Olin Stephens Interview

Olin Stephens’ interview is below but this shot shows him aged 90 as he helms Dorade: The photo by James Taylor was taken soon after Dorade was restored (for the first time!) in Italy in the late 1990s. Olin was uber cool in his 90s, seeing many of his boats being restored and raced again, and he would spend time in Italy and Europe (with a love affair at one point!) . This is probably the occasion he went sailing on Dorade and they said he just wouldn’t let go of the helm! He was 21 when he drew the boat that was to win the famous race across the Atlantic in 1931. No wonder they got a ticker-tape parade when they got back to NYC!

Of course Olin went on to draw seven America’s Cup defenders and with his company S&S dominated the yachting scene from the interwar period right through to the 1980s. He designed to several rules (the 12-M rule was the AC rule for most of that time) but he is perhaps most famous for his inboard yawls, in the style of Dorade which make the most fabulous sea boats. (See our piece on Argyll:  HERE ). He is also a hugely successful 6-M designer and there are many class boats to his name.

Dorade has since gone on to more fame and fortune, being restored from the keel up by Matt Brooks and Pam Rorke Levy after they bought her in 2010. She was expertly refitted by Joe Loughborough’s LMI yard in Newport Rhode Island. Spectacularly she won (yes she WON first overall) the 2013 Transpac, repeating her win of 1936 and has been raced hard and successfully in several continents by Matt and his quite serious crew.

INTERVIEW Olin Stephens 1908  –  2008

This is from an interview Dan Houston had with Olin in 1998 when the 90 year old designer had been sailing on Dorade again in Italy earlier in the summer. It was at the beginning of a ten year period when he became a star of the classic circuit, at one point learning Italian to keep up with a girlfriend decades younger than him. He was loving his new La-Z-Boy armchair, back home at Dartmouth NH, but also jumping out of it regularly to attend launches and regattas as his designs were restored to be sailed competitively again. One owner related later how he had invited Olin to view a restoration in progress at a British yard… “And I told him how we were planning to move the hatchway, he looked at me and said ‘Why? You’re restoring one of my designs so why change it?’ And I felt like a fool, there was no more talk of changing anything after that – we replaced like with like!”

OLIN STEPHENS CLIMBS the hotel lobby stairs with the precise slow steps of a 90-year-old. He’s meeting me for a drink after a gathering of the Offshore Racing Council in Palma, Mallorca, in November. “I don’t have a vote any more, but I like to keep involved,” he says over his tonic water. He’s flown here at his own expense from his home, a place he describes as a retirement complex, in Dartmouth, New Hampshire.

We shuffle through some diffident small talk punctuated by longer-than-average pauses, even for gents of his generation. There is something of the raptor about the way he holds back, waiting. But I don’t find him shy, rather it’s the tactician’s intellect at work, considering the question and then the effect of different answers. I’m reminded of playing chess.

Yet by all accounts Olin, the genius behind Sparkman & Stephens, designer of seven 12-Metre yacht America’s Cup defenders, is what the Americans call a ‘ballsy guy’.

He was 23 when he skippered Dorade, the 52ft (15.8m) yawl, to win the 1931 Transatlantic Race. He beat the competition by two days, testament, not only to his design, but also to a brave decision to take the great circle route, risking icebergs and long periods without being able to take sextant sights because of fog. They went on to win that year’s Fastnet Race. When they returned to New York, Dorade’s crew, which included his father Roderick Sr, and younger brother Rod Jr, were treated to a ticker-tape parade on Broadway. This wasn’t Olin’s first boat. He’d designed dinghies, several 6-Metres and the 30ft (9.lm) ocean racer Kalmia, and with his brother, father and the yacht broker Drake Sparkman, had founded S&S in 1928. But Dorade was built in the year after the Wall Street crash, which sent the world into the worst recession of that century.

Olin’s father, who commissioned Dorade, must have had tremendous faith to put so much money into the fledgling business at such a time. Olin agrees: “It was the defining moment in our careers, though we didn’t appreciate it at the time. Back then we saw it as a sporting thing rather than a business gamble.” Perhaps even more altruistically, Stephens Sr took a back seat during the races, despite being dubbed The Commodore by the young crew. Olin can’t remember a time when he questioned a decision. “Oh, there was once,” he _corrects “in The Fastnet we had a Royal Navy commander aboard who was convinced we were going to hit the Irish coast in the night. We’d been pushing hard in a 20-knot breeze with the spinnaker set, and I was trying to sleep on the chart table. I could hear the water sloshing by and could see the log reading 10 knots as we came off the waves. It didn’t seem bad to me, but this chap was terrified and kept telling dad to shorten sail. After one really big wave dad agreed that we should take the balloon down; the only time he ever told me what to do.”

Olin certainly feels he owes much to his father, who first taught the brothers to sail in a catboat in Barnstaple Bay, Cape Cod, when he returned from the 1918 war. “But he was a sailor only enough to get us into it,” Olin says. Both he and Rod took to it fully, sailing on Long Island Sound from the family home in Scarsdale, before getting into ocean racing in the late 1920s.

I wonder if Olin has Scandinavian blood, but he says no, he is named after his grandfather, which is why he sometimes calls himself Olin II. They’re an old New York State family who owned Falcon Island in Long Island Sound at the time when Manhattan was being founded. They ran a coal business in the Bronx, where he was born on 13 April 1908 and which his father sold before the crash. His mother’s parentage was part-English, from Chard, in Somerset, and part-German. “I have a grandfather clock, made in Chard, which I bought because of my family connection,” Olin says.

His father’s laissez faire attitude partly led to Olin quitting MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) after one term studying naval architecture in 1926, though he says that Glasgow would have been a better place to study yacht design and quotes GL Watson, Glasgow’s finest, as his inspiration. Recovering from jaundice over Christmas that year, he designed a 6-Metre and took up a design desk at Nevins yard on City Island, NYC, where his father had laid up the family boats, “working partly in their time, partly in mine”. Brother Rod also dropped out of a mechanical engineering course when the yard owner asked him to join the company on the building side of things. The brothers’ success ultimately lay in their ability to oversee both the design and building of yachts, splitting the tasks evenly as they did while out sailing.

“I don’t know whether it was because I was older, but he was unduly deferential to me,” Olin says of Rod. “He was the better seaman and navigator; he could work up a sight in 30 seconds. We always had this ability to fit together.” The brothers’ decision to quit studies began to pay off and design work started rolling in so that Drake Sparkman, who was selling the designs, rented a larger office across the road from Nevins. From there it was a short step to founding S&S at East 44th St in October 1929.

The following year Olin married Susie Reynolds at the Presbyterian church in Scarsdale, where his father was an elder: “We met at school and we’d agreed to get married when I was settled,” Olin says. They had two sons, Olin III and Sam. “My wife put up with a good deal,” admits Olin, “I was always off sailing in the new boats, and we didn’t really go sailing as a family. Rod’s wife was into sailing and his daughter Betsy too. He had Mustang (a NY 32 Class) from after the war, but I never owned a boat … it was a matter of both time and money.

Susie and I loved art though, and we’d go to galleries on Saturdays.” Olin began collecting art in 1939, buying modern works by Prendegast, Hartley and Marin. He dislikes most marine art: “If you know boats, then you tend to want the detail. Turner is an exception,” he says. He even studied art at night school, but gave up his own waterside sketchings in favour of more abstract work.

If anything, Olin portrays himself as more country gent than yachtsman. In later life he spent weekends on his 130-acre New England farm, commuting to work from his colonial style Scarsdale home on weekdays. He has acquired a taste for the finer things in life, enjoys French cooking and has taken up photography.

He also loves German cars, owning various Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches since the 1950s.

Olin is quoted as saying that both he and his brother Rod elected to be teetotal after they realised that partying aboard yachts after racing could damage their health, or perhaps this is another side of his focused temperament and the Presbyterian background. Nevertheless, he can polish off half a bottle of wine over dinner, and when we meet for breakfast he displays a hearty appetite, eating a bowl of fruit followed by cereal followed by eggs washed down with tea, not coffee. Overlooking the harbour in Palma in the warm early morning sun, he can pick out three or four boats from the 2,000 odd he oversaw from the team of draughtsmen at S&S.

Of the many highlights in his career, the afternoon in October 1970 when future Prime Minister Edward Heath visited the 12th floor S&S offices on Madison Avenue, followed half an hour later by the Aga Khan … both to discuss totally different yachts – must rank highly. “Mr Heath really knew his sailing, and I also went to Chequers several times (the PM’s country house) where he would play music on his fabulous hi-fi,” Olin remembers.

Regrets are few, though he misses the company of Susie, who died in 1993, and Rod who died in 1995. “I suppose my biggest regret, with all the racing, was not to go cruising,” he says, “but we didn’t want to do it when I retired (in 1982).”

I notice that whenever Olin gets up to cross the room he is approached by eager-eyed alumni of the racing world, and he greets them almost deferentially. His dress is the retirement special of comfy shoes, grey slacks, white or sports shirt and fawn cardigan with an ancient sun-bleached blazer. Occasionally he waves his left arm to illustrate a point, and his Rolex Oyster glints out from underneath his sober attire.

He seems so frail that I can hardly believe the story about him in Italy (last summer) in 1998 when he was invited to sail the restored Dorade. “He took the helm for three hours solid. I think the owner thought he wasn’t going to get another look in that day,” the teller said. But then she was the boat that launched his career… and a thousand other ships.

A more in depth piece on S&S history including Olin saying that if all the rules were swept aside then for a mix of speed and seaworthiness he would simply design Dorade again, will appear in these pages shortly.