He seemed to be very good at not being noticed. He didn’t walk with a stride or even a shuffle, he slid. He was short and thin with hair that looked more like a five o’clock shadow. He should have been dead for years but, he just refused to go. He raced speed boats years ago and was world champion for several years until he crashed. He was thrown right through the side of his boat, they said he wouldn’t live through the night. Vernon and his wife Lessie were married at the age of 14 and had lived in the same house ever since. They were both 84 years old when I first met them and still very much in love. I always thought that he was still living because he wouldn’t leave Lessie.
Vernon had always been a boat builder and builders of race boats came from all over the country to get his opinion on hull design. He didn’t have much in the way of formal education but, he could just look at the hull shape and tell you that removing 1/4 inch from the bottom of the transom would give you another three or four knots. When the US Navy needed 110′ wooden mine sweepers built in WWII they were led to Vernon’s door. When they asked to see his plans, Vernon held up a square stick with marks all up and down the sides. They went nuts at first but were soon convinced, after he explained that the each of the four sides represented each of the offsets of the hull, that he knew what he was doing. He built 110′ boats for the Navy with no plans drawn anywhere. I found myself teaching wooden boat building for the local college in Vernon’s old shop. The same shop that had been George Washington Creef’s, the developer of carvel planking, and the shop that the replica of the 15th century Elizabeth, the Elizabeth II, was built in. This shop predated the Civil War. It dripped history and I felt a heavy responsibility that came with it. As I would teach the class, Vernon would slide in silently from somewhere and just stand in the corner with the wry smile that never left his face, watching. 
After class he would take me aside an give me a boatbuilding lesson. “Do it this way – do it that way”, never in front of the students. He taught me the stick method, the joggle stick technique and to leave the tape measure in my tool box. In the fifteen years that I was teaching I learned quit a bit as is usually the case when teaching anything but, with Vernon there, I learned the old techniques that are mostly lost today. 
Teaching in that historical shop ment that I had a constant stream of “experts” walking in the door telling how to build a boat. Vernon watched this too. He told me about his first boat. “I set up my saw horses in my backyard and began to build. It wasn’t long before they began to stop by and tell me how it should be done. Seems everyone in town had an opinion about my boat. Being that this was my first boat, I followed their advice to the letter. When I got her done I stepped back to admire my first boat. It was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I set it over on the side of my backyard and began to build another boat. Right away they all showed up again and began to tell me how to do it. I stopped them with a raised hand and said, “This is my boat, that’s yours over there”‘. A good lesson in life, I’ve built my own boat ever since.
Just before I moved away I bumped into Vernon at the post office and chatted for a few minutes. As I turned to leave I asked him to tell Lessie “Hi” for me. It was the first time I can remember that smile not being there, “I wish I could” was all he said. The love of his life was gone and I don’t expect he waited around much longer.
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