do. But I can’t remember me or Bill or Paul ever dipping into the dipper, so to speak, not till after work.’ (A ‘dipper’ is mid - western for beer.)
Carol Vernon was a naval architect for the America3
Women’s Team when Bill
asked her to digitise the line drawings for his next Honeybucket. Several years later she got the Willy Street Tour. ‘He had his whole shop set up for iceboat building,’ she remembers, adding that a DN mast had been mounted on one wall of the shop, ‘including the shroud points so that you could lay your sail out and take a look at it horizontally. And the finish on his hardware was just spectacular!’ By 1966 a Wisconsin Magazine story claimed Madison as ‘the boatbuilding capital of the world’ – at least for iceboaters! Harken credits Bill’s quietly fanatical work ethic. ‘You had to produce or else he just plain embarrassed you. You couldn’t stand around and watch him work; you had to chip in all the time.’ Then he repeats one of his favourite jokes about Paul and Bill. ‘I’m sure that in their bathrooms there’d be a drill press or lathe or something like that right next to the toilet, so they’re not wasting any time. I am absolutely sure that was true.’ Mauretta Mattison told a reporter in 2020 that her husband was ‘literally always busy… he just never was able to sit still.’
Family
Bill and Mauretta were married almost 65 years; of course Bill introduced both of their kids and several grandchildren to
‘She was big in helping out with all the iceboat races. And the shop wasn’t far, maybe a 15-minute drive from their house down by the lake, so he was home every night.’
‘Mauretta was his great champion,’ Lindquist adds. ‘She joyfully stayed married to Bill Mattison, the crazy man! I don’t think he was at a lot of Easter dinners in a suit and tie; he’d be off somewhere covered in dust. But that was just part of their house.’
Don’t be fooled, this is just a microscopic snapshot of Mattison’s Miniature Circus; his first attempt, built when he was 13, already included over 250 animals and dozens of individual tents and working displays. Mattison was still 13 when he ran off to the big top for real, working as a roustabout at Barnum & Baileys Circus
iceboating. Lynn’s book includes a picture of herself at the age of four riding with Bill in the cockpit of Honeybucket IV. Below it she remarks, ‘Then when I got older it was a ride on the runner plank…’
Mauretta also had a powerboat called
‘Honey’s Bucket’. She had had a long career with a credit union, but she trav- elled with Bill when he headed off to Australia and San Diego for the America’s Cup. ‘Mauretta was always with him,’ Peter Harken explains. ‘Their businesses were quite different, and she had her own hobbies. But it was a pretty happy family from what I remember.
In 1969 Bill built a DN for his daughter Lynn – also of course named Honey- bucket. ‘Even though I was never much of a racer,’ she writes, ‘I never tired of the thrill I got in the DN skimming along the ice.’ She also remembers a race win on Lake Mendota… as well as flipping the boat over after rounding the leeward mark; ‘I am not sure how Mom ever put up with me that day.’
When naval architect Carol Vernon visited the Mattison house she remembers pausing to admire a beautiful grandfather clock standing in a hallway. ‘And Mauretta said, “Oh yes, Bill built that for me.” And then I admired something else… “Oh yes, Bill built that for me too.” Everything he made was like something from Tiffany’s.’ Boat tweaks and repairs were a constant at the Willy Street Boat Shop, but they also occurred in the Mattison basement – which, says his daughter, had a minimum required window size: big enough for the fuselage of an iceboat to fit through. Part II – Decades of improvement
SAILING SUSTA FUIN
TURE. NTO THE
Recycled PET is used in dock lines Robline has stopped using plastic bags in the packaggof
ging o its products (since 2020)
AINABLY
Made o f
rec ycled 100%
PET
www.roblineropes om.c
SEAHORSE 41
© Roland Duller
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