Boating Enthusiast Digest's Boater Hall of Fame

Now Mr. Howell, there is a guy you could count on. He was a billionaire! You don’t just wake up one day with that kind of money. You have to earn that money by swindling honest, hard working people out of millions of dollars in shady real estate transactions and monopolizing industries such as diamond mines and railroads. The man owned downtown Denver for God’s sake! That has to make you at least partial mayor or possibly supreme dictator of Denver. Imagine he and his bear Teddy, ruling Denver with an iron fist filled with crisp $100 bills, just snarking it up and perusing the streets, looking for floozies. I would have happily let Mr. Howell take the wheel of my boat and drive it all the way to the bank. I can tell you this much, he would have never stood for the laughable Denver Nuggets.

Also, he went to Harvard. All boatsmen know Harvard to be the boating elite. The joke at Harvard is, “How do you steer you ship into Harvard’s port?” Answer: “You hire somebody else to do it for you. You didn’t buy that diamond mine to do your own yachting.” I mean, this is the same man who brought tens of thousands of dollars in cash on a three hour boat ride. Being rich means you gotta be prepared to buy your way out of any situation. Any situation, except being stuck on some desolate island in the Pacific. Even then, it’s good to have some liquidity in those types of situations and Mr. Howell knew this. You can bet your ass he would have bought the first boat that came ashore and sailed right back to Denver. This is called crude boating acumen. You either have it or you stay stranded on islands for the rest of your life.

He had a wife named Lovey. His wife had a sense of “noblesse oblige.” That means that rich people gotta act rich, but they still have to take care of the other people who aren‘t as rich. That’s where the phrase “the rich get richer and the poor get brutally lectured,” comes from. I know this because I have Wikipedia on my boat and all of the Gilligan’s Island episodes on DVD.

What’s my point? What does this have to do with boats?

Everything.

Mr. Howell didn’t have A boat, he probably had like 1000 boats. They could have called “Howell’s Navy” and he could have had a 1000 boat march in the marina to protest to faulty navigation systems or possibly the Coast Guard’s inefficiency in finding lost billlionaires on a deserted islands. . He could have sailed on Washington via Lincoln’s reflecting pool. You want something to reflect on? Reflect on several hundred cannon laden yachts and warships launching cannonballs into the Jefferson Memorial. Imagine all those yachts filled to the brim with hoighty-toighty tightwad billionaires screaming, “Nuah, Nuah, Fire the cannons, Lovey! Nuha Nuha.” I bet you weren‘t counting on that Department of Homeland Security!

That is of course, if he could have gotten off of that island.

Now as I have stated before, I like boats. This guy was a land baron and I still liked him more than the Skipper. He owned a diamond mine, a railroad, and several large corporations. I don’t know for sure, and have no factual information to back this statement up, but I like to think that one of those corporations made boats or boating accessories.

And this is why I am making Thurston Howell III the first member of the Boating Enthusiast Digest’s Hall of Fame. Congratulations Mr. Howell, now if you can just help me get through all the red tape in buying my Cold War Era aircraft carrier, I’ll be on my way.



You can't fathom that someone would waste his time on yours on such a ridiculous, far reaching boating premise? What I can’t fathom is how I didn’t think of this sooner.