Eben W.Chaffee II attended MIT as a freshman in 1906-7. He was fascinated with chemistry and did well in it, but flunked out of nearly everything else, partly due to being distracted by the young women of Boston after his boyhood on the thinly-settled prairie. He enrolled at the University of Vermont (UVM) in the fall of 1907.

At UVM Eben continued doing well in chemistry, made some progress in his other subjects, and learned to sail in a rather unusual way. He had a lot of trouble with his teeth and made frequent visits to a local dentist, with whom he was soon on a first-name basis. One day the dentist--call him Dr. Jones--invited him out for a sail on Lake Champlain that weekend. Eben had never been on a sailboat but cheerfully agreed, and showed up at the dock on Saturday morning along with a young woman he had invited.

The dentist's boat was a 26-foot catboat, with a single enormous sail. They cast off, hoisted the sail, and Dr. Jones thrust the tiller into Eben's hands with a brief explanation of how to steer the boat. "See that smoke?" he said. It was Plattsburgh, New York, seventeen miles away on the other side of the lake. "Keep her pointed at that. I'm going to take a nap." Dr. Jones descended into the cabin, and seconds later the sound of a cork being removed from a bottle was heard. A half hour later Eben and the girl, snuggling in the cockpit and enjoying the fresh breeze, heard the pop of another cork, and subsequently yet another.

Dr. Jones, it seemed, dared not drink during the week; but on weekends, on his boat, out of reach of any patients who might smell liquor on his breath, he systematically made up for lost time. Eben was only the latest of many unsuspecting friends and acquaintances the dentist had recruited to steer his boat.

Three hours after their departure, with the houses of Plattsburgh clearly visible, Eben shouted down the companionway. "Dr. Jones," he yelled, "come up here and help me turn this thing around!" The dentist, prone on the cabin floor, replied with hoots, gurgles, snatches of song, and the suggestion that Eben sail the boat up the streets of Plattsburgh if he so desired. As they rushed toward the breakers on the rocky shore, Eben and the terrified girl asked one another what to do. "You've got to tack it, I think!" she shouted. "How do you do that?" Eben yelled. "I don't know," she shrieked, "but you'd better do it quick!" Eben set his teeth and shoved the tiller to one side as far as it would go.

Instead of turning the boat into the wind to change direction, as is customary, he had turned it away from the wind. The resulting unseamanlike maneuver, known as a jibe, sent the sail and its huge boom whipping over the deck at skull-cracking speed, to stop on the other side with a deafening snap and bang that laid the catboat nearly flat on the water. Dr. Jones, rolling limply in the bilges along with several empty bottles, was still trying to sing although he had by now lost control of his bladder. But the trembling couple on deck were safe--the boat had righted itself and was headed back to Burlington.

On the way back Eben experimented cautiously with maneuvering the craft. He was quite a confident sailor by the time they reached the dock, where the dentist's wife was waiting to help him drag Dr. Jones to their car. Eben, undaunted by his experience, appeared the following Saturday (with a different young woman) for another sailing lesson.

Submitted by John Van Schenck Chaffee, 2013