Why Jim and Connie Grant created the “sailshop on the prairie”
Issue 2 : Sept/Oct 1998
It was life’s haphazard events — and not a grand master plan — which have enabled a couple of sailors to be successful at the sailmaking trade deep in the Indiana heartland far, very far, from the scent, even the merest whiff, of salt water.
Jim and Connie Grant grew up in the small Indiana town of Columbia City, a mite west of Fort Wayne and not far from the few natural lakes of any significance in Indiana. It doesn’t take much water to float a sailing dinghy, however, and Jim grew up aboard a series of sailboats of this nature: a Snipe, a Sailfish, a Thistle, and a Lightning. He created sails for several of these boats using inexpensive materials from the local fabric stores.
Jim and Connie spent their graduate school years together at the University of Chicago, he studying philosophy and she studying history. Like poor students anywhere, they looked for bargains and spent money cautiously. Together they bought a Six-Meter sloop for $600 — plus another $400 for the unpaid back storage it had accumulated during many years of neglect — and turned it into a liveaboard home on the Chicago waterfront. They raced this boat for two years. Jim created her sails from sailcloth begged from Lou Acquino, then one of the premier sailcloth designers.
With graduate school behind them, the couple went west, following the smell of salt, and landed in Marina del Rey on the coast near Los Angeles. There they bought a Cal 20, to replace the boat they’d left behind, and joined the local racing fleet.
What happened next was one of those haphazard events which influences people’s lives. Jim and Connie, in the midst of a fleet championship battle, determined the Cal 20 needed new sails by the weekend. They couldn’t find a sailmaker willing to work that kind of a miracle, so Jim fell back on their poor student experience and made the sails himself.
Connie recalls that the sails “looked terrible;” they were “too full.” However too full turned out to be fortuitous for the light air and chop which prevailed off Marina del Rey during the racing season, and they won the remaining three races, “sewing up” the fleet championship, as it were. They went on to place a strong second in the nationals which were held at Marina del Rey that year, and Jim became known as “Omar the Tentmaker” within the fleet. Others looked to him for sailmaking advice and information on obtaining supplies.
It should be noted that Connie does not sew. This part of their sailing hobby was Jim’s passion, one which she supported. Today Connie takes a perverse pride in being the only member of the Grant family who does not sew.
Before long, Jim had developed a few how-to manuals and an assortment of sailing supplies which people could buy for their own sail production. And thus, Sailrite was launched in 1969 in a three-car garage in Marina del Rey, Calif. Lacking the large tables necessary for cutting and sewing massive pieces of cloth, Jim soon earned another strange reputation, this time within the neighborhood, as the guy who waxes his driveway. There he spread out the cloth and worked the large pieces with ease.
Their growing family made Jim and Connie long for a simpler life … a smaller town … something a lot like Columbia City, Indiana, in fact. And so they moved Sailrite and their children back to the embrace of a community surrounded by cornfields.
The Grants and other Sailrite staff members continue to campaign a small fleet including an S2 7.9, a Lindenberg 22, and a couple of C-Scows several days a week with sailing clubs in Indianapolis, a couple hours’ drive to the southwest, and Clear Lake, a similar drive to the northeast. There, and through their sailing customers from all over the world, they keep tabs on the needs of the sailing community from the middle of the Hoosier heartland.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
