Top: the original Harken marketing department and sales department and accounts department and personnel department. Only Mac is missing from this early photo. And (above) an early batch of Vanguard Tech dinghies. But everything changed when those little white balls started bouncing at the start of 1968… just in time for Star sailors Lowell North and Pete Barrett to be using some early prototype Harken plastic ball-bearing blocks when they won the gold medal at the Acapulco Olympics later the same year. And after that everything else really is history. But introducing radical new sailing equipment when you are based ‘far away’ in the American midwest is not the easiest of tasks and initial sales of this clearly superior new product were disappointing. It was only when the two brothers were taken under the wing of mail-order marketeer Gary Comer, founder of Lands’ End, that things took off… It was Comer too who persuaded Olaf and Peter to market their new equipment line as their own name brand rather than as a Vanguard spin-off
dinosaurs of the ice. When they decide to do one of these’ – his hand rolls up on edge – ‘you’d just get heaved out. I worked on those quite a bit.’ But at regattas he was ‘always drooling, looking at the Skeeters. The Ferraris of the ice.’ One afternoon Skeeter expert (and
mentor) Bill Mattison told Peter to take his boat for a ‘good ride. But don’t break any- thing or you’re gonna have to fix it.’ ‘So I did.’ That ride led to a lifelong friendship and many nights of building and repairing iceboats together. (See the two-part Bill Mattison story in issues 513 and 514). Even after moving to Pewaukee, an
hour away, Peter would drive up to Madi- son after work almost every night to slave away in Bill’s shop; ‘Even during the summer, because Bill said this process never stops. It really dominated my time. It sure got in the way of girlfriends!’
A real job, and the draft Peter funded his final years of college with a part-time job at Gilson Medical Elec- tronics; after graduation he worked there
44 SEAHORSE
full-time as a designer and engineer. He helped to develop a new fraction-collector (for chromatography) that was compact enough to be carried out into the field, a project he describes as ‘packing 10lb of crap into an aluminium box this big with a handle, quite a chore.’ And because the US military thought the invention would help them in Vietnam, ‘well, that kept me out of the army for a year or so because I was put on the critical list…’ Meanwhile, Doctor Gilson gave him
access to a full machine shop. ‘I learned how to run the machinery; lathes and drill presses and milling machines. And he let me work after hours in the shop, making gear for the boats. I had to build my own equipment because I was still playing student, and I didn’t have the money for anything.’ Peter also built boats ‘on the side’, eventually taking over an old horse barn on the Gilson property. But once his war-critical project was
complete the draft board… ‘they got me.’ Unlike brother Olaf, who chose officer training school, Peter says he found a
quicker method. After only six months of active duty he went into the reserves. ‘So I could still go after sailing and everything else. I just wanted to get through it; because I already had ideas, I had things to do!!’ The most famous of those ideas solved a
classic iceboat problem: how to get enough purchase on the mainsheet without adding so much friction that the boom had to be pushed out downwind. ‘Iceboating, your reactions have to be really fast. When you let the sheet out a little bit it has to happen right away – or you’re going over!’
Plastic balls bounce higher and faster There are no exact dates even on the Harken website but Peter thinks it was around 1967 when another project for Gilson – a lazy-susan device to rotate test tubes that would operate even inside a clean room – inspired a solution. ‘I was scratching my head, because there couldn’t be any oils or greases or any kind of lubri- cants… so I couldn’t just use a plain shaft with a regular sleeve bearing; it had to be
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