The lifelong boat designer touched many boaters’ lives
Issue 117: Nov/Dec 2017
Over the past century, a handful of individuals have made it their mission to help ordinary people get on the water and fulfill their sea dreams. John Hannah, who designed the Tahiti ketch during the Great Depression, quickly comes to mind. Also on that short list is Glen L. Witt, whose hundreds of designs enabled several generations of dreamers to build and own their own boats.
Glen, who passed away June 13 at the age of 98 in Downey, California, was a boat nut who, in the early 1950s, learned boat design from what was then called the Westlawn School of Yacht Design. In 1953, he hung up his own shingle (albeit over the back bedroom of his home) and began to sell plans for boats that nearly anyone with a basic knowledge of hand tools could build. Thus was born Glen-L Marine, a mail-order plans business that, with the coming of the digital age, evolved into an interactive online community of like-minded do-it-yourselfers.
Before World War II, much research in aviation and marine technologies was devoted to the development of new building materials. Thanks largely to new adhesives, gluing together thin plies of wood, with their grains running in different directions to create an isotropic panel, resulted in a simple and rather amazing product: plywood. Post-war boatbuilders and designers, Glen among them, began working with plywood. Examples include sailboats like the 26-foot Thunderbird of the 1960s (many of which are still sailing) and the contemporary work of Sam Devlin in Olympia, Washington, who builds gorgeous yachts — sail and power — from stitch-and-tape plywood.
Although Glen did expand the range of his designs to include construction in aluminum, steel, and fiberglass (often in the form of C-FLEX planks), most of his plans are for construction in plywood, which has long been the most popular material for average DIY boatbuilders — from working-class guys accustomed to working with their hands, to professionals who decide it’s time they learned how to work with their hands, to fathers and grandfathers looking for a project to share with sons and grandsons. Glen-L’s customers also include a number of women like Roberta Hegy and Pam Tilstra, who have built several boats and are active on Glen-L’s online Boatbuilder Forum.
Three years ago, I had occasion to call Gayle Brantuk, Glen’s daughter, who now runs the business. When I asked about her father she said, “He’s sitting right here! Want to talk to him?” Ninety-five at the time, he was still sharp. “This was never work for me,” he said. “I enjoyed it.”
The West Coast editor for Popular Mechanics magazine took a liking to Glen and his designs, and featured a Glen-L-designed boat on the cover five times over the years. That kind of publicity was a boon to the fledgling business. As sales grew, Glen rented a storefront and hired a secretary to handle correspondence, blueprinting, and the shipping of plans. In the days before email, boat designers received letters in the mail requesting literature and answers to questions that required thoughtful typed responses.
Designs in the Glen-L Marine portfolio now number more than 300 and range from rowboats and prams to runabouts and motor cruisers, and from daysailers to world cruisers. Another small-boat designer, Ken Hankinson, designed for Glen for 22 years before going out on his own. He retired in 2005 and Glen-L obtained the rights to sell plans for the designs created by this well-respected alumnus.
When I asked Glen how he decided on the next design — if he responded to a gap in the market he felt needed filling — he said he was an “independent old bastard” who drew whatever he was in the mood for. In his last years, those designs were for his grandchildren. Through them and the hundreds of others whose lives were touched and improved by a simple set of boat plans, the legacy of Glen L. Witt endures.
Dan Spurr is Good Old Boat’s research editor and an editor at large with Professional Boatbuilder. He is the author of seven books on boats and sailing, including Heart of Glass, and was formerly senior editor at Cruising World and the editor of Practical Sailor.
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