My Father, Richard Bertram, was raised sailing the waters of Barnegat Bay off Mantoloking, New Jersey. Located between the coastal wetlands of New Jersey and the Atlantic barrier islands, the tricky waters of the bay were a good training ground for a world-class boat race champion. First traversed by Lenape Indians, who fished the rich waters for crabs and dug clams from the sand, it was later used as a hideout during the Revolutionary War. After staging raiding runs on British shipping, American colonists fled to the 30-mile inlet with its strong currents and breaking seas, knowing the larger British ships could not follow them.
At eight years of age, Bertram began sailing these waters in a 15-foot sneak box, which has been described as “a gaff-rigged sailing version of a 19th century gunning boat used to carry duck decoys through the marshes.” He entered his first race around this time and finished last. As a boy, he continued to sail competitively, however, by the age of 14 won the Barnegat Bay Yacht Racing Association Championship against a field of 60 competitors.
After graduating high school, Bertram attended Cornell University, where he continued his love affair with sailing and boats. He was founding member and the commodore of the Cornell Corinthian Yacht Club and led the team to intercollegiate dinghy championships in 1936 and 1937.
In 1937, already one of the most renowned racers in the college circuit, Bertram was elected president of the Intercollegiate Yacht Racing Association. “At the time,” he later told a friend and racing companion, “I had no thought of yacht brokerage as a business career, and my faculty advisor complained continuously about the amount of time I spent sailing.”
As fortune would have it, Bertram graduated college at the same time many young men were signing up for military service to fight in World War II. Although he didn’t end up in the service because he had ulcers, he spent the war working in a naval yard in Puerto Rico, where he and his wife, Kate, lived aboard a 36-foot Alden sloop with their infant daughter, Charlotte.
At one point, they had plans to sail around the world together, but fate intervened. After the war ended, they sailed throughout the lower Caribbean and spent some time in Cuba. Throughout these travels, Bertram found himself matching buyers to yachts as sort of accidental broker. In 1947, he decided to make this his profession and moved to the sunny port city of Miami, where he set up residence in a houseboat on Sunset Key and founded an instantly successful yacht brokerage firm.
According to John Weller, a Bertram employee for almost three decades, Richard Bertram was a gifted boat salesman who loved his trade. He frequently told his salespeople that a boat seller is a future boat buyer and there is no one better to help the purchase thane the broker who just sold the boat.
Shortly after he opened Richard Bertram & Company, Dick Bertram founded a repair yard on the Miami River for both sailing vessels and power boats. At the time, power boats were a minority compared to sailing vessels, but they were catching on quickly. It didn’t require much detailed knowledge to operate a power boat, and PT boats, a small and fast craft, had become famous in their early-war engagements with the much stronger Japanese navy in the Pacific. At the time, the powerboat industry was dominated by the wooden craft handmade by Chris-Craft.
With the brokerage operating in Miami, Bertram was free to return to the professional racing circuit, which had started running open ocean races again. In 1948, Bertram bought a Lightning sloop and won the International Championship in the Lightning class for the next two years running. By 1949, he was devoting most of his time to ocean racing and began to compile one of the most complete collections of trophies in competitive racing history.
That year, he won the Southern Ocean Racing Conference championship aboard the Tiny Teal as watch officer and skipper. In 1950, he repeated aboard the Ticonderoga, followed by a third championship in 1951 aboard the Belle of the West. That same year, he competed in his first transatlantic race aboard the Malabar XIII, winner of the Havana-San Sebastian transatlantic race. This was followed in 1955 by a turn as watch officer aboard the Finisterre as she sailed to the first of her many victories, this one in a race to Cat Cay.
Winning was good for Richard Bertram & Company. By 1950, it was the largest yacht brokerage in the world, its president described as “a hired gun in the Southern Ocean Racing Conference and other4 major regattas, helping rich sailboat owners win races, and then selling them boats.
Brud Hodgkins, who would eventually work for Dick Bertram and sometimes raced with him, sailed on the same competitive circuit throughout the 1950’s and knew Bertram’s reputation well. “He was a natural, natural helmsman,” Hodgkins said.
Besides being a gifted helmsman, Richard Bertram was the perfect personality for his chosen field. By 1952, he had split from his first wife and married my Mother, Pauline. He was charming and friendly, always well dressed, yet not at all arrogant or condescending. Shortly after her married Pauline, the yacht brokerage grew big enough that they could afford to move off the houseboat and into a waterfront home in Coconut Grove, a neighborhood of Miami. By this time, my Mother and Father had the first of their six children.
The Finisterre, which Bertram helped sail to victory in 1955, would figure large in Dick Bertram’s racing career. In 1956, Bertram joined friend and navigator Carleton Mitchell aboard the Finisterre for the famous Newport (Rhode Island)-to-Bermuda race, called the Ocean Race by Bermuda locals. Sponsored by the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club and the Cruising Club of America, the Newport-Bermuda race was first staged in 1906 and grew over the years to become the premier East Coast yachting competition and one of the toughest offshore competitions in the world. Participants were known to refer to the 635-mile survival test from Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, through the Gulf Stream, to St. David’s, Bermuda, as the “Thrash to the Onion Patch.”
In 1956, after Mitchell and Bertram sailed to victory, some of the other competitors claimed they were lucky. In 1958, however, they again sailed the Finisterre to victory. Once again, there were sour grapes. In 1960, they won a record third championship, and the sailing world embraced Mitchell, Bertram and crew. An article in Yachting magazine referred to Bertram as a “transatlantic veteran and a strong factor in the winning of any deep water race.”
Even as he sailed competitively, Bertram was closely involved in the developing sport of offshore powerboat racing, although it’s fair to say that before 1956, there wasn’t any offshore powerboat racing. That year, however, Dick Bertram, a fellow boatyard owner named Sam Griffith, and Sherman “Red” Crise founded the new sport with a gut-pounding race between Miami and Nassau.
Each of these three men played an important role, although credit for making the first race happen probably belongs to Crise, a World War II Air Force pilot and car race promoter. Already wealthy by 1953, Crise owned and auto race course in Nassau that attracted some of the world’s best drivers. At the same time, he was developing an interest in powerboat racing and talked Griffith into joining his first race. With no prize money to offer, Crise promoted this contest with eh flair of P.T. Barnum and frequently referred to it as “the World’s Most Rugged Ocean Race.”
John Crouse, author of Searace, a history of offshore powerboat racing, was a young sports reporter for the Miami Daily News at the time and covered Crise as “he beat the drums for his new 184-mile Miami-Nassau race.”
Although Crise probably deserves credit for putting on the first race, Griffith undoubtedly deserves the credit for making the race famous. Griffith was already a legend along the Miami waterfront when Crise recruited him and Bertram to race. Unlike Bertram, Griffith was more reckless, adventurous, and frequently described as a “wild man.” He was also offshore powerboat racing’s first true hero.
“of weather-beaten countenance, abounding with near reckless courage, wily and fiercely aggressive, yet tempered with a reservoir of humor, Griffith more than any other man was responsible for off-shore powerboat racing’s initial climb to fame,” Crouse wrote. When it came to riding with Bertram, Griffith, and boat owner Jim Breuil in a race, Crouse remarked that “I’d already learned that getting close to the dare-devil Griffith could be like making friends with a torpedo.
On the day of the first Miami-Nassau race in 1956, 11 vessels lined up for the competition. Daredevils all, none of the crews wore life vests or head gear. Bertram and Griffith drove the Doodles II, a powerful, 34-foot Chris-Craft with a pair of 215-horsepower engines.
When the gun went off, the boats leapt toward the open sea, only to discover that the pounding of the open ocean extracted a painful toll on the wooden racers. “The boat gradually disintegrated as the race progressed,” Bertram later said. “When we crossed the finish line, we were leaking through 56 broken fastenings.”
Yet they crossed the finish line first, one of eight starters to finish. They had won the grueling 184-mile race in 9 hours and 20 minutes at an average speed of 19.7 miles per hour, thus setting the course’s first record.
A year later, this time piloting the Doodles III, Bertram and Griffith won their second Miami-Nassau race. If the conditions for the first race were challenging, the second race took place on a day that was openly violent. Contestants sped from the finish line into the teeth of 28 mile per hour to 34 mile per hour wind and blinding rainstorm. Bertram and Griffith led the field across the finish line with a slow time of 10 hours and 42 minutes.
Throughout these exciting races, Bertram continued to climb the ranks of professional sailors and was rated a top foredeck man on the America’s Cup sailing yachts. In 1958, he was placed in charge of the foredeck crew on the Vim, a 12-meter designed to race in the venerable series. Although Vim performed well in the trials, this prize was ultimately to escape Bertram. The American boat Columbia convincingly defeated the British challenger, Sceptre, four races to zero.
