That Time Vonnegut Did ‘the Ditch’ in a Kennedy Boat

Famed Author Crewed on an Annual ‘Marlin’ Delivery to Palm Beach

Peter Swanson Oct 4

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Even before I read someone else saying it, I long ago came to believe that author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was the late 20th century reincarnation of Mark Twain. Vonnegut’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five was his masterpiece, his Twainyist work, his Huckleberry Finn equivalent.

Slaughterhouse Five, by the way, has been banned in school libraries in the Florida county where I reside—a shining example of why no one is ever coming to Florida for the opera or the education.¹

Three years before Slaughterhouse Five began its 10,000-million-copy (and counting) sales run in 1969, Joe Kennedy’s skipper invited Vonnegut to crew for him on a delivery. Captain Frank Wirtanen was taking the Kennedy family boat from Hyannisport, Massachusetts, to the family’s winter colony at Palm Beach. Back then they didn’t called it the Intracoastal Waterway, instead it was the “Inland Waterway.”

Vonnegut chronicled his adventure in a 3,000-word essay entitled “Brief Encounters on the Inland Waterway,” which was first published in Venture magazine in 1966 and later included in his 1974 collection, Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. Loose Cannon obtained a paperback copy of Wampeters online. ²

(Alas, there were no illustrations or photos of Vonnegut’s voyage to be found, unlike Loose Cannon’s recently republished “The Forgotten Voyage: Ansel Adams on the ICW.”)

The name of the yacht is Marlin, and she was acquired by the Kennedys in 1952. According to Soundings magazine, she had recently been the property of the Yellow Cab Company of Massachusetts, which “put her at the disposal of the state’s governor. Prior to that, she had been commandeered by the Navy for coastal patrols during World War II.

JFK was on board with his advisers in August 1961 when he was informed that the the East Germans had begun to build the Berlin Wall.

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Five years and one assassination later, here is how Vonnegut described her:

The fifty-one-foot motor yacht Marlin is a period piece, built for Edsel Ford in 1930. Her boxy mahogany-and-glass superstructure, her forward cockpit, with a Stutz Bearcat windshield all its own, and her rumrunner hull cry out for Jimmy Walker and Texas Guinan³ to come aboard. But for the past nine years she has been the beamy, airy, highly practical day boat of Joseph P. Kennedy and his many descendants. And though political conferences of pith and moment have taken place on her from time to time, her passengers during her Hyannis Port summers are mostly children…

She was designed by Eldredge-McInnis, Inc., and built by F. D. Lawley, Inc., both of Quincy, Massachusetts. She is driven by two big Chrysler Imperial engines—225 horsepower. Her lockers are crammed with water skis, fishing tackle, and unclaimed sneakers of every size. Under a seat cushion is a family flag—a white pennant with two large, rose-colored stars at its center and nine smaller stars across the top.

The Marlin’s captain, Frank Wirtanen of West Barnstable, Cape Cod, says of his present duties, “I don’t think a man without children of his own, without a real understanding of children, could hold this job very long without going bananas.”

Captain Wirtanen is a graduate of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. He used to command tankers, both in peace and in war. He now has the Kennedy yacht fitted out with a system of rubber mats and scuppers that make it possible for him to hose away the remains of chocolate cake and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in a fairly short time.

In the mid-1960s, the Golden Era of Middle-Class Boat Ownership had yet to take hold as the boating industry retooled to convert from custom-wood to fiberglass manufacturing. The ICW snowbird migration was nothing like it is today. Vonnegut described it thus:

The Inland Waterway, in one form or another, runs all over the country, of course. The stretch we were using was a system of bays, lakes, rivers, and creeks very close to the open Atlantic, dredged to a depth of twelve feet, linked by canals, and marked as plainly as the aisles of a well-run supermarket. “Slow—Congested Area,” say signs along the way, or “All Credit Cards Honored at Bill and Thelma’s Sunoco Marina. 8 Miles,” and so on.

What with drawbridges and tight bends and speed limits and traffic, it is a slow way to travel—our trip took fourteen days—but an amusing, often lovely, and very safe way, too.

It is not a single artery. There are many forks and byways, plenty of choices to be made. It is not under the jurisdiction of a single government body, but is variously maintained by a patchwork of federal and state agencies and often, away from the main channels, by private enterprises.

That was the context of Vonnegut’s ride-along. Here’s how he described his deal with the captain:

It is a trip many millionaires’ vessels make every year, almost never with a millionaire on board.

“Yes I will,” I told him. “Yes.”

Call me Molly Bloom. Call me Ishmael.

I am a fool when it comes to money. I agreed to work for a very modest fee plus all I could cook and eat, which turned out to be plenty. I think I ate so much because of my anxiety over which was port and which was starboard. Frank insisted on speaking of everything in nautical terms…

We had only a radio to entertain us. It had a standard broadcast band, but Frank wasn’t interested. His idea of show business was the distress band. All it did the livelong day was fizz and crackle. Occasionally somebody would call the Coast Guard to ask if he could be heard. That was it.

Just like today, the captains and crews working for wealthy yacht owners constituted a their own subculture. Not millionaires themselves, yacht crew nonetheless lived and worked adjacent to their a lifestyle of luxury.

Yet, because of the the many Kennedy children that it entertained, Vonnegut joked that the 35-year-old motoryacht looked like a “set from a Clifford Odets play about the Great Depression.”

In the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, they joined a migration of dozens of millionaires’ yachts heading south, ownerless. The captains and crews would regularly gather at restaurants and pubs, like Shaefer’s seafood restaurant, to swap stories.

One of the captains was a rarity back then—a woman. She was single-handedly piloting a boat bigger than Marlin from New York to Key West. Vonnegut noted that she was a staunch Barry Goldwater supporter. You know, the conservative senator that Lyndon Johnson beat for the presidency.

And speaking of women, Vonnegut recalled this exchange:

“Women only pretend to like boats—to hook a man who owns one,” a skipper told me. “A boat to your average woman is just one more damn house to take care of, only it’s more uncomfortable, and the man orders her around like Captain Bligh, and she doesn’t trust the machinery or the plumbing, and she has to walk six blocks to buy groceries or get the laundry done.”

The author opined on Marlin’s fuel consumption, which he had meticulously tracked for the entire two-week trip. He reported that the twin V-8s had burned a total of 1,522 gallons, a rate Wirtanen described as “splendid.” What was actually splendid was the price—36 cents a gallon, for a grand total of about 550 bucks.

Because of images such as the above, Marlin was recognized and drew onlookers along the way, although Vonnegut mentions one obtuse Army Corps of Engineers officer who had never heard of Joe Kennedy of Hyannisport. The reception became more mixed as Marlin went deeper into the South.

“You ain’t got that Bobby on there, have you?” somebody called jeeringly from the shore. “No,” said Frank. He explained to me, “We’re in the South now.”

The most touching moment came when Marlin pulled into a marina in Jacksonville, the nearest metropolis to where I sit typing. (Jacksonville calls itself the “Bold New City of the South,” a sentiment shared by absolutely no one.)

As this next snippet suggests, symbols really do matter:

Whenever a marina operator recognized the Marlin, he would call up the local paper. He and Frank and the boat and I would then get our picture in the paper. But the nicest recognition came from a Negro who took our lines in Jacksonville.

“Oh, my goodness,” he said, “is this the President’s boat? Was this Mr. Kennedy’s?”

To keep things simple, we said it was. He patted the boat affectionately, shook his head. “I got to tell my wife about this. This is the best thing ever happened to me.”

Here’s how Vonnegut ends his essay, an exchange at Palm Beach with one the yacht captains he had come to know, a Swede named Gunther:

“How did you like our great Inland Waterway?” he asked me.

“Well,” I said, “I’d like to take it a lot slower next time. I’d like to explore and fish, anchor in creeks, wake up with the birds all around. A very beautiful life is certainly possible on the Inland Waterway for anybody who has the time.”

“First,” said Gunther, “get yourself a yacht.”