{"id":199,"date":"2026-07-23T21:23:26","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T21:23:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dreamfirehawk.com\/?page_id=199"},"modified":"2026-10-16T18:57:06","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T18:57:06","slug":"memoir-moments","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dreamfirehawk.com\/?page_id=199","title":{"rendered":"Memoir Moments"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The National’s<\/strong><\/h1>

\"\"Once a year in the fall, the NCESA (National Class E-Scow Association) holds its championship regatta. The event is held on different lakes each year, rotating through various yacht clubs in its regions. I was 21 the first time the Nationals came to Crystal Lake in 1973.<\/p>

1970 through 1976 were my “snowbird” years, where I summered at Crystal Lake and wintered in Albuquerque pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. I like to say I painted my way to a BFA because during those years, I ran a house-painting business at Crystal Lake to help pay for my education.<\/p>

1973 was the first year I monetized my artistic abilities. The Crystal Lake Yacht Club commissioned me to design and create the event trophies. I also designed and sold a T-shirt for Regatta. The T-shirt cost included free beer until the kegs ran out. Those who are familiar with sailors won’t be surprised to hear that I sold out very quickly.<\/p>

The weekend the regatta came to town was windy, and on Sunday it blew twenty-five knots, with gusts up to thirty-five. Skippers and crew gathered on the CLYC beach, waiting to hear whether the races would be canceled because of the high winds.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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I was thinking it was the perfect time to show what an E-scow can do in these conditions, and we knew how to handle them. I enlisted four beefy crew, borrowed my friend Harold McClure’s new E-scow, and put on a show for the Yacht Club. We even set a spinnaker and screamed downwind past the Yacht Club. For those unfamiliar with the E-scow, it is basically a 28-foot-long, 1,000-lb surfboard with a planing hull. Unlike a displacement hull, which pushes water aside, a planing hull generates lift through its shape, allowing it to skim the water’s surface or plane off while reaching downwind. Their mainsail and a jib are 323 square feet of sail. Their spinnakers add another 550 square feet of sail power. Setting a spinnaker is like kicking in the nitro on a race car, just a whole lot quieter. E-scows have been clocked at close to thirty-five miles an hour while reaching downwind with a spinnaker. I’m pretty sure we topped that speed when a gust hit us and made the rigging groan. I held my breath and the tiller, feeling the power we’d lassoed with our sails surging through me. I wondered if this wild wind would rip the mast from the deck. An observer from the beach said they saw our hull go airborne all the way back to the rudders as we rocketed downwind.<\/p>

For years, it had been rumored that an E-scow could pull a slalom skier. What better day to find out, I’d thought. I asked my friend Mike Huck if he was game. “Hell yes,” he grinned, “I’ll meet you at the end of the yacht club dock, what time?”<\/p>

When Mike came sauntering down the dock heading for the lake with a slalom ski on his shoulder, he caught everyone’s attention. You could almost hear the – What the, what the? -rising from the crowd. Our timing was perfect; Mike was ready to go when we came about at the end of the dock, and threw him a tow rope cleated to the transom. Loosely sheeted in, sails flapping, we slowly moved forward, taking the slack out of the tow rope, waiting for his signal to “Hit it!” He grinned and gave it. We furiously sheeted in, and he popped right out of the water. The crowd that had been milling around on the beach, waiting to hear if the races were going to be canceled, jumped to their feet in a roaring, standing ovation as we sailed away with Mike in tow, proving that yes, an E-scow can pull a slalom skier.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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\"\"<\/p>

Dad was passionate about flying, chess, and sailing, but Crystal Lake was where his heart lived.<\/p>

His family has owned 120 acres of woodlands and dunes between Lake Michigan and Crystal Lake since 1906.<\/p>

At the heart of the property was The Big House, the three-story summer home his family built around 1908, along with a barn, caretaker’s house, and an ice house on Crystal Lake. Each spring, slabs of lake ice were harvested and stored in the ice house, providing turn-of-the-century refrigeration.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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The buildings themselves were made from cinder blocks formed on the property from cement and local materials using a Sears and Roebuck Wizard concrete-block machine.<\/p>

Finished eleven years before the dirt two-track running down the west side of the family property became M-22, The Big House still stands today.<\/p>

In 2015, M-22 was rated #1 Best Scenic Autumn Drive award by USA Today’s Readers’ Choice poll.<\/p>

Through his teen years, Dad spent every summer here. The Big House sat within easy walking distance of the Crystal Lake Yacht Club, where he first learned to sail. On Crystal Lake, he fell in love with racing sailboats\u2014any size, anytime, anywhere\u2014from dinghy racing on Illinois’s Skokie Lagoons to Star boat racing out of Chicago on Lake Michigan. But his true passion was Scow sailing on Crystal Lake, especially the fast, powerful E-Scows.<\/p>

Except for his years serving in World War II, Dad never missed a summer at the Lake. As a working man living in the Chicago area, he drove up every weekend in the summer to sail the waters he loved. That meant twelve to fourteen hours on the road, round trip, every weekend.<\/p>

The Lake was his little slice of heaven sandwiched between work weeks.<\/p>

Dad crewed on the boat Rangoon in the Chicago-Mackinaw race. His knowledge of local conditions and his ability to read the sky played a big part in their second-place finish that year.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Dad crewed on the boat Rangoon in the Chicago-Mackinaw race. His knowledge of local conditions and his ability to read the sky played a big part in their second-place finish that year.<\/p>

Much of the fleet was working its way north through the Manitou Passage when the already light westerly winds began to die off. It had been a muggy, hot summer day. Thanks to Dad’s ability to capture the lightest of winds, his “ghosting” skills, he kept the Rangoon moving toward the dunes and the promise of a shore breeze. He knew that on days like these, the heated land could generate a robust thermal offshore breeze, one that wouldn’t venture far offshore.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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As the sun set, Rangoon’s crew could see a dark band of ruffled water growing toward them from the Sleeping Bear Dunes. Rangoon’s sails soon filled with the thermal winds, and she started moving right along while the rest of the fleet remained becalmed farther offshore.<\/p>

The nautical charts showed they could hug the shore all the way to the Mackinaw Bridge, so they did, cruising along at a sprightly twelve knots all night.<\/p>

At daybreak, they were closing in on the transom of the lead boat and perennial winner, and almost overtook her.<\/p>

My Father’s love for sailing became mine. I raced with him on his E-Scow named Storm almost every weekend from the age of twelve until I was twenty-five.<\/p>

Dad was brilliant. Hungover from his 60th<\/sup> birthday party, he took and passed the MENSA test.<\/p>

However, I have heard it said that there can be a vast difference between being intelligent and being smart.<\/p>

He was a poet out of place, a philosopher and a dreamer pressed into taking over his Father’s business when his dad died quite suddenly from lung cancer.<\/p>

It was not a good fit, and both my Father and the label printing company his Father built suffered as a result.<\/p>

Dad became a pilot in World War II. He loved flying almost as much as he loved sailing.<\/p>

When he could afford a private plane, like a Piper Cub, he flew up to the Lake on weekends.<\/p>

I will never forget seeing a rainbow for the first time while flying home to Chicago with him. Much to my surprise, it was a luminous circle below us. He just smiled when I excitedly pointed it out to him and said, “That’s what a rainbow looks like when the horizon doesn’t get in the way.”<\/p>

I was forty-four years old when Dad died in the summer of 1996. He was 73.<\/p>

He’d been following the E-Scow races in his motorboat, watching his granddaughter round the upwind mark in first place, when he suddenly became ill. He was taken to the local hospital, where he died.<\/p>

I arrived shortly after his passing and was given time alone with him in a holding room. I sat beside him and sang Northern Winds & Crystal Waters<\/em>, his favorite song of mine, one last time.<\/p>

His Love filled the room.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\"\"I was born during a raging snowstorm on Saturday, January 5th,<\/sup> 1952, at 4:37 am. Due to the weather, many roads were closed, and Mom would not give birth to me at the hospital of choice or be attended by her OBGYN. Instead, I was born at Saint Francis Hospital in Evanston, Illinois, where some of the nurses were nuns.<\/p>

Mom had a long and arduous labor bringing me into the world. Lots of screaming. She was shrieking from the pain of my imminent arrival when an exasperated Nunnly Nurse said, “Oh, be quiet! I’ll bet you didn’t make those kinds of noises when you were making that baby!” To which Mom replied, “HOW THE HELL WOULD YOU KNOW?” or so Dad told me.<\/p>

That was Mom, a five-foot-four-inch, one hundred and twenty-pound redheaded spitfire. She was a clothes designer and fashionista. I learned much from her. She was an artist, a dancer, and a romancer. She had hoped to go to college to become an artist, but that dream fell apart when she became pregnant with my older brother, Walker.<\/p>

After my parents divorced, Mom loved dancing all night in Chicago with her romantic partners.<\/p>

She also loved drinking, a bit too much, and eventually found her way to rehab at Hazelton, and then AA.<\/p>

At her wake, several of her romantic partners made a point of taking me aside to let me know how magical it was to be on a moonlight sail with Mom.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Yes I Am<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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