A TALE OF TWO CLASSES
By Ed Adams

Some surprising lessons can be learned from two similar classes with dissimilar fates.

Life and death is what this story is about. The death of a one design sailboat called the Rhodes Bantam, and the life of another boat called the Thistle. A one design class is made up of people; like them, it is mortal. The Bantam "lived" for 30 years a better than average life span for a one design, yet the Thistle has lived longer. Why? Rather than start at the beginning, let's take a peek at the way the story ends.

The last chapter of the Rhodes Bantam can be read in the January 1987 issue of Cock Crow, its class newsletter. Open it to the centerfold, titled "Rhodes Bantam Nationals 1986", and what you'll see are two photo captions: "Start of the first race" and "Finish of the last race". But over the captions is blank space. No photos. That's because the National Championship had to be cancelled when nobody showed up to race. Not a single boat.

With the centerfold is a short blurb, "This is an attempt at a little humor that depicts a sad situation... the class officers decided to have a small, late issue of Cock Crow since there would be no annual meeting minutes, no treasurer's report, and no report at the Nationals with all the usual pictures." If there can be such a thing as an obituary for a one design class, this was it.

Contrast the demise of the Bantam with the good health of the Thistle. Until the 1970s, both boats led nearly parallel lives. They're both performance racing dinghies from the boards of respected designers. They have their roots in the Midwest, and were popular with family racers. Even their class associations were formed in the same year - 1945.

Yet the Thistle remains one of the most popular one-designs in the US, and the Rhodes Bantam has all but disappeared. Why? What went wrong?

At one time or another, every one design class suffers a downswing in regatta attendance, and with it the squeamish worry that the "illness" could prove fatal. There are lessons to be learned from the loss of the Bantam. As painful as an autopsy might be, sometimes it's the best way to protect the health of the living.

THE STORY OF THE RHODES BANTAM

Let's flip the pages back to happier times. It's 1969 and summer on Sodus Bay in upstate New York. The best racing in town is in the local 35-boat Bantam fleet.

The racers are mostly young and fit, like 16-year-old Bill Sills, who was fresh from winning the Bantam Junior Nationals. Sills was flying high on a victory streak, a streak that lasted long enough to win every club race for the next three years. The fact that he simply couldn't lose was the source of considerable resentment among his fellow racers. That made Sills uncomfortable. For him, the racing, and the trophies, became less and less satisfying. Winning doesn't give you much of an ego boost if no one is cheering.

By 1972 Sills was a disillusioned age 19. That year he trailered his Bantam down to Skaneateles in New York's Finger Lakes for the National Championship. The fleet was large - 55 boats as usual. Being one of the favorites, it was no surprise that young Sills got more than his share of chief measurer Ken Anderson's attention. Anderson sent Sills off stomping mad after ruling one of his spinnakers illegal. Sills managed to contain enough of his temper to lead the series at midpoint, but then he fell sick and had to retire.

Frustrated, he sold his Bantam and bought a Laser. For eight years, he never looked back. But if he had, Sills would have seen a lot of his peers in the young Sodus Bay fleet following suit, getting out of the Bantam and into the Laser. They respected Sills' decision because of his sailing ability, even if they no longer cheered his winning streak.

The best sailors are often "opinion leaders", whether they care to be or not. The rank and file "listen when they talk, and follow when they walk." If the hotshots become disenchanted and quit, it usually affects the health of the entire fleet. For its own good, a class needs to make its hotshots feel welcome.
Even though the lifeblood of the Bantam was now bleeding away in Sodus Bay, the heart of the class continued to beat in locations like Skaneateles. As is often the case, this local vitality was due to the efforts of a few dedicated sailors, in this instance Dick Besse and Alan Glos. By 1973, Besse had a lot of time invested in Bantam sailing - nearly 20 years. He had built the local fleet up to 30 boats in the early 1960s, and can reminisce about the 73-boat Nationals that was held in 1966.

When the Skaneateles fleet began to shrink in the early 1970s, Besse singlehandedly revived it. Besse was a good enough sailor to win the Nationals in 1975, a good enough craftsman to have built six Bantams from scratch and rebuilt 15 others, and most important, a good enough sport to offer those boats and his knowledge to anyone who asked. Besse published a quarterly newsletter just for his fleet, and convinced fleet members to lease their boats during the week to the local junior sailing class.

One of those he helped was Alan Glos, who had been dabbling at Bantam racing for several years with little success. It was in 1973 that Glos first laid eyes on Besse's newest home built Bantam. It was love at first sight, and Besse knew he was about to lose another boat, this time for less than $2000.

It happened at least once a year. Someone would want one of his boats and he would sell it to them, for his cost. There was never any monetary gain, just the profit of having another fleet member satisfied with a competitive boat. It's important for a newcomer to have access to the best equipment. If he thinks that he'll never win because his boat isn't good enough, he'll quit.

As long as Dick Besse remained devoted to the Bantam, it prospered on Skaneateles Lake. But in 1975 Besse started a new business, a boat dealership. Most of his new customers were entry level sailors, the kind who needed simple boats and sailing lessons, not the Rhodes Bantam. Besse soon found that he couldn't afford to spend the time with the Bantam fleet. It was the beginning of the end on Skaneateles. The fleet had lost its guru.

It was that same year that Paul Hempker of Dynamic Plastics began building and racing the Bantam. He was welcomed as a potential savior of the class, since there hadn't been a builder for almost four years. The Bantam had gone through a number of part time builders, each putting out only a few boats and staying with the class only a few years. Some built fast boats; others didn't. Getting hold of a fast boat wasn't easy.

The Bantam was designed to be built in wood, then converted to fiberglass construction. There was a conception that the older wooden boats were faster than those of fiberglass.

All this hurt new boat sales, says one time builder Don McPhearson. A one design class has little appeal if the boats are unequal. It's essential that a neophyte be able to buy a fast boat "off the shelf", without a long wait, and without a lot of research into the builder.

Paul Hempker gave the class a consistent, competitive boat and tried to work with them on promotion and technical problems. He suggested that the class act as his boat dealer, but the class couldn't afford to stock unsold boats. He tried to modernize the boat, but had little success. Few sailors wanted to retrofit their boats with modern bendy masts and airfoil rudder and centerboards. Only after much argument was it required to make older boats carry foam blocks so they could be somewhat self rescuing. "The class tried to attract builders but then strangled them by not paying the money to build the boat properly," says Steve Clark of Vanguard boats.

A class has to be progressive, carefully allowing its boat to evolve with the times. Drastic changes are just as bad as none at all. If the modernization is too drastic, you obsolete all the existing boats. On the other hand, when development stagnates, there is no incentive for sailors to purchase new boats and upgrade their equipment. If people aren't buying boats, then the builders get out of the business.

In the late 1970s, Dynamic Plastics was building nearly 20 boats a year. Still, the class was shrinking. According to sailmaker Bob Rowland, fleet leaders were spending all their energy trying to find homes for old boats, instead of finding buyers for new ones. By 1985, no one was ordering new boats; Hempker hasn't built a Bantam since.

If Dick Besse was the "sparkplug" in Skaneateles, then John Hargrave was his counterpart in the Midwest. Hargrave can remember the Bantam's heyday in the 1960s, when there were nearly 500 dues paying members spread in an area bounded by New York, Kansas and Alabama. He was the strength behind the strong Cowan Lake, Ohio fleet.

If Hargrave saw a new sailor daysailing in any kind of boat, he would make sure to introduce himself and invite the sailor to one of the Bantam fleet's "open house" parties. He organized exhibitions in the local shopping malls to "talk up" the class. Most important, Hargrave devoted the time to "keep after people", spending countless hours on the phone, demanding excuses for non attendance and extracting promises to show up for the next race. Without the "sparkplug" the engine doesn't run.

While Cowan Lake prospered in the 1970s, the national organization began to falter. In 1976 the class turned to Hargrave and made him National Secretary. He teamed with Commodore Alan Glos in a last ditch effort to save the Bantam class, but it was too late. National membership had already dropped below 100.

In 1981 Hargrave was transferred overseas by his employer. His Bantam was packed away, awaiting his return. It was a couple of years before he came home. By then, no one was racing Bantams on Cowan Lake. "Nobody took up the slack," says Hargrave. Nobody had the energy to keep the engine running.

Mike O'Tool belonged to the Cowan Lake fleet during that time. He remembers the friendly recruiting wars the Bantam fleet would have with the local Snipe, Flying Scot and Thistle fleets. When the recruits decided against the Bantam, they usually offered polite reasons like the boat was "too small" or "too tippy" for family sailing.

O'Tool knew the real reason. The Bantam fleet had dropped below the "critical mass"; they couldn't put enough boats on the starting line to prove that the fleet was viable. The competition was just too strong. While the Bantam fleet might have survived elsewhere, it just couldn't measure up anymore on Cowan Lake. Mike O'Tool eventually bought a Snipe. For a one-design class, it’s often “survival of the fittest.” If a locality already has several fleets, it will be difficult for a weaker fleet to survive. There are only so many sailors to go around. On the other hand, a weaker fleet might prosper by moving its base of operations 10 or 15 miles to a less populated body of water.

When John Hargrave moved overseas from Cowan Lake, he also resigned as National Secretary. Bob Schultz’s nominating committee couldn't find anyone to take his place. So Schultz had to take the job himself.

"I guess that's a sign that the class is weak," says Schultz. "It was sinking fast. The class officers were only doing their time, not really working at it. I was almost 60 years old, not in my most vigorous period. I didn't have the drive," he admits. "We backed off from doing risky things, like sailing when it was windy. A class has to appeal to young people, and we weren't getting them." Schultz stills races out of Houston Woods, Ohio, but now it's in a different boat - a Y Flyer.

The last hardworking Commodore was Hargrave's teammate Alan Glos, who had learned by example from Dick Besse. "I think one of our fatal flaws was that we didn't bring in young people," says Glos. "The average age of our sailors was growing older every year. Almost by natural selection, the social aspect got mellower than younger sailors would have liked. In the heyday of the class, the drinking age was 18."

Once the class got "old", they began to lose a lot of members to age, because the sailors weren't athletic enough to enjoy the boat anymore, says Glos. Young sailors, turned off by the social scene, weren't replenishing the ranks as they retired.

Bob Rowland says one sign of the downfall was that the newsletter began to come out less frequently. "Maybe that was because there was less to talk about, but it really hurt enthusiasm," says Rowland.

Commodore Glos managed to increase the frequency of the Cock Crow to quarterly, but four times a year wasn't enough. He also wrote a couple of "how to" articles for sailing magazines, illustrating his points with photos of Bantam sailing. That fueled enthusiasm for a while, but what the class really needed, he says, was an energetic promotion committee. Unfortunately, the manpower didn't exist. By 1980, Glos had resigned both his Commodore’s lapels and his hope for the revival of the class.

Around that same time, Bill Sills got nostalgic for the better times of his youth and pulled his dusty Bantam out of the shed. By then there was no one racing the boat on Sodus Bay. He managed to convince the club's junior program to keep teaching in Bantams, and brought the National Championship to Sodus Bay in 1981. It was a good turnout by recent standards, but still there were barely 25 entries. Sills had hoped, in vain, that the Nationals would bring all of his old friends "out of the woodwork."

Alan Glos won that championship in Sodus Bay, with his teenage son crewing for him. In the better times of the 1970s, Glos had raced with his wife, Kathy. Those were some of the best times on Skaneateles Lake. Fifteen boats on a weekend, racing several short races a day. Families sailing together and then feasting on burgers and beers at the post race barbecue. Pitching tents at weekend regattas, and gathering in small groups to "finish off the better half of a bottle of Canadian Club," as Steve Clark remembers.

Alan and Kathy Glos' toughest competitor on Skaneateles was Jim Burlitch. It was a friendly rivalry, friendly enough so that Kathy eventually divorced Alan and married Jim. They continued to race, now Jim with Kathy crewing, and Alan sailing with his sons. The sailing club became "common turf" as Glos put it, where children would be exchanged.

While the Gloses and the Burlitches sailed happily on, relatively unaffected by the new situation, for many of the sailors the old congeniality of the fleet had gone sour. Socially it wasn't quite the same anymore. "An uncomfortable change in the status quo," says Steve Clark. It wasn't long after the divorce that the Skaneateles fleet, one of the last survivors in the Bantam class, was on its death bed.

Jim Burlitch is now Commodore of what's left of the Bantam class. "Speaking for myself," he says, “I don't have the time to work with newcomers." Yet he admits that "the winners have to take the lead in terms of promotion, teaching, and attracting new sailors. I don't know how you motivate people to do work; I honestly do not know. If I did, maybe I would be a better Commodore."

THE THISTLE: A DIFFERENT STORY

Alan Glos packed his Bantam away for good a couple of years ago, and began looking for another type of boat to race. The Thistle was one of the first classes to come to mind. After all, it had the Bantam's good points: family-oriented, high performance racing. And unlike the Bantam, it had a solid class organization with nationwide popularity.

Glos simply dropped the hint that he wants to try a Thistle, and his telephone began to ring. First there was a call to read him the regatta schedule, then a call to offer him the use of a boat for a trial regatta. Finally there were calls to line up an experienced Thistle crew for him, to make sure that his first "ride" was an enjoyable one. "It was almost like I was being courted," says Glos. "At the regatta, lots of people came by to give us boatspeed hints. There was a general feeling of being welcome, not like I was breaking into an exclusive club. I finished fifth in that regatta, and it was clear that they weren't afraid of someone coming into the class and doing well."

It's no wonder that the Thistle Class is thriving. It's also hard to believe that it wasn't always this way. Like so many other one designs, however, the Thistle has seen worse times. The most serious spell hit bottom in 1984, the year that not a single boat was built.

Compare that to the 1960s, when 150 fiberglass Thistles were built every year, according to Peter Hale, who has been sailing in the class for over 30 years. In those times, the builders had "dealers" pushing their product. These so called dealers were Thistle sailors who would stock one or two new boats, and sell them locally for little or no profit. By the mid-1960s there were up to 40 boats in some local fleets, says Hale.

In the 1970s, however, a number of factors began to eat away at regatta attendance. The price of boats went up, and the average sailor's expendable income did not. Thistle sailors could no longer afford to be boat dealers. There were fewer regatta sites that would allow camping, one of the favored activities of the thrifty Thistle Class. As other recreational sports grew, traditional sports like sailing suffered from the competition.

Perhaps the most damaging change was when Thistle sailmakers began racing wooden boats, old boats that were built during the pre-glass era of the class. The sailmakers thought that old "woodies" were stiffer and had a faster hull shape. As soon as the "woodies" began winning all the trophies, everyone with a newer fiberglass boat became discouraged. Wooden boats were scarce and expensive to maintain. People stopped buying new boats, and then many stopped sailing. Such was the state of the class by the early 1980s.

Unlike the Bantam Class, the Thistle Class managed to turn the tide. They did it by creating a new class office: Vice President of Growth and Promotion. The result was a number of innovative ideas.

Two trophies for "growth and promotion" were commissioned. One is given to the local fleet that annually recruits the most new boat owners; the other goes to the fleet with greatest percentage increase of new boats. The fleets are given special T-shirts to commemorate their achievement. "To my surprise and delight, the awards have generated a lot of excitement," says Carol Robinson, a former Growth and Promotion VP.

A "clearing house" for crew was begun. Now, if you plan to travel to a distant regatta, but are short crew, all you need to do is consult the nationwide crew list. This simplifies regatta logistics, so more sailors can attend.

One of the more innovative ideas was the institution of a "buddy system" at major regattas, where the regatta organizers assign a new sailor to each of the "regular" racers. The "regulars" must introduce themselves to their buddies, and then take their buddies around to be introduced to other friends in the class. The idea is to keep shy newcomers from getting lost in the crowd, to keep them from going home without feeling they have become part of the Thistle family.

There were other, more subtle changes in the regatta formats. Championship events were made more professional, using established US SAILING formats. Other regattas, however, were "toned down", to put more emphasis on the social activities and less on the racing.

How does the Thistle Class management know what its customers want? Through annual surveys of the class membership, says Jack Finefrock, current VP of Growth and Promotion. The surveys help construct a demography of the class as well as positions on pertinent issues. This allows management to tailor regattas to the type of sailors who are likely to attend. For example, there were 60 babysittable children at the 1985 National Championship, so babysitting was offered as part of the regatta package.

There are seven Thistle fleets in the Pacific Northwest, but until recently, the closest builder was in Ohio. This meant expensive shipping and long waits for a new boat. The builder was too far away to be actively involved, and that discouraged growth. So the Thistle sailors of the Northwest District raised the money to buy a set of Thistle molds and set up a local builder. Since then things have been booming, says northwest sailor Ken Tucker.

Both Tucker and Peter Hale also note that the Thistle Class encourages the participation of sailmakers and other "hotshots," explaining that they give the class credibility, and do more than their share of teaching sailors better racing technique.

It was the sailmakers who effectively killed new boat sales by racing old wooden boats in the mid-1980s, and it was those same sailmakers who also helped turn around that disastrous trend. "What we were doing wasn't helping us or the class," says sailmaker Greg Fisher. "The class was shrinking and we weren't selling as many sails. Changing back to a fiberglass boat made a big difference." As soon as the sailmakers began winning with glass boats, the class began ordering new boats again.

Today, the Thistle Class is alive and thriving. Why? It's more than just the hard work of class management. It's also the implementation of new ideas and the cultivation of new blood. The ability, as Alan Glos says, to make everyone "feel welcome."

Ed Adams was a Sailing World editor and former Snipe and Championship of Champions winner. This article first appeared in Sailing World magazine.

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