TROJAN BOATS AND THE TROJAN BOAT COMPANY - 1956-1992
For those of us who love our sleek wooden boats, especially the original Trojan boats, 1949 was a year to remember. It was four years after the end of World War II, with U.S. manufacturers still converting to peace-time uses of construction materials no longer needed for the war effort - steel, aluminum, rubber, nylon, and newer products such as plastic and vinyl. Novelties of 1949 included inflatable plastic boats, and a surfboard coated with fiberglass.
That year two young men tired of their jobs at Norman Owens’ Boat Company, and decided to leave to form their own company. Jim McQueen and Harper Hull traveled to Troy, New York, where they bought the Cottrell-Spoore Boatworks, a small builder of wooden racing boats and runabouts. McQueen and Hull renamed the company “The Trojan Boat Company” and moved operations to York, Pennsylvania. There they bought a dairy barn, converted it to factory use, and started to build boats in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch Country where they had access to the local Amish work force, hard working and skilled craftsmen. Not long afterward they moved their main factory to nearby Lancaster.
In January 2001, when Bob Cushman interviewed Larry Warner and John Leed, keepers of Trojan Boat archives, Warner recalled, “Problem was they didn’t have any idea on how to run an assembly line. So they thought, Let’s go back and get ol’ Ernie Warner and get him over here with us. So that’s how he got there.” With Ernie Warner in charge of manufacturing, McQueen’s area was Sales, and Harper’s was Engineering. Larry was one of Ernie Warner’s five sons who also joined the firm. John Leed’s father had been Line Specialist at Trojan Boats, and John himself had also worked in production.
In 1950 the Korean War apparently slowed the start of the new company, while Jim McQueen left for the service. After 1953, when the war was over, business boomed for The Trojan Boat Company at its Lancaster factory, and within two years the young company was producing some twenty boats a week. In 1954 it introduced the famous Trojan Sea Breeze which before long generated 800 orders.
In the 1960’s the 31-foot Sea Voyager came out; 10,000 of these wooden family cruisers were produced over the next decade. In 1966 Trojan acquired the Shepherd Boat Co., a Canadian builder of up to 50-foot wooden motor yachts. Larry Warner recalled that in 1964, he was involved with the engineering of the Sea Voyager, the first 42-footer he worked on, a boat that took about a week to build.
“Did you design the ‘42 a special way? Or was it pretty much stock?”
“They were all the same design, but there were options. They had what we called x packages, offering things beyond our normal features. If you wanted a depth finder or something like that, you’d get written up as an x-package. If they were really busy they would try to discourage that, but if they were looking for work they didn’t seem to mind too much. . . But as far as a major redesign, it didn’t happen.”
By 1968 time Trojan facilities in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Elkton, Maryland, and Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, had made Trojan the second largest producer of inboard boat-builders in the world, building a complete line of wooden boats. The company was an early user of computers, and even had the capacity to contract payroll and data processing work for other business firms in the Lancaster area, using the new automatic tape punch equipment then becoming available for data processing. The early computers being developed in 1949 worked thousands of times faster than their predecessors. These new machines used vacuum tubes to replace the more cumbersome electro-mechanical wheels and levers of older models. The Trojan team was ahead of its competitors in using this new technology.
Larry Warner recalled, “They built a lot of the little 14-16 footers. They built those boats, probably 25-30 of them a week. Put them on trailers. My Dad used to put six boats on a trailer and deliver them all over the place. But the boat that really brought them into the limelight was a 20-foot cabin cruiser with a stand-up head.”
“Did it have a kitchen in it?” asked Cushman
“Yes,” Larry replied. “It had an alcohol stove in it.”
John Leed added, “It had a 5-gallon jerry jug for the fresh water system, an old military can they set up in the head.”
“What year did they make that?” asked Bob.
“I think it was 1953,” replied John
“And they made a lot of them?”
“Yes. See, back in those days Trojan actually had an incentive system on their production line, which was unheard of. Nobody in the boating industry had an incentive system. Everyone else did it in time. They actually encouraged the guys to work harder and faster and they’d make more money if they made more boats. Trojan was really the envy of the industry. We could build boats unlike anybody else.”
As capable and forward-looking as McQueen’s team was, it did not foresee the revolution in boat-building that was soon to come. By 1960 boat designers had finally realized the practicality of using fiberglass in place of wood. At the Trojan Boat company, however, the change would come slowly.
“Why did they wait so long to do the fiberglass?” asked Bob.
‘Jim McQueen said that fiberglass was a passing fancy. He thought that fiberglass just wouldn’t stay around. He said, “We’re not getting into that.” There were signs in the office that said “If God had intended there to be fiberglass boats, He would have made fiberglass trees.” And that kind of thing.’
“Yeah, he fought it. Then eventually he couldn’t do that any more.” When McQueen finally realized that to remain competitive fiberglass must replace wood in the manufacture of boats, Trojan Boat did not have the capital to build the molds for a complete line of fiberglass boats to replace their existing wooden models. In 1969 the needed financial backing came in the form of a buy-out by the Whittaker Corporation. The Trojan acquisition was one of a number of boat businesses that Whittaker bought at that time, with a plan, said John, and “What GM did for cars, they were going to do for boats. They were a little ahead of their time.”
So Trojan at last ceased production of wooden boats and began production of fiberglass boats. Moving into fiberglass production, Larry Warner remembered the 32-foot boat as “Probably our best boat. I guess it was the boat that turned the company around.”. A transition period began during which Jim McQueen and the old line Trojan managers were obliged to adjust to changes brought by the new management team from
Whittaker, some of whom had no boat building experience.
The company survived the change and, operating as a Whittaker subsidiary, began to produce well-built fiberglass boats. John and Larry remember the most successful models as the 28, 30, 31, 32 and 36-foot boats. For twenty years from about 1972 to 1992 about 2,200 of the twin inboard 32-foot “sedans” were built. In 1981 Trojan introduced the International series of motor boats, one of several popular models.
The original Trojan Yacht Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania ended production in 1992. Miramar Marine, later known as Genmar, owner of Carver Boats, purchased the Trojan Boat brand name and assets. Genmar Holdings, Inc., the largest independent manufacturer of recreational powerboats in the world, located in Pulaski, Wisconsin, produces motor yachts with the Trojan name through its Carver Yachts subsidiary. Boatbuilding technology has changed, and the Trojan yacht of today is an entirely different vessel from the historic Trojan Sea Breeze of 1954 or the Sea Voyager of 1968.
Information contained in this narrative has been obtained with the help of Roger DeVore who cites Powerboat Guide’s 2000 Edition, Ed McKnew & Mark Parker, TROJAN 1949-92, and from Bob Cushman’s interviews on January 26, 2001, with Larry Warner and John Leed, former Trojan Boat employees.
Another good Trojan history site is:
http://www.acbs.org/Public/Rudder/Summer2001/trojan.htm
THE TROJAN WARS
The Story of a Gutsy Boat Builder
by Brian Nolan
They were the Stradivariuses of the postwar plywood fleets and, when the last wooden Trojan cruiser rolled off the company's production line in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1974, the sadness was palpable. The event marked a milestone in the turbulent life of this upstart boat builder.
By daring to duke it out with the colossus which was Chris-Craft, and going toe-to-toe with the great pretender to the boating throne, the Owens Yacht Company, Trojan demonstrated from the very beginning that inspired American characteristic-the compulsion to achieve.
And achieve it did. At the peak of production in the late 1960s, the Trojan Boat Company boasted a payroll of 700 employees in plants at Lancaster, Pa., Elkton Maryland, Niagara-on-the-Lake and Smithville in Ontario, Canada. The company was turning out an average of 4,000 boats a year, handsome cruisers ranging in lengths from 24-footers to the 52-foot Trojan-Shepherd.
Its salad days were short. In just 25 years from the first to the last wood boat, Trojan had captured a world-wide market-a fraternity of owners from all walks of life, united by two factors: Trojan's clean lines and quality workmanship.
The firm's meteoric rise from a rented dairy barn in rural Pennsylvania was nothing less than startling. No one had ever heard of Trojan when it first appeared in 1949, but anonymity was no obstacle for the two founding partners.
James R. McQueen liked nothing better than a scrap. A fighter pilot in World War II, colleagues remembered him being feisty as the P-51 Mustangs that he had once flown.
Harper Hull was opposite in personality. A graduate of the University of Michigan with a degree in naval architecture, Hull was studious and meticulous. He spent the War drawing plans in various shipyards in the South. Hull and McQueen met when they were working for Owens in Baltimore, where McQueen couldn't get along with Norm, one of the four Owens brothers. In fact, he couldn't stand the sight of him. It was said of McQueen that his one-man crusade in life was to put Norm Owens out of business.
McQueen was confident there was enough room for another boat producer to take advantage of the rapid postwar economic boom. He convinced his partner that with their combined skills, success was assured. Hull would design the boats, he would sell them. To this day, everyone talks of McQueen's optimism and enthusiasm. It could have easily been Jim McQueen rather than Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman who said; "start big, and you'll end up big."
Yet, Trojan's beginnings were modest. On December 31, 1948, McQueen and Hull drove to Troy, N.Y., with a truck pulling a trailer, where they plunked down $4,000 to buy the assets of a small boat works that had foundered on financial rocks. For their money they got an assortment of woodworking tools and machinery: a planer, a band saw, and more. After man-handling the heavy equipment on to the trailer, they checked into a motel to spend a gloomy New Year's Eve, entertaining each other with gallows humor of their impetuous decision to take on Chris-Craft and Owens.
Calling their newly acquired business, Trojan Boats, they set about building their first model, a 10-foot plywood car-topper that became an instant hit with the public.
They knew that producing larger boats required a proper production line and someone to manage it, so they turned to another Owens alumnus, Ernie Warner, a farm boy who had become a skilled woodworker. Warner was an example of what the Navy had discovered a long time ago: that because they are resourceful, farmers make good sailors - they learn how to fix things.
The Warner family tells the story of how a young Ernie blew off the tips of two fingers when he accidentally detonated a dynamite blasting cap. Rushing to the boy's side, his mother grabbed a handful of cobwebs, thrust the boy's fingers into the silky mesh which instantly stemmed the flow of blood. This was resourceful!
Warner joined Trojan in November 1949, buying into the partnership with money he raised by mortgaging his house and cashing in a life insurance policy.
Years later, Harper Hull said much of the success of Trojan in the pioneering years can be credited to Ernie Warner as head of production. Warner was not only resourceful in the early shoestring operation, he was also innovative and analytical. On an assembly line time is money. To reduce the amount of labor required to build a boat, Warner devised a number of laborsaving techniques. The most significant one was to sheath the hull with a single length of Duraply scarfed together from several pieces of plywood. This was fastened on to the frames from the shear strake to the chine, from the stem to the transom, "white knuckled" on to frames of white oak, in the words of John Leed, a former Trojan employee. To prevent rot, the frames and stringers were dipped into a wood preservative that was so corrosive that a drop on the skin was like a hornet's sting.
Lapstrake hulls were assembled one strake at a time, but to speed up the process, Warner invented a tool that sequentially hammered in the copper nails and then clenched them to the backside of the strake.
Hull designed all the cruisers with V-bottoms and a hard chine for stability in rough seas as well as lots of freeboard fore and aft, making Trojans a dry boat in a chop.
The shorter models got bottoms of 1/2-inch ply and sides of 3/8-inch. Cruisers over 33 feet were carvel planked with 3/ 4-inch Philippine mahogany. The 38-footers and longer were planked with 7/8-inch mahogany.
Another interesting practice that gave the plain plywood hulls a smooth finish when painted was gluing waterproof paper over the wood, which covered up any sign of plywood grain. This facing was applied by the plywood supplier, eliminating labor on the assembly line.
What struck new owners of Trojan boats was the quality of workmanship. Fittings were always top drawer. Fastenings were copper and bronze; railings and handholds were stainless steel.
The Philippine mahogany gave the boats a warm, honey-like appearance. As a cabinetmaker, Warner saw that the joinery was high standard.
"They were beautiful boats," in the opinion of Max Silverman, a longtime marina operator and boat broker in Manotick, Ontario. "Trojans matched Chris-Craft all the way."
What the boat buying public discovered was that Trojans gave you more boat for less money. Trojan offered the "most wanted features" as standard equipment that were options in their competitors' cruisers: a complete galley, a stand-up head, upholstery, cabin cushions and carpets. The cruisers came with a variety of power plants, either single or twin screw, gas or diesel; the latter offer an option that was ahead of its time.
Other characteristics that owners admired were the spacious cabins and teak decks which gave the boats a rich appearance that was seen only on the most expensive cruisers or sailboats in the past .
Trojan was a leader in offering workers incentives on the production line. Those on piecework could increase their weekly paycheck considerably. To ensure that quality did not suffer, inspectors approved the work. If it was not up to snuff, the employee made good the work later on his own time. It was a progressive company in many regards. An early IBM computer was in use in 1957 that provided accounting functions, controlled the flow of materials to the production line, managed inventory, and recorded the piecework done by individuals who also enjoyed a profit-sharing retirement plan.
Before a succession of corporations took over the Trojan management, many employees said they felt they were working for a family business. When Trojan acquired Shepherd Boats in Canada, workers there were naturally apprehensive about the take-over. But Trojan surprised the Canadians with its thoughtful management-employee relations. "It was the happiest job I ever had," remembered Helen Rockwell who worked in the Trojan-Shepherd payroll office.
Trojan displayed another distinctly American trait: hucksterism. When anyone asked why the company had located in land-locked Lancaster, they hinted it was because of the presence of a pool of Amish workers in the area, giving credence to their talents as woodworkers. "In fact, the Amish were no more or less talented than any of the other workers," said Larry Warner, the son of Ernie and himself a long standing Trojan employee. "What they did excel at was giving the company nine hours of work in an eight-hour day."
For visiting firemen the sight of the black-clad Amish on the production line with their straw hats was not only a colourful sight but also a reassuring one of fastidious craftsmen at work.
"They were really excellent barn builders who kind of got involved in boat building," laughs Warner. The real reason Trojan located in Lancaster was because the three partners lived nearby.
Another innocent deception the company perpetrated was to draw human figures disproportionately smaller than normal in illustrated brochures as to make the boats look bigger. That they seemed to be a family of dwarfs didn't seem to matter to the founders.
It is difficult to know how many wooden Trojan cruisers were actually built. As the new owners of the Trojan firm came and went, much of the company's financial records and plans got tossed into the dumpster. Records that do exist for the 1950s show that success was rapid with the introduction of a 20-foot pocket cruiser with a stand-up head that "really put Trojan on the map," recalled Larry Warner. In a five-year period, from 1953 to '58, Trojan sold 16,783 boats, a remarkable achievement for a newcomer in a very competitive industry.
While records are incomplete the years between 1958 to 1974, when the last wooden boat was made, a guesstimate of 3,000 boats a year would bring the wooden Trojan fleet to 64,783 boats built in that period. And that is conservative since, by the middle 1950s, Trojan was already building on average 4,000 boats a year.
Unfortunately, Trojan was slow to recognize the shift from wood to fibreglass construction. "Jim McQueen never liked fibreglass. He thought it was a fad," said Larry Warner. By the middle of the '60s the company still had not begun to build in fibreglass, or, for that matter, aluminium or steel. When it did, Trojan turned to a local company making bathtubs to turn out the early fibreglass hulls.
Still, the middle 1960s were roller coaster years, with the Whittaker Corporation of Los Angeles taking over Trojan, who shortly afterwards acquired Shepherd Boats in Canada. The deal gave Trojan access to Canadian and British Commonwealth markets. The move also gave Trojan a luxury 52-footer that soon found favour with American buyers. In 1966, Trojan made an aggressive bid to get into the European market, shipping 24 models across the Atlantic for boat shows in England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
At home millions of TV viewers were already familiar with Trojan's 33-foot Express Cruiser seen in the Sea Hunt series, starring Lloyd Bridges as Mike Nelson, a Navy exfrogman. The series used a cutaway model for interior shots as well . Bridges liked the boat so much, he bought one for his personal use.
However, the company's initial reluctance to accept fibreglass as the way of the future, and a misunderstanding of the public's boating tastes which chose the greatly reduced maintenance of the the new technology, marked a turning point. Eventually, gone were the smells of sawdust, paint and varnish, to be replaced by resins, epoxies, molds and composites. Gone, too, were the off-the-wall antics such as Jim McQueen sighting the shear or chine line by spreading his legs and looking backwards through them at the upturned wooden hulls on the production line.
By the late '60s Trojan was playing catch-up in an industry that had abandoned wood for fibreglass in the mass production of recreational boats. Only the die-hard traditionalists and custom builders stayed with wood.
"The number one problem Trojan always had was not enough money. They were growing faster than resources could support," said Larry Warner. Moreover, while they sold thousands of boats, they still couldn't compete with Chris-Craft when it came to buying materials in volume.
A succession of new owners arrived and departed as if through a revolving door, each with a solution of how to become viable. After Whittaker came Invest Corp., followed by Bertram, who launched the Bertram Trojan International series in the late 1980s. Next came Genmar Holdings, Inc., who paired the Trojan name with Carver, one of Genmar's many boat-producing companies. In 1992, Cenmar closed the Lancaster plant and moved the production line to Wisconsin.
Larry Warner was offered a job with Carver in the mid-west. Instead, together with John Leed he founded Marine Tech, a company that bought Trojan's Lancaster inventory to supply parts for Trojans, which included the wood era. They set up shop in rented space in a corner of a pipe organ repair factory in Columbia, Pa., a few miles west of Lancaster. Besides propeller shafts and struts etc., they inherited what company archives survived. This included some financial records, boat serial numbers, photos and other memorabilia of the wood construction days.
While the name Trojan still endures in the aerodynamically-shaped fibreglass hulls that are the fashion in the new millennium, it is with nostalgia that owners of wooden Trojans remember this gutsy, upstart company; its founding fathers had a dream and made it come true with a boat that was both winsome and rugged. Of the trio of Jim McQueen, Ernie Warner and Harper Hull, only Hull is now left, an energetic 78-year-old still living in Lancaster.
Yet, for all three of these remarkable men, their legacy lives on in the memory of anyone who has ever seen their wooden Trojans cruising on blue seas under sunny skies.
Brian Nolan is a Canadian author who usually writes on politics and military affairs. He divides his time between a home in Ottawa and a pied-a terre in the south of France.
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________________________________________
December 25, 1984
Whittaker's Marine Group LOS ANGELES, Dec. 24
(Reuters) - The Whittaker
Corporation said it had agreed
to sell most of its Marine Group
to the Arabian Investment
Banking Corporation for $70
million. Whittaker said the sale of the
group, which excludes the Survival Systems division, would
be structured as a purchase by
three newly formed concerns.
It said that upon completion of the transcation, Whittaker and affiliates of Arabian
Investment would have substantial equity in the three new
concerns. One of the new companies
would be Bertram-Trojan Inc.
and it would acquire the assets
of the Bertram Yacht division
and the Trojan Yacht division.
Another would be Kettenburg
Marine and it would acquire
the Kettenburg Marine division. The third, the Riva Corporation, would acquire the stock
of Cantieri Riva S.p.A. and
Riva Boats International
S.p.A., both Whittaker subsidiaries in Italy. Whittaker said that the proposed sale was consistent with
the company's strategy of concentrating in three selected
growth areas - health care,
technical products and specialty chemicals.
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Trojan Yachts
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An U.S. pleasure boat manufacture based in Lancaster Penn. at one time owned by a company named Whitaker. A marriage of convenience took place between Trojan and the Canadian boat builder Shepherd Boats in the 1960's. This "marriage" allowed Trojan boats to be sold in Canada at a reduced duty rate. Trojan Yachts started out as a product of the Trojan Yacht Company, and the Trojan line of yachts survived buyouts until the early 2000’s. Most recently, Trojan Yachts was a division of Carver Boat Corporation in Pulaski, Wisconsin, owned by Genmar Holdings. Trojan’s roots go back to 1949, the Trojan Boat Company, and a long-standing tradition of wooden boats. The final, early 2000’s Trojan yacht models were a line of express yachts created with no wood underneath the waterline, in 37 to 45-foot versions. Trojan held to the philosophy of not mass-producing yachts, but taking the craftsman’s way of building yachts. The yachts were constructed using the highest quality of materials, and featured a solid fiberglass hull. A Trojan express cruiser was used in the 1960’s television series “Sea Hunt.”
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1985 – In March, 1985, Whittaker sold part of its interest in Bertram and three other marine companies to INVESTCORP in a leveraged buyout. The transaction was structured as a purchase by three newly formed companies. One, Bertram Trojan, Inc., acquired the assets of Bertram Yacht and the Trojan Yacht division. Retaining its own identity, Bertram emerged stronger than ever and introduced a 37-foot convertible with sleek, new styling.
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