Tag Archives: John F. Kennedy

Victura: beloved sailboat taught JFK about life, family, leadership and winning

Victura and the Kennedy's

 

James W. Graham’s new book — Victura: the Kennedys, a Sailboat, and the Sea –offers new insights into the dynamics and magic of the Kennedy family and their intense relationship with sailing and the sea. Many families sail together, but the foot sloop purchased in 1932 shortly s move to Hyannis Port, stands apart.

Throughout their brief lives, Joe Jr., Jack and Bobby spent long hours on Victura, competing in countless races every summer. They were joined by their younger brother Teddy when he grew old enough. Joe Jr. and Jack ranked among the best collegiate sailors in New England, driven by their father Joseph P. Kennedy who insisted that winning was essential. Among their sisters, Eunice emerged as a gifted sailor and fierce competitor, the equal of any of her brothers.

JFK Sailing Victura

Tracking their story beginning in 1932 when Jack was 15 and continuing today in an identical family boat of the same name, readers will learn to admire the Kennedys for what Victura taught them about life, family, leadership, determination, winning, and dealing with tragedies.

Celebrating the sailboat’s deep influence on Jack, Bobby, Ethel, Ted, Eunice and other Kennedys, it offers a new way of experiencing their intimate sibling relationships and growth as an extended family. Kennedys credit young Jack’s sailing with helping him survive the sinking of his PT boat in the Pacific. Life magazine photos of Jack and Jackie on Victura’s bow helped define the winning Kennedy brand in the 1950s. Jack doodled sketches of Victura in Oval Office meetings, and his love of seafaring probably played a role in his decision to put a man on the moon, an enterprise he referred to as “space-faring.”

The notion of "Space-fairing" developed by JFK came about as a result of his sailing experiences and love for adventure. CP
The notion of “Space-fairing” developed by JFK came about as a result of his sailing experiences and love for adventure. CP

When the Kennedy siblings married, sailing connected them with their children and nephews and nieces. Sailing was an everyday event, even in dangerous weather and in the darkness of night.  The sport influenced how they celebrated and observed happy events, managed grief, and grew close to one another.

Ted loved Victura as much as any of them. In the years following the untimely deaths of his three older brothers, Ted sailed with his children and the children of his lost brothers as crew. He also sailed past the shoals of personal shortcomings and an ebbing career to become known as the “Lion of the Senate,” helping fulfill patriarch Joe Sr.’s desire that his children pursue careers in public service rather than in business.

Rich with colorful and intimate anecdotes, the book features author interviews with family members, including children of Ted, Robert and Ethel Kennedy.  Victura is a story of redemption, strong family bonds, character, sport, tragedy, the power of metaphor and the influence of a little boat on the lives of great men and women.

In Victura, James W. Graham charts the progress of America’s signature twentieth century family dynasty, in a narrative both stunningly original and deeply gripping. This true tale of one small sailboat is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the impressive story of the Kennedys. For the Silo, Jim and Lynda O’Connor, and Paul Krupin.

Victura
The Kennedys, a Sailboat, and the Sea
James W. Graham

ForeEdge, an imprint of the University Press of New England
$29.95 cloth 978-1-61168-411-7
$22.99 ebook 978-1-61168-599-2
Official publication date: April 1, 2014
280 pp., 28 illus., 6 x 9″

For more information visit

About the Author

James W. Graham, a communications and public affairs professional for a major-brand retailer, was a senior adviser to former Illinois Governor Jim Edgar and the Illinois House of Representatives. He races and cruises his sailboat Venturous out of Wilmette Harbor, north of Chicago.

What People Are Saying

“This wonderfully-written book takes a well-worn subject — the Kennedys — and gives it as fresh a gust as the sailors on the sturdy, little Victura themselves must have felt a thousand times off the Nantucket shore. In going to sea on board the Victura, Joe, Jack, Bobby and Teddy Kennedy entered their metaphor of quest, braced themselves for the unknown, and left their country, in the end, with an imperishable poignancy in its heart.”

— Richard D. Mahoney, author, Sons and Brothers

“The Kennedys saw the world and nature as a magical place, full of mystery and adventure. They especially enjoyed challenges and the freedom of activities like sailing, skiing, river running, climbing and just being outside. Two thirds of the surface of planet earth is liquid: the sea is vital to life — a huge source of both pleasure and fear — and a great teacher. Victura, a small wooden sailboat, became
the center of adventure, companionship and love for this remarkable family. Author Graham knows the sea, sailing and the Kennedys. Sail on Victura, to new horizons.”

— Jim Whittaker, first American to summit Mt. Everest, former CEO of REI, author of Life on the Edge: Memoirs of Everest and Beyond.

“Victura is more than Graham recounting the sailing experiences of the Kennedys. In this well-researched but warmly written book, Graham sometimes goes several pages describing an election, or a Kennedy family intrigue, and then gracefully brings the
story back to the sea, showing how, in best and worst of times, the family pulled together around sailing.”

— Rich Evans, book review, SAILING magazine, March 2014

JFK Sea Quote

 

Window Fishing Or The Night We Caught Beatlemania

Window Fishing

A Silo Canuck Book Review

I’ve never particularly been a Beatle’s fan. I like some of their songs. I like a number of them very much, but if I was asked the now proverbial question, “The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?” I would probably say, Oh, I don’t know, maybe The Who? The body of work of Mark Knopfler. Massive Attack were massive for me.

But I was not a child of the sixties, “an age of assassins,” John B. Lee writes in his poignant and powerfully executed preface, when “[o]ur childhood martyred almost all the heroes that we’d had.” John F. Kennedy. Robert F. Kennedy. Martin Luther King (Malcolm X, not mentioned but later, yes). “The list is overlong,” Lee says. “It will not end.” I understand more fully than ever these life-shattering moments, for Americans and Canadians alike; for so many  Across the Universe . Into this near death of hope came The Beatles. The Beatles came to America, came on a Sunday night in January 1964 to The Ed Sullivan show and, and as Lee exclaims with no exclamation mark, “sang my life awake.”

It’s not a perfect looking book. Yet as I read, the grainy cover photo (by an unknown photographer) of four dapper mop-tops fishing out the window of their Seattle hotel—they literally weren’t allowed to leave—starts to resonate. It’s imperfection could be viewed as integral, evoking a time in music when moments of “perfect imperfection,” as Michael Shatte calls them in his essay, were more common in pop; “happy accidents” which would not be tolerated in this era of hyper-produced top-forty songs, when singers voices are routinely, digitally “auto-tuned” in the studio, and we get used to being disappointed when we hear them live. Then there’s lip-synching. I don’t need to go on. There is great music being made by great musicians right now. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. This is about a particular moment in pop-music history, in cultural history, and many of the moments that followed.

PaulMcCartneyBlur

The book is selected and edited by John B. Lee, a Canadian poet and writer who has published more than fifty books and received over 70 prestigious awards for his work. If you haven’t heard of him don’t feel too bad. He tells me openly there is little money in poetry, reminding me it’s not about that anyway. If it was it probably wouldn’t be poetry.

If you haven’t read him it might be time to start: his verse and prose catch the beauty of rural life, farm life, family life, hockey, human sexuality—life. Just Google him. He’s from home, you know. Right around here, right around me, the Poet Laureate of Brantford, Ontario and Norfolk County, home as well to Alexander Graham Bell and Wayne Gretzky, a poet of sport. Like McEnroe was one of the poets of my youth, making tennis beautiful, thrilling, creative; revolutionary. How I tried to emulate him…

Window Fishing Cover

Window Fishing is about a time of Revolution, evolutions in culture, and about growing up in the thick of it all. I wasn’t here yet, but as I read this book I learn. It is a literary volume. The cover photo and torn ticket stub on the back page are its only images. Or are they? Because black words on white paper are also images. And the book’s words, artistically rendered, conjure images as well as ideas. It is poetry, and prose poetry, and personal essays; fine writing by a collection of fine writers.

I learn that for most of the men, who were boys then, pubescent, the Beatles were all about music: musical discovery, even ecstasy. And style too. There was style.

For the women who write about the phenomenon of Beatlemania, there was music too. Absolutely. But there was something else. Something profound: the awakening of sexuality. Even a kind of love. Suddenly I understand all the screaming and crying, the fainting. For emerging, young (straight) women, the Beatles were more than musical. They were also beautiful. Sexy. As Susan Whelehan puts it in her essay: “John. He was mine and I was his…I was going to be his FOREVER. And I am.”

While many parents of the day may have dismissed The Fab Four at first as a silly “boy-band,” we might say now, shaking their longish (for the time), round hair-cuts—singing “Ooooo!” and “Yeah Yeah Yeah!”—fact is from the beginning The Beatles were always at the very least competent, and obviously compelling, musicians. Writes Honey Novick in her probing, poetic essay: “You could actually dance to their music.” And we know they became more and more sophisticated as they progressed through their careers, eventually making challenging, often satisfying real art-music, the way Radiohead did for me in my 20’s.

All this beautiful literature about The Beatles and the 1960’s has inspired me to listen, finally, seriously, to the music. Even if you thought, at the time, “Yeah Yeah Yeah” was just bubblegum for kids, consider the lyrics. One friend to another: “You think you lost your love/Well I saw her yesterday. She says it’s you she’s thinkin’ of/And she told me what to say: She says she loves you.” She loves you man. Yeah! (Yeah! Yeah!). What more is there to celebrate? Ecstatically.

If you were there, or if you want to learn, or if you care about music or culture or the 1960’s or just literature, embrace the “perfect imperfection” of this unique and potent book. Some of the poems made me close my eyes and shut the pages. To savour, digest. Bruce Meyer made me cry. I was 8 years old when Lennon was shot. Assassinated. It made no impact on me then. I wasn’t really there yet. The book put me there, as close as I can ever come.  For the Silo, Alan Gibson.