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The Dirty Old Man


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I met Jim Smith (Yes, that really was his name.) at one of the first backyard races that I attended. Jim was there with his teenage son, Chuck. We soon discovered that we lived in the same area of Florida. Even though there was a large age difference between us, Jim was in his late 40s or early 50s at this time, and I was in my late teens, we hit it off right away. And so began many years of close friendship.

I learned about Jim’s background. He was a WWII vet. He was a mortar crew fighting the Japanese. Part of his job was to carry the baseplate of the mortar. He told how he was captured one day. He soon was able to escape, but was wounded in the process. I wish I could remember more about that, and other war stories, but I can’t. Hey y’all, gimme a break. This was over 50 years ago!

When I met him, Jim was working as a piano refinisher. He had worked most of his life as a carpenter before going to work for a large furniture and piano dealer as a refinisher. He had recently broken his back when helping to carry piano up some stairs. They dropped it and he was under it as it fell. By the time I met him, he had built his own A-frame house on a little lake in Odessa, a little town near Tampa. After a long court battle, the insurance company settled for enough money to build his new house on lake.  Jim always had a pipe in his mouth. I’ll tell you a little more about Jim and pipes a bit later.

Jim had raced outboards in Pennsylvania when he was young.   Now, he wanted to get his teenage son, Chuck, into racing. They worked together to build a Hal Kelly B-stock hydro from plans in Popular Mechanics. During those years, Hal Kelly was a popular designer of race boats to be built by home builders. Some of the plans are still available from Clark Craft and others.

I remember going to Jim’s house and watching 8mm movies of his early racing days. We spent many happy hours practicing with our race boats on his lake. Jim drove a little in the first few races, then Chuck took over. His old war injury kept him from straightening his arm where he shot through his elbow when he escaped. 

I guess y’all are wondering about why this little story is called “The Dirty Old Man”. Jim was as nice a gentleman as could be, but he jokingly would complain that the sexual revolution had come and he was too old to take advantage of it. You younger kids won’t remember those days, but us older folks will recall the days of hippies, “flower power”, VW “hippie”vans, protest songs, the Viet Nam war, Woodstock, and free love. We got to teasing him about being a dirty old man. He thought that was funny and soon took to wearing a pink jump suit to the races with “Dirty Old Man” written on the back.

Jim was of great help to me during my time racing, and after. I got married to my first wife, Karen, along in there sometime.  We’d visit back and forth between my house at Snug Harbor, near St. Pete., and his in Odessa. He showed me how to properly use tools, and make good joints. He even loaned me his portable table saw so I could build my first Kaycraft B-class runabout (named after Karen) He encouraged many of us young-uns in the St. Pete., Tampa area.

Jim quit racing when his son, Chuck went on to his career, but we always kept in touch. He later gave me a job at Edward’s Pipe and Tobacco Shop when I quit working as a draftsman at Babcock and Wilcox, a national industrial power plant manufacturer. He was working at Edward’s making and repairing smoking pipes. Jim taught me to repair customer’s broken pipes so he could concentrate on making custom pipes.

Eventually Jim came to work with me when I began manufacturing Kaycraft fiberglass dinghies, canoes, and small fishing boats. Later, after quitting the boat building business,  I went back to work for more of the Florida boat builders. I was able to help him get jobs at Gulfstar yachts and  Irwin Yachts, where I worked in the engineering office, and he worked in the carpentry shops. I remember him saying that he didn’t like working in those big shops. He said he’d “rather be a big fish in a small pool, than a small fish in a big pool”.  Later, I was able to get him to come with me to a little start-up company where I was production manager, called  Sovereign Yacht Company. Jim built the plug for a new 17 foot sailboat that he scaled down from their larger Sovereign 23. (The fiberglass mold that the boats will be laminated in, is layed-up over a wooden “plug”.) Even later, he followed me to Southern Yacht where he built the plugs for a couple of new versions of the Skipper 20.

After the years working for several of the yacht manufactures in the Clearwater area, I moved on to a time of working as a draftsman for another friend of mine, Steve Seaton, who was a yacht designer, then to my own little drafting and design office where I did work for several yacht builders in the area, and then, finally, to my own little boat building company, Princess Marine, where I stayed until I finally retired from the boat business. Jim continued working at Sovereign for awhile, and then he went on to other jobs, but my memory fails me again.

Somewhere during that time, I met and married my wife, Miss Debbie who appears off and on in many of these little stories. Jim was there as one of my groomsmen at our wedding.  I Lost track of Jim when we moved to North Florida. I wish now that I had kept up with him. I did call him several years later. He was retired and not in good health. He had  quit smoking his beloved pipes because of his health. We planned for me to go back to Tampa to visit, but I never did. I learned not too much later that Jim was gone. I’ll always remember him with fond memories, and be thankful for the years we had together. Rest in peace, Jim, the cleanest “Dirty Old Man” there ever was.

 

 

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