Essential staff
Peter Harken pays tribute to three of the indispensable members of the team who played a very special part in the two brothers’ success…
Our family has had dogs pretty much most of our lives ever since living in the Philip- pines where Olaf and I grew up after WWII and both of us made sure to con- tinue the tradition when we left the islands for college. Olaf had a little mutt named Nebbish at Georgia Tech – against all the rules, but rules are made to be broken which we were both pretty good at. In my case, while I was at the University
of Wisconsin and walking to class, two college girls from New York sitting on a park bench with a black six-week-old pup stopped me and explained they had bought him and tried to hide him in their dormitory but just got caught and had to get rid of him. They asked where I lived, I told them I lived in an old dump of a house with some other guys… Then they asked if I would take care of their pup until the end of the semester when they would take him back to New York with them... Looking into that pup’s soulful eyes I said, ‘Sure, and what’s his name?’ He didn’t have one yet and since all our male dogs were named Mac I said, ‘OK, Mac, let’s go.’ He wasn’t on a leash, but jumped from the girls and stuck right next to my legs,
50 SEAHORSE
even at crosswalks and crossing streets, never going ahead without my ‘It’s OK Mac, let’s go!’ He truly was an amazing pup and learned everything very fast. I never had to put a leash on him once during his 17 years of fun. One time he got out of the house while I
was at class which was quite a hike and I found him sitting by the entrance door of the building waiting for me, a place he’d never been to before. So from then on I’d take him with me and he’d sit outside wait- ing until I reappeared. Mac became such a familiar site around lecture halls that professors would ask me ‘Is Mac outside? OK, let him in… Mac, come up here!’ And he would run in and sit right up on stage by the podium. I can remember one of the professors remarking, ‘Mac, glad you’re listening because your boss is probably asleep pretending he’s paying attention!’ At the end of the semester Mac had
become my shadow day and night so I asked the girls if I could keep him and they said yes, probably happy they didn’t have to explain their new acquisition to their parents back in New York. Mac became quite famous on the sailing
and skiing scene, always with me on the boats or in our crummy old van and on our University of Wisconsin ski trips riding with us in the Greyhound bus. He learned to ride the chairlifts with me and then run down the whole slope following me and up again all day long – one tough mutt. And a mutt he was… half Lab, half
Cocker Spaniel, about 20kg of trouble. After college when Olaf and I started
Vanguard, our dinghy-building company, Mac was in the shop full of fibreglass with us… if he wasn’t off on one of his adven- tures when he would disappear for up to three days before reappearing, usually all ragged and beat up. He’d arrive at the shop door trying to sneak in quietly with ears lowered and a ‘what me?’ look and curl up for some badly needed sleep… Like his boss. He made me so mad searching for him those days he was missing I would go where he was sleeping and yell, ‘Oh no you don’t. Get up, you bum, since you kept me up night and day looking for you, damn you!’ He did this a lot. Especially if there was a dog in heat somewhere... Many’s the time too that the Pewaukee
Chief of Police would bring him back for ‘breaking and entering’, as he called it. That bum used to chase down skunks
and would come back to the plant stinking like hell with everyone here yelling, ‘Mac’s back, run, run!’ I don’t know how many times and how many cans of tomato juice I used trying to bathe the stink out of him. Mac would go with us to all the regattas
around the country, staying in our van. Often at scow regattas Buddy Melges would have Mac in his car and later say, ‘Peter, I have your Van-guard!’ Which is where the name came from, by the way. He was some regatta Van-guard… as long as no food was around. When food was offered it was, ‘Thank you, Mam, here are the keys and would you like to drive?’ Before the 1976 Olympics in Montreal I
was sailing the Tornado and at a pre- Olympic regatta in Ohio Mac would always wait for me at the end of the pier with the spectators. But after the last race he was
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