Transport: Panhandle Dream

Past the furrowed water of the Potato Patch, where the Atlantic currents sweep around Coney Island into Gravesend Bay in New York Harbor, seagoing, 23-year-old Cowboy William J. (“Tex”) Langford poked the nose of a $100 put-put in which he had sputtered down from Boston. Moored just off the pier he tied up to was a slim, long yacht hull. The masts were off her, she could have done with some swabbing, but to Tex’s longing eyes she was a jimdandy. To a benign-looking stranger gazing off to sea he said so. Then things took a fairy-tale turn. “Glad you like her,” said the stranger. “She’s yours.”

A few hours later, still yawing slightly in this unreal course of events, Tex had in his otherwise empty pockets the ownership papers to the 63-foot Winnetta, a 35-year-old schooner which in her $75,000 prime had once raced her sticks off on the Great Lakes, in more recent years had been the little-used property of fiftyish John S. Nairns, an inventor preoccupied with developing an airscrew for propelling ships. Inventor Nairns had sold the Winnetta’s motor, but he still had the masts and sails in storage. Last week, lucky Tex scrubbed and buffed away at the Winnetta, dreamed of starting off round the world.

Then frisky fate dealt Tex Langford as rude a bulldogging as any Panhandle dogie ever got. In over the Potato Patch whisked last week’s hurricane (see p. 11) at week’s end Tex’s dream was jagged driftwood on the Gravesend strand.

Guest on the Vitalis radio program in Manhattan night of last week’s hurricane was globe-circling Sailor Dwight Long (TIME, Sept. 19). Few minutes before his turn at the microphone came he learned that his 32-foot ketch Idle Hour had slipped her mooring and was being whipped out into Long Island Sound. Dwight Long did his radio stint, then ventured to the WJZ audience an anxious SOS: “. . . All I own in the world is aboard the Idle Hour. . . .” Next day they found her, mistress of 35,000 miles of angry oceans, a splintery pile on Long Island’s rocks.