When I was a kid, before the malls were built from one end of the country to the other, all the retail stores were downtown. Every thriving municipality had a downtown. Growing up on Hypoluxo Island, the closest downtown was in the city of Lake Worth, around three miles north of our house. We could ride our bikes there on weekends, as long as our chores were done and we were back home by five o’clock. Brubaker’s music was located on the eastern end of downtown Lake Worth. It was there that I bought my first Beatles album for $2.98 and proudly brought it home to play on our massive Magnavox stereo console. The parental reviews were, for the most part, positive. The Fab Four wrote and recorded songs with catchy melodies and tight vocal harmonies. Certainly, my parents would have rather been listening to Glen Miller, but they figured if the kids were going to rock and roll, The Beatles seemed to be relatively benign and somewhat enjoyable. Several years later, the reviews didn’t go so well when I brought home Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced.” Both of our parents worked and looked forward to peace and quiet after a long grind. Returning home that day, they were greeted with “Purple Haze” cranked to the elevens. To make matters worse, they glanced at the album cover and completely lost it on me. This was not The Beatles singing about holding your hand. A psychedelic black dude with two white freaks was singing about dope and kissing the sky. My adolescent defense of Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell, and Noel Redding as innovators fell on deaf ears. “Turn that sh– down or off right now! Right now, dammit,” they screamed. “Turn down that NOISE!”

Noise. It’s everywhere. It starts every morning with the alarm clock and ends each day with the local news at ten o’clock. Electronic, mechanical, or human origin, there is just so much noise. I guess that’s why we all need to get away, but where can we go to hide? Hell, we bring it with us in our sloppy attempts at escape. Kids and adult idiots tune their automobile exhaust to be obnoxiously loud. Sub-woofers powered by nuclear fission throb low frequency earthquakes. Atomic hoodlums pull up next to me at a stoplight and my steering wheel shakes, my bladder releases, and my Pacemaker arcs out to the DC ground. Center consoles cruise by the yard with “bro country” cranking so loud that branches on the big banyan tree next to the office shatter and fall with a crash. Have you ever noticed that the smaller the boat, the louder the music? A curious inverse proportion, to say the least. Jet skis power through the no-wake zone in front of the yard with ear-splitting rap in foreign tongues. I must admit, I find this attempt by transoceanic cultures at something so purely American as rap or hip-hop to be fascinating. Just please, por favor, bájale el volumen.

As I have gracefully aged (not), my tolerance for obnoxious noise has worn thin. Each day, I head up to the office, somewhere between twelve and one o’clock, to sit at my desk and attempt to have my lunch in peace. Several days ago, an old, raggedy-ass truck rattled up and parked, exactly eighty-one inches (damn right, I measured it!) from my office window. Emanating from the truck was an extremely insulting, offensive cacophony at a volume which was unattainable, prior to recent scientific breakthroughs in digital audio. The south window of the office shook like a propeller slinging a blade at cruise RPM. My PB&A bowl from 3Natives vibrated off my desk. Nope, sorry, not today, I decided, and I ran out to meet the enemy head-on. As I approached the truck, I noticed the windows were up. I simply cannot begin to imagine how loud it was inside that cab. The windows were blacked out, so I looked through the windshield and signaled to the two occupants, apparently under some sort of cannabinol-induced acoustic hypnosis, to turn it down. Completely ignored, I signaled again. No response. I then beat on the door with my fist until the driver rolled the window down and stared at me in defiance. “Turn that sh*t down!” I screamed. They turned it up. Game on, boys! We resolved the conflict when I noticed the sub-contractor logo on the shirt of one of the occupants and we phoned his boss, a reasonable businessman. He immediately took care of the problem. Thirsting for vengeance? No, this is simply a matter of respect for others, something that my parents drilled into me when the Sheriff’s Department repeatedly shut down our band practice in the family garage.

Here at the yard, we have always felt that a practical focus on noise is part of better boatbuilding. When we do the initial start-up, we are keenly aware of noise. We want our boats to perform as flawlessly as possible and to be as quiet as the machinery will allow as well. We work hard to get to the source of noise and do all we can to get it to an acceptable level. Sometimes, due to the inherent mechanical frequencies of sliding or rotating parts, noise is inevitable. Some noises are just part of the deal. Some, in time, become endearing signatures. The 2-cycle roar of a Series 71 Detroit Diesel. The rolling thunder of a Harley-Davidson. The Banshee scream of a Flat-12 Ferrari. These are essentially trademark mechanical sounds that define a manufacturer and an era in which these companies ruled. The most offensive boatyard noise today is not generated from gear mesh, combustion, or friction. It comes from electronic sources like errant prompts and alarms and the profane tantrums of human aggravation accompanying those irritants.

There is a different kind of noise in the world today. Noise generated by unscrupulous media, stuffing their pockets with politicians. These are not journalists. These are not statesmen. These are high-paid agitators, well-coached in the fine art of producing stress-generating hype. I can still hear the tympani from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, second movement, in the opening theme to the Huntley-Brinkley Nightly Report of my youth. Even during the Vietnam War, no one in our family ever threw a domestic projectile at Chet Huntley. I have thrown every movable object in our family room at contemporary “broadcast journalism.” Fortunately, all have missed their mark or ricocheted off and harmlessly fallen to the floor to be slobbered upon by family dogs with a more tranquil demeanor than their innkeeper. I am fully aware that the truth has no place in media noise and yet, I still allow my blood pressure to spontaneously combust when talking heads spew flammable fiction. The whole premise of the noise is to get us at each other’s throats. Many years ago, when round-the-clock cable news was in its infancy, I had the idea of creating a “Good News Only Channel.” 24/7/365, GNO would cover nothing but kids, puppies, good stories, good food, good deeds, and people having good, clean fun. “Experts” assured me that no one would tune in. Conflict and suffering generate profit and besides, essential major sponsors, like pharmaceutical companies and personal injury attorneys, can’t successfully pimp their smack when everyone feels good. “Noise is what the people want,” they all agreed. Ask Don Henley. “Dirty little secrets, dirty little lies … give us dirty laundry!”

When I climb into my truck at the end of a long day, I want to head home in peace so that I’m relaxed enough to be someone my bride wants to hug when I walk through the door. For almost 40 years, I listened to NPR on the way to work and on the way home. Morning Edition with Bob Edwards, Red Barber, and the great Baxter Black, All Things Considered with Robert Siegel, Marketplace with Kai Ryssdal, Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor, and of course, Click and Clack—the car guys. “Don’t drive like my brothuh!” On midday runs, I listened to Talk of the Nation with Juan Williams. My FM dial was welded to 90.7. It was always good stuff. Many times, I sat in the truck, engine off, waiting to get to the end of a captivating story. Then, the noise brokers infiltrated NPR, and it went straight to hell. It was as if a trusted old friend suddenly had an agenda. I turned it off for good one day when they did a piece on dieting being racist. A once great national asset became noise, plain and simple, telling listeners how to think, while enticing us to impugn our neighbor, our country, and ourselves. Can we please just turn that sh– down? This world is hard enough without the noise. Let’s take the rumble out of the stumble, quell the quarreling, and let the wind … whisper … Mary.

This article originally appeared in the August/September 2026 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.