Opposite: Harry Anderson presents the 1979 One Ton to John McLaurin whose Laurie Davidson design Pendragon won the mostly light-air series in Newport. Fabulous facts: the same Pendragon won the previous year’s 3/4 Ton Cup in Canada – a double never achieved by any design before or since. Changes to the IOR that winter hit Davidson’s centreboarder hard so instead of having an overweight 3/4 Tonner he persuaded his client that with a bowsprit, a bit more sail and some lead his crazy new plan might just work. Above: when Harry Anderson and some of his New York Yacht Club afficionados started to sense the club’s 132-year hold on the America’s Cup was beginning to slip away. The 1980 America’s Cup challenger Australia – seen here to leeward of Dennis Conner’s Freedom – had borrowed the technology for a pre-bent glassfibre topmast from the failed British Challenger Lionheart, allowing for a much bigger mainsail roach to be carried. The Aussies didn’t win that year but they did win a light second race and Australia herself was much faster than on her previous appearance in Newport in 1977. Design genius Ben Lexcen was just getting into his stride…
Corinthian Yacht Club (SCYC) in Oyster Bay, New York. His first crewing experi- ence was at about age six with his father on the family S-boat: ‘My job was to light his cigarettes,’ he remembers, chuckling. His mother had inherited a summer camp on St Regis Lake in the Adirondacks so he spent many childhood summers there. ‘We did a lot of sailing on the lake, on
E-Scows and other classes.’ Later he men- tions a local class called the Idem. ‘Idem in Latin means “the same”,’ he tells me. ‘It’s the second-oldest one-design in North America, with a huge gaff-rigged main and a special cockpit behind the house for the mainsheet trimmer. There are still about six original ones up at St Regis Lake. ‘Clinton Crane designed them. He was a
good designer; he designed the Aloha [issue 478] for Arthur Curtiss James.’ (See what I mean about trying to keep up?) At 12 Harry started his flag officer
career as vice-commodore of the Upper St Regis Lake Yacht Club. (He’d eventually accrue 139 years as a flag officer of one
yacht club or another.) That same year he also made his first media appearance, in the New York Herald Tribune; ‘I was about 12 years old and I’m standing at the end of St Regis Lake, fishing for trout.’ Twenty-five years later trout fishing
would give Harry something to talk about with President Eisenhower, while they waited for wind during the 1958 Amer- ica’s Cup. In 1933 Harry followed family tradition
to the Adirondack-Florida School. He isn’t sure why his father and uncle went there; he guesses that his grandfather had prob - ably known the founder… Sailing was an important part of the curriculum, and he was soon elected vice-commodore of the school’s yacht club. Today the school is called Ransom Everglades, and the gymna- sium is named after Harry Anderson ’38. For his final year of college prep Harry’s
father sent him to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Three days after graduation, in June 1939, Harry stepped onto a schooner that was heading for
Labrador to research Norse landings. His father had signed him on as a crew, since the (uninspected and uninsured) schooner was not allowed to carry passengers for hire. His log from that summer details hard physical labour and eating salt cod three times a day; it also mentions that the well-connected captain was alerted to World War II’s start a few days earlier than either the US State Department or Whitehall.
YCYC, ROTC and 12 Metres Anderson started at Yale in September 1939, shortly after Germany invaded Poland. Yale Corinthian Yacht Club (YCYC) was already going strong, and during his freshman year he sailed Class X dinghies. When he returned as a sopho- more, though, the boats had been taken home by the graduating seniors who owned them – perhaps the origin of his later support for college-owned fleets? During college summers Anderson raced
on several of the era’s most modern boats: SEAHORSE 53
JONATHAN EASTLAND/ALAMY
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