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Page 187a. 9/1/82, Happy Mentos to you (Sailing in the natural state)

A slightly altered drawing of a commercial. I grew up sailing small boats in southeast Florida, having become obsessed with sailing after reading Children of the Sea by Wilfrid Bronson when I was 11, in 1947. My father was back from the War, and I talked him into helping me build a boat. We built a 9 foot pram in the garage of our home on North Flagler Dr. in West Palm Beach,, across the street from the Flotilla yacht Club. I fitted it out with leeboards and a lateen-rigged sail. We hauled it across the street and down to Lake Worth, the Intracoastal waterway, and I sailed that sucker up and down the lake, to Peanut Island and back, using a steering oar like the boy in the Bahamas, not a rudder. I learned to sail from books I checked out from the Northboro School library. They say you can't learn to sail from books, but I did. Later, all through my teens, I sailed more conventional crafts, including a sloop-rigged catamaran that I sailed out the Palm Beach inlet into the Atlantic. Never quite made it to Nassau. But now here I am, since 1979, landlocked in The Natural State. Hence the altered drawing.