendous victory’ in the Pacific War). The headline was ‘Tiny Circus Boasts Barker, Hot Dog Stand,’ though the follow-on seems even more enticing: ‘Boy, 13, Runs 300-piece Toy Big Top.’ It was around this same time that Bill
himself famously ran away to join a real full-sized circus. He spent a summer or two as a roustabout for Barnum & Bailey, later claiming that during the war years ‘they’d take any warm body’. Once the manager promised to return him home safely to his parents before school started up again, but instead they let him stay on… perhaps real- ising that such an adventure would be the best education of all.
An accidental career At 16 Bill started a bicycle-based runner service that picked up photo film at the local Air Force base and delivered devel- oped prints back to his customers. By the time he sold the company half a century later Star Photo had become a Madison institution – and Bill was the go-to fix-it guy for some very big names. ‘He got into the photo processing busi-
ness himself,’ Peter Harken explains. ‘And he became extremely good at it – so good that the US Government used him for their very critical and most secret photos. ‘They would fly a guy in with a brief-
case shackled to his arm that had films in it, and Bill would process the photos. It
was always very hush-hush.’ Bill also helped Eastman Kodak build
and maintain automatic photo processing machines all over the country, Harken adds, before confirming a story I’d heard about a DC-3 the company kept on standby for his personal travel. ‘True, they would bring in their plane from Rochester and fly him to the site. ‘Because of his mechanical ability and
insight he’d just start working on a problem without ever asking for help – or waiting for permission to do things!’
For the love of the sport Bill really got hooked on iceboats in the mid-1940s. First he helped build the Mary B, an A-boat that was one of the fastest stern-steerers in the world; at the builder’s shop he eventually graduated from carrying wood and sweeping floors to ‘glue mixer’. Next he built his own one-design Rene-
gade, which unfortunately soon after com- pletion was destroyed by a fire in the family basement during the winter of 1949. Less than a year later he was about to
make his very first start in Snapshot, a brand-new Renegade he’d built, when it was mowed down by an iceboat Bill used to crew on (‘which turned it into “All Shot”). No one wore a helmet in those days, and
even spectating was dangerous; once Bill was standing on the ice watching a race when a passing forestay hit him hard enough to slice open his face from left temple to right jaw. He also spent a year in hospital after hitting a hole in the ice on a practice run, damaging his kidney, liver and spleen – and disintegrating the iceboat. ‘I’m full of sponges,’ he often quipped. Many years later, asked about that
accident by a reporter who thought such danger should at least provide some finan- cial reward, Bill disagreed. ‘There’s no money in it at all,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s so appealing about it. There’s a raw element out there, where
everybody, every boat, has a chance. It’s fickle and a challenge every time you sail. It’s all for the love of the sport.’
Korean winter In 1951 Bill went off to Korea to serve in the US Army Topographic Unit, a title Peter Harken claims is much too ‘nice’ for the dangerous job of night reconnaissance. ‘I was involved in the army myself,’ Harken says, ‘and night recon was the worst damn unit in the world to be in… ‘They would go out at night and crawl
on their bellies and go behind enemy lines to discover where machine gun nests were at. A lot of the guys didn’t come home; I think the attrition rates were almost 50 per cent. It was a terrible, terrible job. ‘When they finally brought Bill home
he’d lost 70lb and they wouldn’t let Mauretta see him for several days. But those are subjects that he would hardly ever talk about. All he ever said was, “It was bad; it was ugly.”’ Bill would later tell another iceboat
buddy that on the trip home from the war he laid up full-sized plans for his next ice- boat on the deck of the ship. ‘He’s one of a kind,’ Peter Harken says, adding that Bill never wasted a single moment. ‘They broke the mould after they created Bill, I tell you.’
Soft water and the first Honeybucket Back from the war and back up to weight once again, Bill started sailing Scows in the summer. He hadn’t sailed on soft water before, because ‘To get something that kept the water out cost money,’ as he put it in a 1991 interview. He also built ever-faster iceboats. They
were all red and white and differentiated only by roman numerals, because every single one was named Honeybucket – the Army nickname for ‘manure’ spreaders… ‘The Korean War introduced you to the real “Honey Bucket Wagons”,’ daughter
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