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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