Sport: Old Maiden in Uniform

Except for 90-year-old America, matriarch of U.S. racing yachts, no U.S. racing boat is more beloved by U.S. yachtsmen than the three-masted schooner Atlantic. On any yacht-club veranda, mention of her name unwinds a reel of yarns:

>How she won the Gold Cup put up by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1905, sailing from Sandy Hook to the Lizard (3,014 miles) in 12 days, 4 hours, 1 minute—a record that still stands for a transatlantic crossing under sail.

>How, during World War I, while she was serving as a mother ship for U.S. subchasers, her original owner, Wilson Marshall, decided to give that same Gold Cup (supposedly worth $5,000) to the American Red Cross to be auctioned off—and the resentment that swept the country when it was discovered that the Kaiser’s Cup was actually gold-plated pewter, worth about $35.

>How Croesus-rich Gerard B. Lambert (Listerine), a Johnny-come-lately to yacht racing, bought the old has-been from Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1927—and how. skippered by Charles Francis Adams, she finished second in the transatlantic race from New York to Spain the next summer.

>How she sailed the Atlantic again in 1935 and on the return trip survived two hurricanes that forced her to heave to for nine days. What a sight the old girl was, stalking into New York Harbor, her 20,000 square feet of sails torn to ribbons after 35 days at sea.

Last week, with mixed emotions, U.S. yachtsmen learned that the 38-year-old Atlantic was not too old to serve her country once more. She will be used as a training ship for Coast Guard cadets at New London, Conn.*

Millionaire Lambert, who likes to do things in style, gave away another yacht last week. His eleven-year-old Class J sloop Yankee, thrice-thwarted America’s Cup candidate, originally built by a syndicate of Bostonians at a cost of $500,000, was turned over to a Fall River ship-junking firm. The $10,000 he will get for her bronze plating and lead ballast will be given to the Commodore of London’s Royal Thames Yacht Club toward the purchase of a British fighting plane.

Sole surviving J-boat last week was Harold S. Vanderbilt’s four-year-old Ranger, last Cup defender, high, dry and huddled up at her birthplace, the famed Herreshoff yards at Bristol, R.I.

*The Grand Old Dame America, for whom the America’s Cup was named, is in the Navy. Saved from the graveyard by popular subscription in 1921, she was presented to the U.S. Naval Academy, is still moored in Dewey Basin at Annapolis.