A TED STORY
“Janie Really Was Not Happy”
—Laura Turner Seydel
Janie really was not happy. First of all, my father was off sailing and he’d come home with his dirty laundry and as soon as things were clean he was off again. She was pregnant and now his kids from a former marriage were being shoved on her. Janie was trying but this was more than she bargained for and she couldn’t stand the situation. After all these years Janie and I have now become best of friends but back then she really couldn’t stand us. Teddy and I spent a lot of time down in the basement with Jimmy Brown and with my dad being away so much, he almost became like a surrogate father for us.
A TED STORY
“The Benevolent Dictator”
—Teddy Turner
Having Jimmy Brown around was almost like having a grandfather living with you. He was kind of strict and kept after you but he also had that tender side so where your parents might not have given you ice cream after dinner, Jimmy would. My dad was a dictator, but Jimmy was the benevolent dictator when my dad wasn’t around. And he had a big job because there were five kids and a household to take care of. In some ways he had zero authority but all the responsibility, which is a very, very difficult job but he was great at it. And Dad was gone a good bit between sailing and work but I really don’t think anybody holds it against him because ultimately he was very successful in both. It’s not like he wasn’t around because he didn’t want to be there—as a kid that would really upset you—that wasn’t what he grew up with and he was away doing big things. We were proud of him doing it and were very happy when he was around. Things were very different when he was around; there was always life and activity and buzz and schedule and stuff. Dad makes the most of every moment while Jimmy was a little more laid-back. We did a lot but it wasn’t at the frantic pace of my father. With Dad, when it was a weekend or a vacation the term was “maximum fun.” His view was that if you didn’t get it all in you’ve wasted time and haven’t had your maximum fun.
I read a lot of books on parenting and tried to do my best as a father. Jimmy helped out with just about everything and as a team, he, Janie, and I did our best to raise children with good manners and the proper respect for their elders and each other. We taught them the importance of honesty, integrity, and hard work. I was so busy with work and sailing that I wasn’t around as much as I would have liked, but my children always knew I loved them.
Sailing Gets Serious
B
y the mid-1960s my passion for sailing grew to be nearly as intense as my drive to succeed in business. This was a time in my life when I was doing everything at an increasingly fast pace. My father had enjoyed fast cars and now that I was on my own and could afford one, I thought it would be cool to own a Ferrari. I bought a used one that was still in good condition and while it was great for getting me around town, it posed a challenge when it came to getting my boat in and out of the water at the Atlanta Yacht Club and the other places I sailed in the area. I owned a Flying Dutchman, which was just a two-man boat but it was heavy for a Ferrari. I couldn’t see the practicality of buying a four-wheel-drive truck just to tow my boat so I took the Ferrari to a mechanic and had them install a trailer hitch to the back of it. I may have been the first person ever to trail a boat off the back of a Ferrari and this made for quite a scene whenever I drove down the highway or pulled into a boatyard but I never minded all the stares and laughter.
The more races I entered the better my sailing became and, as always, I had a strong desire to move up to the next level. For years I had read about bigger boats in
Yachting
magazine and now, with the company doing as well as it was, I realized that I might be able to afford one. A friend of mine named James Schoonmaker, from Miami, suggested I charter a boat and enter the Southern Ocean Racing Conference, or SORC. We checked with a yacht broker and were able to find someone to lease us his Block Island 40 out of Pimlico Sound, North Carolina. At forty feet in length, she was much bigger than anything I had ever sailed and I doubt its owner would have leased his boat to me had I not had a partner with Schoonmaker’s experience. After we worked out terms and signed all the papers, Schoonmaker decided to take off for a race in Brazil. I was left on my own on the biggest boat I’d ever sailed.
With Jimmy Brown’s help, I pulled a local crew together and Irwin Mazo came up from Atlanta to be our navigator. (He had learned navigation on a destroyer in the final days of World War II.) By the time of our scheduled departure for Charleston, the weather had turned cold and the manager of the marina recommended we spend another night there. But it didn’t seem so bad to me and I was eager to get going so we went out anyway, motoring into the darkness singing sea chanteys. We made it between the first few sets of buoys but then somehow took a wrong turn. Thinking we were heading into a channel we were actually going full steam into a shallow bay. The next thing we knew—CRUNCH—we had run aground. We were stuck in Pimlico Sound and the wind started blowing harder.
Waves started to lift up our boat and then would drop us down hard on the sandbar with a loud crash. Normally waves like these can help you dislodge but that night the wind was blowing us back into the shallow bay and we couldn’t get off the sand. As the waves kept pounding, Mazo grabbed the radio and started calling “Mayday! Mayday! Coast Guard!” only to discover that the radio didn’t work. We started to worry that the boat might crack up, and knowing that there was no rescue on the way, we got the life raft out and put on our life jackets. We were prepared to abandon ship but as a little more time passed we realized that the boat was not breaking up and we never manned that raft. That was a good thing because if we had set out in a lifeboat in those conditions we probably would have all drowned or died of hypothermia.
After a rough night, the storm passed in the morning and we dislodged from the sandbar. The boat was okay but our psyches were damaged. Everyone was exhausted because it had been impossible to sleep that night. If you went belowdecks, there was a constant BAM, BAM, BAM that was so loud there was no way you could relax, let alone sleep. At first light we could see where we had made our wrong turn. It was back just a quarter mile and so we were able to make a quick correction. Regardless, the crew’s confidence was shaken. I think Mazo and Jimmy Brown may have been the only guys on board with any real experience at sea. It was like I had pressed a bunch of old men into military service, gave them shovels, pointed them to the front lines, and asked them to take Berlin from the Germans!
Mazo wanted to make an unscheduled stop in Morehead City to get the radio fixed. This made obvious sense but given my crew’s low morale I suspected that if I pulled up to the dock they would desert. I held on to the tiller and said, “We are
not
stopping at Morehead City.” They asked if we couldn’t just go there to get the radio fixed and check the condition of the hull and I said, “No!” Morehead was a big fishing port and when we passed the inlet on our way out to sea, it looked like the entire fishing fleet was coming in. Without a working radio, I should have taken this as a sign that the weather at sea might be getting rough. I think that Mazo was even considering jumping overboard and swimming ashore.
I was determined to keep moving and sure enough, less than a hundred miles from Morehead City we ran into the worst storm I had ever experienced. Winds were over 50 mph and it was a struggle just to keep the boat from going around in circles. The trip to Charleston was only two hundred miles but it took us two brutal days to get there. Mazo spent almost the entire trip under a blanket belowdecks and when we put in at Charleston, he came on deck looking like someone just released from a concentration camp. The entire crew of three left me except for Jimmy Brown (and if he didn’t work for me I’m not sure that even
he
would have stayed).
The next week’s race was scheduled to start in St. Petersburg, on Florida’s west coast, and to sail there from Charleston we had to go all the way around the Florida Keys. I managed to assemble an entirely new crew (in addition to Jimmy) in time to start this trip and while the weather was pleasant as we headed out, we ran into another storm in the Gulf of Mexico. As soon as conditions turned rough, the crew folded up their tents and left all the work to Jimmy and me. I remember one guy who got so sick that he wouldn’t leave his bunk. He just lay there on his back and when he started throwing up it shot up into the air and back down on top of him.
I couldn’t get anyone but Jimmy to work up on deck, so I decided to take advantage of the Gulf’s shallow waters by pulling down our sails, dropping anchor, and riding out the storm. I was so exhausted from all that work that I managed to sleep that night but it proved to be a mixed blessing. I awoke the next morning to find that the anchor line had parted and we were adrift. We had no way of knowing how long the line had been broken. We were out of sight of land and I was so inexperienced that I didn’t yet know how to operate the radio direction finder. The only thing I was sure of was that the wind had been blowing in a southerly direction and since we dropped anchor in the Gulf of Mexico I figured that if we sailed due east we’d have to bump into Florida. We did that, and as the weather started to moderate we came into sight of land. We ran alongside a fishing boat and the skipper let us know we were off the coast of Naples. We then managed to sail north to St. Petersburg and got there just in time for the race.
I learned a great deal about ocean racing in that first year. I sailed over a thousand miles and I felt like I was becoming experienced. In addition to my own firsthand knowledge I also learned a lot from Jimmy Brown. He had been around a lot of boats in his years, and he helped us learn about racing by getting information from our competitors. Jimmy would sit down at a bar next to a veteran racer and before you knew it, the guy would tell him some secrets. Jimmy was a great conversationalist, and given the makeup of the sport, which was very elite and very white, I’m sure these other sailors couldn’t see how this black man they were drinking with could ever be a threat. It was amazing how many valuable insights they passed along to him. For example, Jimmy came back one night to say that one successful skipper explained to him that most people focus on what happens during daylight hours and fail to understand that races can be won and lost at night. I used this information to my advantage the rest of my sailing career.
We did poorly in our first couple of races but we managed to win a few trophies before the series was over: a second place finish in one race and a third in another. In the process, I fell in love with ocean racing. I liked everything about it—being out on the open ocean, the teamwork, the preparation, the challenges—everything. It really was a lot like running a business. You had to recruit a good crew and you had to be able to motivate them. From my early misadventures I realized that when conditions were good, you couldn’t tell how strong your crew was. Heading out and singing chanteys everyone looked great, but once the going got tough, the weaker guys would fold.
Early on, I figured out that in both business and sailing, it’s important to assemble a strong team with talents that are complementary. In many ways, a good sailing crew is like a good football team. In football you need some guys with brawn, some who are agile and quick, and you have to have a good quarterback calling the shots. In sailing, the quarterback is the skipper or helmsman. He has to be able to look out ahead and make the right calls and strategic decisions. You need the stronger, quicker crewmembers to grind winches and pull in the sails. You also need an experienced navigator. Today, technology has made navigation much easier but back then you had to rely on a sextant and dead reckoning and the job required a lot of skill.
Sailing around the clock, crews are split into two watches. While one watch sleeps, the other takes over and keeps the boat on course at top speed. Watches are normally four hours long and two teams shift out six times a day. I tried to be flexible with my own schedule to make sure I could be on deck when the sailing was the most difficult and the decisions most critical. For example, sailing into the wind requires the greatest skill so I would try to stay on deck when we were going upwind. I’d try to rest when things were at their easiest but given the fickle nature of weather at sea, I often had to get by on very little sleep.
While I had been successful on smaller boats I found that my skills were better suited for ocean racing. Not only did this sport reward leadership, recruiting, and motivating a team, it also required a lot of hard work—often around the clock—and numerous split-second decisions. The more I raced, the more I got the feeling that this was a sport in which I might compete successfully at the very highest level.
I decided it was time to buy my own ocean racer. Sizing up other vessels during my first SORC season I decided to order a new Cal 40, a thirty-nine-foot sloop made of fiberglass. We took delivery in the fall of 1966 and named her
Vamp X
(after the “Vamp from Savannah”)
.
With a new boat and a season’s worth of experience I was able to attract a stronger crew. Everything came together that year and we took the overall SORC championship. It was the biggest series I’d ever won and I let the success go to my head a little. (Privately, I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman, and lover all at the same time.) In public, for the first time in my life I had reporters interviewing me. The sailing culture was very conservative in those days and when I was quoted saying things like, “Man, we blew those other boats away,” I rubbed some people the wrong way. My crew and I were green, brash, and from the South; and that combination didn’t always go over well in places like the New York Yacht Club. But we loved to win and challenging the establishment was all part of the fun.