by Steve Wilen, CYA Pacific Northwest Fleet

A 32-ft raised deck Blanchard boat. Photo courtesy of S.  Wilen; MOHAI, catalog no. 89.89.257.

One summer Saturday morning in the late 1920s George Weyerhaeuser came into the shop and asked me, “Do you have boats here for sale?” I answered, “Yes, of course, we build new boats and we have them for sale,” and I went and got my father because I was still in Roosevelt High School at the time. So Dad and I took him out and showed him the thirty-two-foot standard Blanchard raised deck cruiser we had there, and he looked it over and then said to Dad, “I didn’t bring my checkbook with me. Would one-hundred dollars hold it?” And Dad said, “Well, normally we expect ten percent, but this late in the season there’s very little likelihood of anybody coming around who hasn’t seen the boat already, so I guess I could hold it for a week or two on the strength of a hundred-dollar bill.” So he took the money and told Mr. Weyerhaeuser, “I’ll just put this in an envelope in our safe here,” and that’s the way the deal was closed for that 32-foot, $3,500-5,000 boat.

Later - in the 1930s George Weyerhaeuser’s nine-year old son George was kidnapped in Tacoma, WA, United States. The grandson of prominent lumberman and company founder J. P. Weyerhaeuser, young George was successfully released for ransom and eventually succeeded his father as the chairman of the Weyerhaeuser company.

Well, Mr. Weyerhaeuser came back the following Saturday in a taxi, paid off the balance on the boat and told my dad, “I’m on my way to Minneapolis-St. Paul for a family wedding,” and he didn’t say whose wedding it was, “so I’ll be coming back to Seattle in just two weeks from tomorrow on the Empire Builder, and I’ll come by the shop by taxi and then take the boat home to Tacoma.” So Dad said, “Fine.” But, when it came time for Mr. Weyerhaeuser’s return, Dad had received an invitation to go duck hunting on a cruiser with some of his best, old-time friends, so he said to me, “OK, on the weekend in question you know Mr. Weyerhaeuser is coming to take delivery of his boat.” I acknowledged that. He said, “Well, I want you to go down to the shop on Friday afternoon, wash her all down nice and clean just like you would for Harry Gowman or McDonald Smith. I want you to get the woodbox full, the wood locker full, of good hardwood scraps from the scrap pile, and get a good fire going. You lay it on Friday, and the next morning you start it so the boat is nice and warm when he gets here. And, if he should come alone, you offer to go with him back to Tacoma.” And that’s the way it happened that I got a cruise with George Weyerhaeuser.

By the time Mr. Weyerhaeuser and I got his boat out into Elliott Bay he said to me, “I’m sure glad your dad thought to send you with me, because I didn’t know there were any locks between the fresh water and Puget Sound. In fact, if I had had to leave your place alone I would have turned the wrong way and wound up in Lake Washington.”

As we headed for Tacoma it began to blow pretty rough, and Mr. Weyerhaeuser asked me, “Do you think everything’s all right?” “Yes,” I said, “as long as that engine keeps running there’s nothing to worry about.” Well, he figured we would go down the East Pass, so I asked him, “You’re going to moor at the Tacoma Yacht Club, aren’t you.” “That’s right,” he said. “Well, it’s a little shorter if we go down the West Pass (now known as Colvos Passage),” and that’s the way we went, and it took the best part of the day before we got to the Tacoma Yacht Club and put the boat in his nice, new boathouse.

As soon as we had the boat secured in her boat house Mr. Weyerhaeuser took me up to his aunt’s home, which was a beautiful, English Tudor mansion right on the edge of the bluff, and it later became part of Annie Wright Seminary. It looked right north up the East Pass, with a gorgeous view of the Olympic Mountains, and I’m sure on occasion you could see Mt. Baker. After he had showed me the view he said, “You can see why I wanted the boat, living here.”

Then he said, “Now I’ve got to go up and unpack some of these things, and it may take me a little more than half an hour, but,” he continued, “as soon as I can I’ll come down and we’ll go downtown to the hotel for dinner.” There were plenty of magazines and other things to occupy my time while I waited, and then we had a fine dinner, and he paid for my ticket on the bus to get back to Seattle, and that’s the last we heard from George Weyerhaeuser. Apparently he had a local connection in Tacoma to look after the boat, keep it in shape, and I have no idea how long he kept it. I did become aware later that he purchased a Huckins Fairform Flyer from Florida, and I think he may have had two Huckins boats.

It was probably in the late 1970s that Eunice and I were on the Aura in Canada, heading south, and we stopped in Sidney, BC to do some shopping for items like Empress strawberry jam and things like that that were readily available up there in Canada at that time. When we pulled into the Customs dock I noticed what I was sure was George Weyerhaeuser’s Fairform Flyer, and a lady was sitting in the after seat in the cockpit. So as Eunice and I headed up to town we stopped by the Huckins and I asked the lady if that wasn’t Mr. Weyerhaeuser’s boat, and she said, “Yes, it is,” and so I asked if he was aboard. She said he was, but he was napping, so I said, “Well, maybe he’ll be awake when we come back.”

So forty-five minutes or an hour later, when we headed back to the boat, we stopped by the Weyerhaeuser boat, but the lady said, “Well, he awoke, but he and his wife went uptown shopping, too.” So we didn’t get to meet that day, but I asked the lady, “Well, you just tell him when he comes back that the guy on the sailboat, which you will undoubtedly pass on your way heading for Customs at Roche Harbor, is the guy who took him for his first boat ride on Puget Sound.” So when the Flyer came by we were still in Canadian waters, and Mr. Weyerhaeuser gave us a three-whistle salute and waved cordially. And within a very few years of that day he was gone.

-Excerpted from Classic Yachting, Winter 2024