It was the last Monday of November 1979. I was a year out of college and somewhat adrift. Through an old high school friend, I’d landed an entry-level job at a new business that was hiring local yokels on the cheap in my hometown of Newport, Rhode Island. It was my first day as the new receptionist at Cruising World magazine.
Little did I know when I answered my first phone call that my life was about to significantly change. In unimaginable ways.
Five years earlier—precisely five decades ago this month—the first issue of Cruising World had made its debut at the US Sailboat Show in Annapolis, Maryland. It was the right magazine at the right time, riding the wave of a revolution in production-sailboat manufacturing. Publisher and editor Murray Davis was an affable Aussie who’d first visited Newport as a newspaperman covering the America’s Cup. His hell-on-wheels English wife, Barbara, managed the ever-expanding office. She terrified everyone but for some reason found me amusing.
If she hadn’t, it would’ve been a quick end to this story. Instead, fatefully, I’d stumbled into a welcoming place full of happy, creative, nurturing souls. Somehow I’d tripped straight into my life’s work.
My first big break came when I found a typo in a press release I wasn’t supposed to be reading while taking it to the printer. That got me kicked upstairs to the editors’ offices with a new title: editorial assistant. Proofreader to the stars!
I wasn’t much of a writer, but knocking off dozens of papers as a history major at a fine liberal-arts institution had taught me some skills. The notion of using them professionally had never once crossed my mind. I’d played college football and thus could mindlessly grind winches, but I was even less of a sailor, my experience limited to some informal beer-can racing out of the Newport Yacht Club.
That was also about to change.
I’d have many mentors in the following years, but none more influential than my first two, both Great Lakes sailors: Dale Nouse, the magazine’s executive editor and a hard-nosed former reporter at the Detroit Free Press, and senior editor Dan Spurr, who’d sailed his Pearson Triton from Lake Michigan to join the staff. Nouse taught me how to compose a story. Spurr taught me how to sail. I learned a ton just by reading their always polished prose.
I instantly fell in love with all of it. Sailing had everything I was after: travel, adventure, fun, competition and, of course, the wild blue yonder. Writing became a quest, to hone my craft to the best of my abilities. I came to see both pursuits as interlocked, inseparable. I couldn’t get enough of either.
Oh, the people I met and sailed with: Danny Greene, Robin Knox-Johnston, Alvah Simon, Gary Jobson, Mark Schrader and, of course, Lin and Larry Pardey. The Pardeys and I became such great, trusted pals that they asked me to pen their biography, As Long As It’s Fun. Such an honor. Still the best thing I ever wrote.
And, oh yes, the races that followed: Newport Bermuda, the Transpac, Pacific Cup, Sydney Hobart, Around Ireland, and literally hundreds of J/24 races (all with that old high school buddy, Ian Scott, who’d helped launch my improbable journey). Finally, holy cow, the places I sailed: across the Atlantic, down to Antarctica, through the Northwest Passage, around Cape Horn (twice), up and down the Caribbean, all the way around North and South America on an epic 13-month, 28,000-nautical-mile odyssey. Crazy.
On this special anniversary, I’m amazed and grateful. After all this time and all those miles, Cruising World is still going strong…and I still get to contribute. I believe that Murray, Barbara and Dale—all long gone now—would be proud. And me? The luckiest of lucky lads.
Back in the day, Dale critiqued every syllable of everything I wrote. He offered plenty of advice, the most memorable of which concerned wrapping up a story. He believed that a solid conclusion was the true key to any successful piece. And he was always praiseworthy whenever any of us, his colleagues and pupils, stuck the landing.
“It’s the most important thing,” he’d say, time and again. “You’ve got to know how to get off the stage.”
Herb McCormick is a CW editor-at-large.
