Imagine Media LLC

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Listen, Honey

It is a chilly fall afternoon, but there is great warmth inside the oldest house in Oxford, Maryland. Half-models climb one wall to the ceiling, which seems dollhouse low in its 1668 construction. The coffee table displays favorite wooden boat magazines and carefully clipped articles, with antique chairs all around that have survived generations. A model of a two-masted sailboat is encased in glass, and family portraits clutter another wall like gnats on flypaper. This place could be a treasured museum or a yard-sale special, depending on who assesses the clutter.

Eddie Cutts, Jr. whirs into the room and stops just short of his proudly displayed New York Yacht Club burgee. The 77-year-old has been forced to use a wheelchair since his left leg was amputated a short time ago, and, though his lanky body looks frail, I can immediately tell he’s a shooting star stuck in a plastic seat. He’s just spent a half hour finishing his afternoon cup of tomato soup, and he’s been ready since before I was born to tell me about his life perfecting the craft of boatbuilding at his yard next door. He clears his throat as if he is straightening his stance in his mind.

“I’m autonomous in my thinking about boats,” he pronounces in a definitive opening lob. “God was the first one to decide he wanted a boat, so he got hold of Noah and told him what to do. Boats are the only way you can get away from anything anymore, honey.”

I cross my legs and sink deeper into the slouching old couch.

Well, then. Where to start?

I find it a rare pleasure meeting people like Eddie while wandering around marinas, and an even rarer joy when someone like him invites me inside to sit down for a talk. He’s a last link to a bygone era, a time when people said what they thought, meant what they said and didn’t give a hoot if anybody had a problem with that. He’s also a patriarch of the craft, a man who did and still does things his way, taking plenty of time to hand carve works of art. He’s been doing so here in Oxford since the late 1960s, surrounded by dozens of neighbors who are of the same kilter—living in historic homes, watching the country’s oldest operating ferry cruise in and out, driving to the market past the house where James Michener wrote the bestseller Chesapeake.

Eddie is definitely a character unto himself. Even in this town full of well-documented history, he managed to offer new stories that should have been shared long, long ago.

 

SPAGHETTI, GOD AND THAT DARN PHONE

“I’m an Englishman, but I love spaghetti,” Eddie says with great import, looking me square in the eye. “You know, the Romans occupied England over 400 years. They liked those English girls. That’s why we love spaghetti, and why there’s so many pizza parlors in this country.”

I’m not sure what I said to invoke this gastro-genealogical response. I know we were talking about history, but I’d thought it was his personal history. I quirk my head like a confused parakeet.

“Am I convoluted?” he asks, raising his droopy, Bassett-hound eyes, concerned he’s having a senior moment.

“Not at all,” I lie. “How, again, did you get here to Oxford?”

It seems Eddie’s story begins in the mid-1600s with an ancestor named John Cutts, whom Eddie says the William and Mary sent to create a New World shipyard in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with brothers Richard and Robert Cutts—who eventually opened one of the first marinas in Maine. Shipbuilding, it appears, has always been in the Cutts blood.

Fast forward to about 80 years ago, when a businessman named Ralph Wiley from Long Island, New York, founded the yard here in Oxford. A few years later Eddie was born. “When I was this big,” he says, holding his left hand about a foot from the floor, “I knew I wanted to be a boatbuilder. God gave me a gift. When I was a kid, I could carve a good model of a boat, even back then.”

Eddie went on to design boats on New York’s City Island, and a mutual friend introduced him to a man named John Case, who was in the market for a sailboat. Eddie drew him a 33-foot double ender with an 8-foot beam, white hull, and varnished mast and boom. “He fell in love with the boat,” Eddie recalls. Rebellion, in 1966, became the first Eddie Cutts-John Case collaboration to be built at Wiley’s yard in Oxford.

Around the same time, Wiley wanted to sell the property. Eddie partnered with Case and signed an agreement that would let him purchase up to 50 percent of the yard over time. He never really thought about the language—“up to 50 percent”—until much, much later, when he realized he would legally never be entitled to more than 49.9 percent of the business. “I was a little upset,” Eddie recalls. But Case, perhaps in the spirit of the times, made good on the spirit of the deal before he died about 15 years ago. “That’s just the kind of man he was. It all worked out so well,” Eddie says. “I’m astounded, really.”

Today, Eddie runs the yard next door to his home with his two sons. His wife of a half-century, Maggie, still keeps the books. Cutts & Case Shipyard has never specialized in any specific design, Eddie says, but instead on quality construction. “I wanted to be the kind of designer who could design any kind of boat….”

The phone rings. It’s an old-fashioned ring, bleating into the rafters a half-dozen times. Eddie lets it go.

“I hate those things,” he cripes before continuing.

“I can look at a picture and tell you how fast the boat is going. I just can. God gives the talent…”

The phone rings again.

“That rotten thing.”

He shifts in his wheelchair and adjusts the Cutts & Case ballcap atop his salt-and-pepper hair. He appears to be willing the phone to shut the heck up so he can finish his thought. There doesn’t seem to be an answering machine, and he doesn’t seem to care.

“You ask me for a dinghy, I’ll draw you a dinghy. Biggest yet is the 65-footer outside, but we haven’t finished her yet. I don’t count hull numbers, honey. I just do what people ask me to, the best that I can.”

 

HERESHOFF, ROSENFELD AND A LOUSY LEFT LEG

Eddie gained a bit of fame and a lifetime of business when he invented the Cutts Method of building, a double-planking technique that includes grooves into which Kevlar cords are laid, glued and epoxied. The method eliminates the use of frames, rivets, fastenings and caulking to produce what Eddie—and some experts—say is a seamless wooden boat.

“There are no seams because of the Cutts method,” he intones. “Noah started it, but Eddie Cutts is gonna finish it.”

In the meantime, Eddie likes to have his share of fun. He enjoys spending time with friends (L. Francis Herreshoff was a close one for three decades) and collecting Americana that he refinishes and displays in the towering front windows of a red Cutts & Case shed, which is open for free to anyone who’d like a look. Motorcycles, holiday sleighs and of course boats are part of his collection—most notably Foto, the 33-foot cedar chase boat from which Morris and Stanley Rosenfeld captured America’s Cup photographs.

Eddie knew Stanley Rosenfeld from his days on New York’s City Island and decided to save the boat after Stanley died. “The boat had been taken down South and sold to somebody for a dollar, just to keep it legal,” he recalls. “They didn’t want it anymore. It needed an enormous amount of work. Well, I happened to know the guy who bought it for a dollar. He was the skipper of the New York Yacht Club commodore’s boat. I liked the Rosenfelds, and it was a part of American history. I guess I’m crazy like that, honey. I take on big projects. It had to be preserved.”

The work took him two years. “The boat was a wreck,” he recalls, shaking his head in disgust. “They were slobs. Didn’t care about anything but their pictures.”

Foto’s original engine was freshwater cooled, so a good cleaning had it right back in business. Eddie and Maggie cruised the boat up and down the Eastern Seaboard for a few years before putting it on display. “Great cockpit,” he says. “You can see everything from it. The design—I would’ve done a few things different, but all in all, it’s a good job. I’d have used the Cutts Method and shaped it a little different, but then again, I wasn’t born yet.”

He’s not sure whether his sons will keep the yard going after he retires. For now, he zips around in a golf cart outfitted with a Cutts & Case burgee, making sure construction is still done precisely to his standards. “Who knows?” he says, looking around. “In 50 years, it might be apartments.”

He shifts a bit in his seat; his newly fitted false leg is obviously uncomfortable. He looks down like a sidelined marathon runner coming to terms with the inevitability of time.

“I’m about to make my own prosthetic,” he offers with a hopeful grimace. “I can’t do a worse job than they’ve done. I hope to go boating again. And motorcycling again, too.”

He cuts himself off, worrying he’s gone convoluted. “I’m getting long in the tooth. Well, I shouldn’t say that,” he adds with a laugh. “I don’t have very many teeth left.”  ♦

 

Eddie Cutts, Jr. has been building wooden boats in Oxford, Maryland, since the mid-1960s. There are a few things he’d like to tell you about that—and about Stanley Rosenfeld, spaghetti dinners and lousy prosthetic legs.