Lyle Compton Hess (1 9 March 1912 – 12 July 2002) was a yacht designer and boat builder.
Lyle C. Hess was born in Arco, Butte, Idaho, the seventh of 12 children. His father, Franklin Hess, was a contractor who moved with his family and his team of workers to various construction sites.
About 1920, Lyle had the first experience that set him on the road to becoming a yacht designer. While his father was overseeing the digging of an irrigation ditch - Patterson Creek, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming - Lyle discovered that the hull shape of the model boats he whittled from pine determined how the boats behaved in the river eddies.[1]
Around 1924, Franklin Hess and family moved to Long Beach, California. Lyle saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time.
Further formative experiences followed. In Long Beach, Lyle formed an informal association with a boat yard, met a professional yacht designer, and built and raced sailing boats.
The boat yard was Chalker and Whiting Boatworks, run by George Chalker and Bill Whiting. The professional yacht designer was Edson B. Schock (Edson Burr Schock, 1871-1950), who in 1922 moved to Los Angeles to meet the demand for luxury yachts from people made rich by the Hollywood movie industry. In 1928, the two came together when Chalker and Whiting Boatworks built a Schock-designed 72 foot schooner.
Lyle built his first sailing boats on a vacant lot next to the Chalker and Whiting Boatworks. He also crewed for local yacht owners in races. Lyle underpinned his growing practical knowledge with study, reading books and articles by such yacht design authorities as T. Harrison Butler, Dixon Kemp, and Albert Strange. Lyle also read the UK magazine, Yachting Monthly, edited by Maurice Griffiths. Griffiths championed the conversion of the English working sailboats of the 19th century into yachts for the new middle class in the UK and the US.
[1] Chuck Malseed, 'Lyle Hess: A Profile,' Cruising World, February 1977, pp. 48-50 (available on line at: http://www.norseayachts.com/lylehess_a_profile.php). Mormon farmers were the first non- Indigenous and non-Latinos to irrigate farmland in the US. Mormon farmers who had settled in Jackson Hole hired experienced Mormon engineers from elsewhere, such as Franklin Hess, to dig irrigation ditches to bring water from the Snake River to their farms. For a history of irrigation ditch construction in Jackson Hole, see 'Chapter 11: Irrigation and reclamation', in John Daugherty et al., A place called Jackson Hole: A historic resource study of Grand Teton National Park, Moose, Wyoming: Grand Teton Natural History Association, 1999 (available on line at: http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/grte2/hrs11.htm).
lchbiography.html © Bil Hansen 2008 Last modified: 2010/2/14