Classic Memories
Forest E. Johnson built thousands of still-popular classic wooden powerboats, many emblazoned “Prowler.” Johnson’s famous marine photographer son pays tribute to his dad, his dad’s boats, and the early days of Miami boatbuilding.
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It was a simple plan. Forest Johnson, one of the biggest names in the marine-photography biz, would drive north to Orlando from his home in Ft. Lauderdale with the archival material we’d been talking about for weeks. I would simultaneously head south from the ol’ ranchero in Tallahassee and meet Johnson at noon in the lobby of Orlando’s J.W. Marriott Hotel, where we’d kick back, enjoy a sandwich, look the archival stuff over, and talk about Johnson’s boatbuilder dad, Forest E. Johnson. With luck, a story would result, focused primarily on a series of classic wooden powerboats built by Forest E. between the late 1940s and the late ’60s, each distinctively designated “Prowler.”
“Hey Forest,” I yell, spying Johnson in the Marriott’s parking lot, heading for the hotel with folders of black-and-white photography stacked atop a giant cardboard box full of old newspaper clippings. I grab the folders to be helpful and we proceed into the palatial lobby where we commandeer two comfy chairs and a giant coffee table.
The first photo off the top of the stack shows Forest E. in Key West in 1918, rail-thin, darkly tanned, awkwardly holding a trophy he’d just won racing the first raceboat he’d ever built, an 18-foot outboard-powered speedster called All-Cat. He’s got a young, but steely, hardscrabble look to him, and huge hands, blackened with grime and grease. The hands of a mechanic, obviously.
“He was born in Key West in 1899,” says Johnson, leaning in more closely, “so he was probably 18 or 19 years old when this picture was taken—he had to quit school in the fourth grade to support the family after his father died. For most of his life, his good friends, the ones who knew him well, called him Conchy—you know, because he was a Conch. Originally from Key West.”
I examine more photos as Johnson continues his story. Forest E., he says, began learning the boatbuilding trade from local shipwright Ronny Watkins and, thanks to the races he was winning in the boats he was building, a customer base rapidly materialized. In 1921, the young man moved his shop north to Coconut Grove, calling it Forest E. Johnson Boat Works. The die, as they say, had been cast.
Bulletproof Plate
One of the genuine American catastrophes of the early Twentieth Century was the ill-conceived constitutional amendment that, in 1920, banned the manufacture, sale, and transport of booze. But by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, Forest E. had hit the big time—his reputation as a builder and racer of super-fast, super-tough, super-seaworthy boats was known far and wide.
“This one shows another side of my father,” says Johnson, handing over an 8-by-10 glossy with frazzled corners. It shows a transformed Forest E., standing in a posh, socially sophisticated setting, his elbow against a mahogany bar, glass in hand, his tailored suit augmented with a crisp tie and a fashionable pocket handkerchief. He looks a little like a movie star. “Running rum from Bimini into Miami,” adds Johnson, “was illegal, but building boats for rum runners was not.”
Cash money always sealed the rum-runner deals—Forest E. never built a boat on spec. A guy would show up with roughly $2,000 as a deposit (serious money during the ’20s), list the modifications he needed, and then come back a couple of months later to hand over another pile of dough and take delivery on a brand new Forest E. Johnson Cruiser. The modifications were often extreme, pushing design concerns like weight, horsepower, balance, bottom design, and seaworthiness to reality’s ragged edge, including as they did capacious carrying capacities, low profiles, top speeds in the open ocean of 40 knots or more, and inwales layered with bulletproof steel plate.
“You’d hear about a big run somebody’d made—you know, a success,” says Johnson, handing over a photo of a gleaming white cruiser rocketing across the waves, her nose slightly raised, “and in a day or two, when my dad got home from work, there’d be a case of top-shelf stuff at the back door. Very popular with friends and neighbors, of course, although in the early days my dad wasn’t much of a drinker himself.”
An Absolute Classic
I feel compelled to tell Johnson a quick story of my own. It begins at some point in the distant past as I strolled through a marina in Jacksonville, Florida, just lookin’ at boats. Close to calling it quits for the evening, I caught the glint of a perfectly proportioned, masterfully varnished trunk cabin just a few slips farther on. I picked up the pace and soon stood at the transom of a rehabilitated wooden vessel that was utterly transfixing. A chrome nameplate on the cabin, just abaft a row of rectangular ports, proclaimed “Prowler.”
“She was one of the prettiest boats I think I’ve ever seen,” I enthuse, holding a particularly representative photo up to illustrate, “…an absolute classic!”
Forest E. built boats a certain way, Johnson explains. And although the first Prowler wasn’t officially launched until 1948 (just a year after Forest E. married Heidi Tutwiler and took her on a boat-racing honeymoon), virtually all the vessels he built during his lifetime, whether for rum runners, government agencies charged with chasing rum runners, politicians, businessmen, movie stars, or racing enthusiasts, shared several characteristics.
“They had very stout, mahogany-batten-seam, white-cedar hulls,” Johnson says, “with bolted mahogany frames. The cedar planks were fastened with silicon-bronze screws and then plugged. A 32-footer would have had about 30,000 screws. I still have boxes and boxes of them in my garage, believe it or not, along with all kinds of other stuff that my dad used to build boats. I’ve got all his racing trophies, too—hundreds of them.”
The Prowler’s Reign
Johnson and I continue going through old photos, admiring Prowler (and Prowler Jr.) race boats, Prowler cruisers, and Prowler sportfishermen, most of them graced with a signature high bow (to better deal with headseas), a relatively low transom (to facilitate bringing fish aboard), and a wonderfully sinuous S-curved sheerline.
“He almost never put a set of boat lines on paper,” says Johnson. “He’d just draw up a profile and a layout. But while he had no formal training in naval architecture, he knew what worked—mostly from racing. One time, I think he won 10 races in just one day! I mean, he loved it—just loved it.”
Love is a compelling and attractive quality. At the height of the Prowler’s popularity, the list of Forest E.’s friends, acquaintances, and clients included celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Sam Snead, Don Aronow, Sam Griffith, Ernest Hemingway, and even the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, who once dialed up during a brief economic downturn to assure himself that his favorite boatbuilder was okay.
“Look at this,” says Johnson with a grin, handing over a photo of a striking young woman in a bathing suit being towed on a slalom ski behind a twin-engine 26-foot Prowler with Forest E. at the helm. “He towed Delores Kipple 200 miles all the way from Miami to Nassau—set a world waterskiing record. The black bathing suit reduced chances of attracting sharks and barracuda in case she fell. The bottom of the ski was painted black, too.”
End of an Era
The last few photos we look at feature Forest E. himself, rather than the boats he built. And as we sort through Johnson and I talk about a lot of things, among them how his dad’s life came to a close. Forest E., emphasizes Johnson, was first and foremost a wooden-boat man. When the demand for fiberglass came in the late ’60s, he opted to try the stuff but loathed it.
“With reluctance, he did two fiberglass Prowler models,” says Johnson. “One was a 32-footer and the other a 23-foot runabout.”
In addition to the gloomy shift from fragrant cedar to smelly polyester, Forest E. had to also contemplate a shift in leadership. As the ’60s transitioned into the ’70s, the large, big-city facility he now occupied on the Miami River underwent an especially poignant transition, becoming Forest E. Johnson & Son.
“But it really didn’t work out,” says Johnson. “I remember one night in particular—my dad must have spent two hours trying to explain to me why shaft angle was so important, how it could make or break an inboard boat’s performance. But heck, I was 14 years old at the time—my mind was on other things. Today, I frankly don’t remember any of it. Which is one of my greatest regrets, I’d have to say.”
A classic impasse had arrived, the same one that many, if not most, fathers must eventually confront. Forest E. wanted his only son to take over a business he was deeply passionate about, but the young man had a different direction in mind, thanks to a hand-me-down Polaroid camera. After Forest E.’s death in 1971, Johnson and his mother kept the Miami enterprise going for another five years but, at length, the energy crisis of 1976 (which made polyester resin virtually impossible to get), coupled with the increasing popularity of the deep-V hull (versus the Prowler’s flatter, shallower-draft design), forced them to let go, painfully but inevitably.
“I became a professional photographer,” says Johnson, with a grin. “And, as you know, a deeply passionate one.”
“Like father,” I add, with a grin of my own, “like son.”
