Local author writes all a-boat close to home boat racing history

MARION — When Marion resident Charles Poekel Jr. was growing up, he heard countless stories about his great grandfather, Thorvald Schougaard Poekel.

He knew his great-grandfather was a boat designer who immigrated to the United States from Denmark,had worked for the famous boating company Herreshoff Manufacturing Company and was killed by a taxi cab in New Jersey in 1940.

But Poekel wanted to know more.

“My father would tell me a lot about his grandfather, which is my great-grandfather, that he was such a brilliant design engineer and a clever person and extremely bright and extremely clever,” Poekel said.

“I knew very little about him and about the boats that he had designed,” he said.

This is how Poekel came to learn about the Vencedor, one of the greatest racing yachts in the United States that Poekel’s great-grandfather, T.S. Poekel, helped build in 1896.

What followed were five years of research, writing and editing of Poekel’s third book, “Vencedor: The Story of a Great Yacht and an Unsung Herreshoff Hero in the Golden Age of Yachting,” which was published in 2021.

The Vencedor competed in several boat races on the Great Lakes. In 1904 and 1907 the Vencedor won the race from Chicago to Mackinac Island but lost in a race that became known as Canada’s Cup.

Poekel, who is a lawyer by trade, said one aspect he enjoyed when he wrote “Vencedor” was conducting the research and the challenges that came with it, namely finding information about the people who had worked for the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company.

He explained that ship designs and old records from the company had been turned over to the Hart Nautical Gallery in the MIT museum but there weren’t any personnel records of the 200 employees.

“The Herreshoff family sort of kept the spotlight for themselves,” Poekel said.

Poekel also visited the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island where he learned they had never heard of his great grandfather.

“They had no records of him; they had no employment records at all,” he said. “They had kept thousands of records of designs of yachts and no records of any personnel that worked for them.”

To learn more about his great grandfather and the boat races the Vencedor competed in, Poekel turned to newspapers that used to cover boat races similar to how baseball and football games are covered today.

“People followed racing quite a lot in the newspapers and that made it easier for me to do the research because so many of the races were covered in the paper,” he explained.

Poekel chose to begin his book with describing conflict that arose when his great grandfather left the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company for the Racine Boat Manufacturing Company in Wisconsin.

He explained that T. S. Poekel left with 12 other Herreshoff workers for Wisconsin where they helped build the Vencedor, which the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company was not pleased about.

“The Herreshoffs started attacking him and saying that he wasn’t as talented as people think he is or he thinks he is,” Poekel said.

From there, Poekel explored his great grandfather’s life in Denmark and the United States, the race between the Vencedor and the Canada and then some of the other boats he helped design.

Poekel said that “Vencedor” has been received “quite well,” especially with boaters in areas where the Vencedor raced.

He said that the boat races on the Great Lakes are an important part of history that “so many people don’t realize,” noting that 10,000 people a day used to watch the races.

“It’s just incredible,” Poekel said.

On Saturday, June 14 Poekel will be at the Barnes & Noble at 2421 Cranberry Highway in Wareham for a book signing event. The event will be held from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m.