To the editor:
Roger F. Duncan, my eleventh-grade English teacher forty-six years ago, taught us to write plain and pointed stories in the tradition of E.B. White, and “Banker on Vacation” (Working Waterfront, August 2008) shows that his own knack for that is undiminished. But he also taught us to be logical and fair, and here his August 11 piece is less exemplary.
Mr. Duncan’s apparent point is that dudes from away spots like Boston shouldn’t presume to offer working fishermen ideas like the reintroduction of wind sailing for commercial fishing and shipping, because they don’t have much experience on the water. In short, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Mr. Duncan’s argument is that an experiment in commercial sailing in Maine more than 25 years ago failed badly. But so what? Maybe this is an absolutely wonderful idea, well worth offering by vacationing bankers or anybody else, that failed only because it was implemented badly.
Second, why did Mr. Duncan feel it was necessary to include the name of the current local resident who had tried the idea and was forced to abandon his ship all those years ago? After all, Mr. Duncan is not against disguising people’s identities: he disguised the name of his Boston banker, if there really was one. (I will not pursue the connotations of Mr. Duncan’s phrase, “name of Ackerman or something like that.”) Furthermore, while reading old magazines is sometimes a good way to research events like the abandonment of the John F. Leavitt, I believe Mr. Ackerman has both a different version of the catastrophe in question-in which no one was lost, by the way-and a telephone.
Last, Mr. Duncan missed a more interesting story, which is that Mr. Ackerman, having lost one schooner, has for years been building another, from scratch and by hand.
Charles Karelis
Research Professor
George Washington University
Washington, D.C.