I was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, just after the great New England hurricane of 1938. I regard myself as a very typical teenager of the 1950s, and graduated from high school and trade school with just good enough passing grades to get by. I considered myself to be quite socially normal and of an average demeanor, and, like all others, I was dealing with the usual conflicts of the day.
Having been trained as a printer and printing press operator, I spent four years in this business, and although I was good at it and enjoyed the work, I found that working in the building was too confining for me. I seem to require lots of space because even at this early age I had become a full-fledged obsessive compulsive philosophical “thinkaholic” who seems to have been born with the need to ask many impossible questions with nary a place to ask, and it seems that I was immune from being able to latch onto any philosophical belief system, which would have certainly stemmed the tide of inquiry as there were too many of them, and they seem to me to be in constant battle with one another.
It appeared also to me that there had to be a common thread of universality regarding the plight of man. It was easy for me to see at a young age that human beings everywhere, no matter what flavor or design location or degree of this or that, simply had to be enmeshed in a universal system with the universal outcome of fairness, balance, and truth. Simple logic and reason bring this to light. To be without a belief system leaves one more vulnerable to the ebb and flow of life, as well as being completely open to unfathomable learning.
Around 1959, when a friend of mine purchased an old, broken-down boatyard in Newburyport, Massachusetts, which became Powers' yard, I then abandoned the print shop and at the boatyard found my open space to work in and to continue to entertain and expand my thinking processes.
During the sixth year, in Newburyport I designed and built using an old Coast Guard surf boat as a base, a cutter-rigged sailing vessel that I named “FINLANDIA,” and spent many a long we can single-handing (that is sailing alone) off the New England coast, especially between Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the serenity of Gosport Harbor at the aisles of the Shoals of the coast of York, Maine. Single-handing offshore requires a sharpened attentiveness to detail, for here there is no room for error. One's responsibility is complete and self-reliant. It has to be at the fall that this attention to detail was to become helpful as things later developed, and sailing alone on Finlandia when things were going well was a delight to my mind, and with no outward limits, the brain often times soared.
With prospects of a lean winter with little work at the power's your yard in this six year, I reluctantly set my sights on the inviting warmth of Fort Lauderdale. Florida, leaving all that was known behind, and going alone was not a particularly easy thing for me to do, but within 24 hours of my arrival there I had secured a job as your refinisher or at Summerfield Boat Works and also found a temporary place to stay.
Soon after, I purchased an old 36-foot Elco cruiser to live on at Summerfield Boat Works and joined others on the work crew who also worked and lived in the yard on their boats. It was a comfortable family affair of like-minded vagabonds.
Then, in late November 1971, two years later, without warning, I was visited by the cosmic sense, which, to put it mildly, turned my world upside down.
Several years later, I formed my own York refinishing company and gave my full attention to running this business for the next four decades, also during this. However, this thing, which I now refer to as the greater friend, this awakened intelligence, would appear from time to time for a brief stay and continues to do so to this day.
I have spoken of this cosmic event only briefly to three different friends over the past 40 years, and one of them, Philip Thorpe, had urged me to put it on paper. I thought about this possibility for some time and came to realize that this two-story was significant enough and worthy to be made available, so I began the cosmic room and published it in 2011.
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