A boy. A boat. A body of water.
This was not Matthew Plunkett’s childhood, which seems strange given that he just spent the past three years of his life immersed in one of the great American boat builders. Matt was a high school history teacher in Brooklyn, N.Y., when the Whaler story came to him. He wanted to be a full-time writer, but even that is a financial step-down from our famously under-funded teaching profession. So he waited. Turns out patience is a virtue worth acquiring. Three years ago, through a network of friends and colleagues, Matt sat down to coffee with a man named Paul Herzan.
“As a young kid,” Paul remembers, “I spent many happy hours on Spy Pond in Arlington, Mass., zipping around in my classic 13-foot Whaler. I have long had a nostalgic attachment to Boston Whaler. Commissioning this book was a way for me to capture the joy of that time and the admiration I still have for this iconic boat.”
Paul was the boy. Boston Whaler was the boat. And Spy Pond was his body of water. Like so many before him and even more since, the Whaler played a key role in Paul’s childhood. Grown up now, it was possible this life-long Whaler fan would make an eager audience for a real accounting of the company’s history.
“I don’t think he knew how interesting it was going to be,” Matt says. “But Paul certainly knew there was enough human drama in the evolution of the company that there would inherently be a story to tell.”
From the humble origins of knowing nothing about Whalers and next to nothing about boats, Matt succeeded in capturing the entire scope of a much-loved American institution. Beautifully bound in a navy hardcover with a dust jacket, Unsinkable: The History of Boston Whaler is worthy of prominent coffee-table placement. That is, if you can ever put it down. Matt’s structure, agenda-free approach, and insertion of the human story at key moments make Unsinkable a surprisingly engaging company history book.
Company Involvement
Dick Fisher arrived on the scene when his full-page ad in a 1961 issue of Life magazine, calmly watching the boat he’s perched on get sawn in half. The message was clear: this boat is unsinkable. A first in innovation, the Boston Whaler was a key component to the newly forming recreational boating market. From there, the company would change names and hands four significant times over the decades, but the Boston Whaler brand was securely anchored to its reputation of unsinkability. Rafting off that anchorage, Matt found Boston Whaler’s loyal fans could recite the entire company history when prompted. But tapping into the current iteration of Boston Whaler proved a challenge from the outside.
“There was one of two ways this book was going to come together,” Matt laughs. “I thought having the company be involved – and if I could get them to open up the doors – it would be better. They have archives and people whom I’d want to talk to that are still with the company. I knew I was only going to get so far talking to former employees or using the public record, no matter how recent.”
Matt drafted a letter to the then-president of Boston Whaler, inside the Brunswick corporate family. Huw Bower’s only concern was to make sure Matt didn’t have an axe to grind against the company in its current configuration. As anyone remotely interested in Whaler can tell you, there is a great rift between Classic Whaler fans and… everyone else. Matt convinced Bower of his complete ignorance on the subject of Boston Whalers by letting him in on a secret: he spent two weeks in preparation for the meeting with Paul Herzan researching 1700s-era whaling around Boston, Mass. Embarrassing, sure, but it worked. The project received necessary approval and access from Brunswick, and Matt dug in.
“I tried to approach it very journalistically and offer a fair accounting of the past 60 years, to tell the story of Whaler as close as I could in terms of historical accuracy. I think if you’re a Classic Whaler guy, I’m not going to convince you otherwise. And if you just bought a 42-footer, I’m not convincing you that you just made a mistake.”
Structure & Pacing
Often, corporate history books get bogged down in a murky mass list of names and places. At some point, you just want to step back and diagram who’s who and what’s what. This is unnecessary with Unsinkable. Chapters align with changes at the helm. Almost like reading the succession of kings in an empire, each president of Whaler brings a different personality and vision for the company. Matt’s insight into what makes each president tick turns the list of names and places into real characters, people you care about and have a vested interest in how their story line turns out.
Full-page insertions of factory renderings, original design sketches, and photo reproductions visually complement the text and provide touchstones to draw even the casual reader into Whaler’s history. Even the most avid Whaler enthusiast needs a break, however, from the company history narrative. Well-placed customer stories, quirky sidebars, and behind-the-scenes style editorial achieve textual pacing difficult to find across the genre. Matt admits most of these human elements cropped up in the process and were not what he set out to find.
“Boating is so much more about relationships and the emotion than the fiberglass. I couldn’t figure out how to get those into the book any other way, other than stand-alone stories that were worth sharing but didn’t fit the fuller narrative of the company’s rise. The images, drawings and sidebars framed in blue hopefully add a human element – to tell the human side of the Whaler story.”
What is Boston Whaler?
Matt’s Final Word on Boston Whaler is a think-piece on something boat owners feel instinctively. The boat, more than any other vehicle or utility in our lives, has a life and spirit of its own. Why else do we give them names? Matt illustrates this by drawing on the ancient allegory of Theseus’s ship, which floated in the Athenian harbor for several hundred years. Can it still be considered Theseus’s ship, when each and every part of the original ship has been swapped out over the years for a newer one?
“Although it’s wise to avoid all philosophical discussions until firmly seated at a pub,” he writes, “the questions of identity and authenticity surrounds Boston Whaler today. How does a company, or a person, retain its identity in the face of the constant evolution and regeneration required to survive?”
To continue this philosophical thread, Matt pulls in John Locke’s favorite theory that identity is transmitted through knowledge and tribal memory. If there’s one thing Matt takes away from his three years immersed in Boston Whaler history, it’s this:
“I was struck with how many people who’d left the company 20 or 25 years ago and gone on to find a significant amount of success in their life and career. But looking back on their time at Whaler, they had no hesitation in declaring: Man, my time at Whaler was the best! Each of them has a different reason for it: the specific product they were making, the culture of the place, the pride they felt. It just seemed, in their own words, that Whaler was different than other companies they’d gone on to join, work for, or even run. If I were the company, I’d be pretty pleased with that. Even though the ownership has changed hands, that feeling has not.”
Purchase Unsinkable: The History of Boston Whaler
Amazon Books
www.bit.ly/unsinkableGLB
Barnes & Noble
www.bit.ly/BNunsinkable
QuartoKnows
http://bit.ly/QGunsinkable
