RudderPosts

Meet the Editorial Assistant

This is Betsy Powell, WoodenBoat magazine's editorial assistant. She joined the company in 1988, after she and her husband, Jack, moved to Maine from Pennsylvania. She began her career with us in the WoodenBoat Store, helping with the Christmas rush, but someone soon recognized her organizational talents and courted her away to the editorial department, where she's been ever since.
   
Betsy keeps us organized, and she's also an eagle-eyed proofreader. Many of you have corresponded with her, as she responds to many of your Launchings submissions—and other editorial correspondence. She comes by her interest in the topic of wooden boats honestly: she and Jack, before moving to Maine, restored a 1948 27' Elco powerboat, and cruised it on Chesapeake Bay. Their most recent boat, which they sold just a few years ago, was a Bahamian-built Albury launch—a strip-planked center-console outboard-powered boat. Jack's made a second career of painting yachts and houses, and this boat was always impeccably kept—as are WoodenBoat's editorial files, thanks to Betsy.

Meet the Associate Editor

This is Tom Jackson, WoodenBoat's associate editor, and his rapidly growing black lab pup, Biscuit. Tom will have been with the magazine for eight years in September; before that, he spent years and years in newspaper journalism. How many years? “Too many,” he said, shaking his head.
    Packing a passion for small traditional craft, Tom came to Brooklin from Astoria Oregon, where, as a recovering newspaperman, he was working with his wife, Corinne, running an art gallery/café. The couple pulled up their stakes in Oregon upon Tom's hiring at WoodenBoat, and Tom drove his Toyota pickup truck across the country, a partially finished Nomans Land boat in tow. The Nomans Land boat, a beautiful job of joinery, will likely be complete sometime in the next few years—if Tom ever finds a few minutes to sit still.
    This summer, he's off to Seattle to man our booth at the Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival at the Center for Wooden Boats. He returns home for just one day before joining the crew of the new 78' Spirit of Tradition sloop GOSHAWK for delivery for the Marblehead to the Halifax Race (Tom will remain aboard for the race). Then it's back to Brooklin for a few weeks before jetting off in the other direction—this time to Sweden, where the peripatetic associate editor will sail in a raid and write an article about the experience. (A raid is a sort of gang-cruise of small open craft—mostly traditional.)
    Boatbuilding will resume in the fall.

Meet the Senior Editor

This is Mike O'Brien, WoodenBoat's senior editor for the past 18 years. He came to us from Soundings magazine, where he was technical editor; before that, he worked for the now-defunct Sailor magazine as associate editor.
    Mike's been fascinated with things marine since the age of three, when he first climbed into a skiff. He taught himself how to sail at age seven by reading instructions in the family encyclopedia. A powerful oarsman, he rowed "eights" in college, and back in his native New Jersey he went three years undefeated in surfboat competition.
    Before turning his attention to magazines, Mike was a marine scientist. He did his graduate works at Virginia Institute of Marine Science, studying nearshore physical processes—“wave action, sediment transport, that type of thing.” From the littoral to the literal. While teaching marine science in Virginia, Mike ran his own boat shop called, appropriately, Mike's Boat Shop. In his spare time, he publishes his own magazine, Boat Design Quarterly. He's taught design at the WoodenBoat School and, more recently, as a registered Maine Guide, has taught kayaking.
    Why is he dressed like this, with the headlamp and the orange cap? Because Mike lives on the land adjacent to WoodenBoat's offices, and typically walks to work through the woods. He submitted to this rare photograph while I was learning to use a new digital camera late one afternoon, just before quitting time.

Meet the Art Director

At left is Olga Lange, WodenBoat's art director, burrowed deep into the design of the issue that's now on the newsstands. Olga hails from Brooksville, Maine, where she and Brian Keegstra built their own house—much of it from timber they harvested and milled themselves. She's worked at WoodenBoat since 1983, and has been art director for the past five or so years. (Before that she was art director of our sister publication, Professional Boatbuilder.)

“I moved to this area,” she says, “because it was beautiful. I loved the mixture of wooded hills, complicated coastline, the blueberry barrens, the wonderful native plant and animal life.” She still loves all that, apparently, as she seizes any opportunity to get outside. What's her favorite part of the job--aside from the opportunity to ski at lunchtime (photo, right)? “When I can feel a layout is really pulling together, the words and images are really complementing and amplifying each other, that feels good. Now and again, I'll feel that way about a whole issue--that feels great!”