Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson Page A

early sixties, the numbers on the books seemed desperate once more. Family members had quit the business, the eldest son was dead, others were no longer on speaking terms. There had been charges of embezzlement in the civil war that had broken out in the churchgoing and close-knit Methodist family. And yet, if you were reading the papers in this period, you’d form an impression distinctly otherwise. On the second to last day of the 1959 motorboat show, by then being convened annually at the New York Coliseum, the
Times
wrote:
    [T]he National Motor Boat Show, is drawing to a close at the Coliseum.… The three Wheelers [sic] brothers, Wesley, Eugene and Robert, who are manning the annual display of the Clason Point, the Bronx, concern with their octogenarian father, Howard [Howard E. was shortly to be ninety], reported sales this week of $1,181,000. This comprised firm orders for one 43-footer at $70,000, three 34-footers at $23,000 each, one 37-footer at $30,000, and forty orders from dealers for spring deliveries.
    Within two and a half years, the company was dead, at least in terms of involvement by any Wheeler family members. “In a year that has seen two other boat-manufacturing companies acquire new ownership, still a thirdboat-building firm has changed hands,” the
Times
wrote on August 26, 1961. “The famous Wheeler Yacht Company, now on Clason Point, Bronx, on Patterson Avenue and formerly with yards on Coney Island Creek and during World War II in Whitestone, has been taken over by the Rimbach family of Flushing, Queens.” Wheeler had been seized for debt by a father-son firm of certified public accountants with German connections. The new owners said that they intended to keep the marquee name. Howard E. didn’t live to see this final insult. He’d died in Florida, five months earlier, on March 23, 1961. But in some sense he had to have known it was all behind him, the wooden, watery dream obsessing him since 1910.
    Howard E. died three months before Hemingway died. He is said to have suffered a short final illness, a quick reversal that seems in perfect keeping with his life and the history of his company. The salesman-builder-dreamer-visionary, who’d made it into his ninety-third year, was survived by twenty-one grandchildren and thirty great-grandchildren. In his last years, with his physical health still strong, the emotionally distraught patriarch, only semi-involved with the business, still possessed of his flaring brows and untamed hair and pork-chop sideburns, all of it gone shock white, had tried to distract himself by building a house on a canal in Fort Lauderdale. He’d go to the ocean and sit fully clad on the sand in a porkpie hat and a dress shirt and a tie with miniature Wheeler flags on it. In the same season that some landlubberly CPAs in Queens were getting ready to dispossess the progenitor’s business, another distraught man, in Idaho, absent of both physical and mental health, stared at his shotgun. I wonder if Hemingway even knew Howard Wheeler’s name.
    There’s a Bruce Springsteen song called “Atlantic City” with this line: “Well now everything dies, baby that’s a fact / But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” So I can report this happy fact: a Wheeler rising yet again. A great-grandson of Howard E.’s, Wesley Wheeler, who is Wes Wheeler’s son, and so has pleasure boats in his blood, has sought to remake Wheeler Yacht Company on a small scale at a shipyard in North Carolina.

He was a world-class pack rat and kept all kinds of pieces of paper, uncounted numbers of which have passed down to posterity. These receipts and tickets and bills of sale—from trains, steamship lines, hotels, hardware stores, laundries, bullfights, barbershops, taxidermists, automobile dealerships, heavyweight championship bouts, rod-and-reel outfitters—along with his letters, Western Union telegrams, journals,