Another early employee, still with the company 39 years later, is tall, soft-spoken Hubert Quick. Quick, a native of Bennettsville, South Carolina, had come northward to High Point with some of his family looking for work in the factories there.

 "When Willis started Hatteras," Quick says, "he brought some of the good workers out of the hosiery mill, including my brother and me and a cousin. Everybody was afraid to go because of the fiberglass. Everybody was saying you couldn't live but ten years, it would kill you, get in your lungs. We had to do a lot of grinding and it was so bad I walked out a couple of times. My brother'd come after me and say, 'You get used to it.' We didn't have the protective suits we have now. We didn't even have masks. We'd tie a rag around our nostrils to keep the dust out. No fans. Nothing. Give you a grinder and a butcher knife and put you to work."

 Quick, who today is the supervisor of large parts lamination, was also wryly credited with doing some of the early hiring for the company.  "When business expanded and they needed more workers, Willis and Don would come out and give my brother and me some money and a car and we'd start out early in the morning and go down to Bennettsville and drive through the cotton fields and say, 'Hey! Y'all want to come work on boats in High Point?

 One of Hubert Quick's coevals was a young cabinetmaker named Tommy Henshaw, a Massachusetts boy who'd fallen in love with a Southern Belle and followed her back to her hometown, High Point.

 "One day," Henshaw recalls, "I was doing cabinet making in Station Six and along comes Willis with an older couple. He came up to me where I was hanging cabinet doors and wanted to borrow my hammer. I gave him a claw hammer and he walked over to the side of the boat I was working on and just whapped the hell out of it with the hammer. Hit it so hard the hammer went flying out of his hands. He then turns to the couple and said: 'Could I have done that to your wooden hull?' They said, 'No.' He sold that one right there."

 Slane was famous for that kind of showmanship. He got a local police captain to go out back and fire his pistol at a fiberglass panel and then he'd show prospective customers the minimal damage.

 Acceptance of the 41 was so enthusiastic that other models followed quickly. In April of 1962, Hatteras brought out the 41 Double Cabin, the first fiberglass motor yacht and the genesis of the Hatteras legacy for cruising yachts. Four years after the founding, there were six models altogether including a 34-foot sports cruiser, 34-foot double cabin, a 34-foot deluxe sportfisherman, and a 34-foot sedan.

"When we tooled the first 50, we' d thought that was a big boat. We had to tear the wall out to get it out of the building. We jacked the plug up and put four-inch steam pipe under it for rollers. But, we didn't have anything to pull it out with. I hooked up my 55 Ford to the front, but we couldn't get enough traction. So, we had four guys sit on the trunk and then pulled it out. " -Ed Baldwin

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