Fiberglass vs. Wood: The Material Switch That Wiped Out American Boatbuilding

It is April fifth, nineteen sixty. The largest builder of small boats on Earth changes hands for forty million dollars. The company being sold is built entirely of wood. Mahogany, planked twice over, sanded by hand, varnished until it throws back the sun. It is called Chris-Craft, and on this morning it is the biggest builder of pleasure boats in the world. The buyer makes plastic. Its name is National Automotive Fibers. NAFI. For thirty years it has supplied synthetic upholstery, molded trim, foam rubber, and carpet fiber to the automakers of Detroit. It has never built a boat. It is run from Wall Street by a man named Paul Shields, and it pays for Chris-Craft in installments, twenty-eight million dollars of the price spread across the next five years. A maker of synthetic material has just bought the wooden-boat empire. The Smith family valued the company at fifty million. They take forty. There is a rival bidder, the Brunswick Corporation. There is a son named Harsen Smith, the company president, who does not want to sell at all. He loses. This is where the material switch turns. Not in a laboratory. In a boardroom. The synthetic men now own the wooden kingdom, and inside eleven years the mahogany will be gone. To understand what forty million dollars actually buys, go back to a marsh at the mouth of a river, and a boy of thirteen with a knife.