“Landon was the showman,” said Bart Loomis, Alfred’s grandson, recalling the ostentatious $100,000 Tiffany sapphire necklace Thorne once presented to his wife, Julia. “He liked to own things—yachts, islands, railroads, you name it, he bought it. You want to talk about big money, Landon Ketchum Thorne was big money. He was the flashy one. That was not Alfred’s way, but he went along with it.”
Despite their contrasting personalities, Loomis and Thorne were as close as two men could be, professionally and personally, and Loomis enthusiastically joined in Thorne’s extravagant hobbies and sporting pursuits. Loomis’ three sons were close in age to Thorne’s two boys, Landon junior and Edwin, and the two families became inseparable, visiting each other often and going off on extended holidays together. In large part this was due to Julia Thorne, who was as charming and charismatic as her husband, and Loomis doted on her. Compared to his sister, Loomis’ wife, Ellen, seemed sweet but rather vague or, as one family member put it, “a bit on the fey side. At times, you wondered if she was really all there.” “Julia was very overpowering and kind of spoiled,” noted Paulie Loomis, “but both Alfred and Uncle Landon thought the world of her.”
Julia was at the center of the two tribes, and she “loved to hold court.” She threw splendid parties that were famous for the opulent gold dinner service adorning the table and the giant flagons of champagne that white-jacketed waiters tipped into glasses. Witty, intelligent, and unusually well read for a woman of her day, “she was one of the most informed women you could ever meet,” said her daughter-in-law Mimi Thorne Gilpatric, who was married to Landon junior. “She could hold forth about anything that was going on, whether it was politics or literature, and she always had something interesting to say.” She was a connoisseur of rare manuscripts and first editions, and assembled one of the foremost collections of William Blake, which she later gave to the Morgan Library. With age, she became very grand, and commissioned an elaborate genealogy of the Thorne family’s blue-blooded ancestry, which she had bound in leather, with hand-engraved parchment pages and an elaborate gilded crest on the cover.
Julia was in every way “a glamorous figure,” recalled Gilpatric. “She would be sitting there in one of her Mainbocher gowns, and all her jewelry, with five rings on each finger and gold bracelets from here to here”—pointing from wrist to elbow—“she looked like one of the royal family.”
During the winter of 1930, Thorne had been regularly featured in the sporting columns as a member of a syndicate of yachting enthusiasts headed by Paul Hammond, a great sailor, who were building the Whirlwind, one of the four yachts that would compete for the honor of defending the America’s Cup. The other three aspirants were the Enterprise, owned by Harold S. Vanderbilt; the Weetamoe, backed by a syndicate headed by Junius S. Morgan and George Nichols; and the Yankee, belonging to a Boston syndicate headed by John S. Lawrence and Chandler Hovey, with Charles Francis Adams, secretary of the navy, sailing her. But as it turned out, Hammond quickly got in over his head—spending a bundle on a second large boat to house his crew of thirty—and halfway through construction informed Thorne the syndicate was busted. So Thorne, with his deep pockets, took control of the syndicate and, as he did in all things, brought in Loomis as his equal partner. The two already owned several boats together, and Loomis agreed to split the cost of completing the yacht.
The two partners were prepared to spend whatever it took to win the America’s Cup. It was an unbelievably extravagant undertaking at the time, as J-class racing sloops were built exclusively by powerful syndicates of wealthy families such as the Astors and Vanderbilts and not by self-made men like Loomis and Thorne. While there is no record of how much money they lavished on the Whirlwind, a good measure lies in the ultimate fate of the J-boats themselves, which became too prohibitive even for the very rich, so that by the end of the 1940s, America’s Cup races were relegated to smaller twelve-meter boats.
Of course, the Whirlwind, which took its name from a famous clipper ship owned by a Thorne ancestor, was destined to be no ordinary racing sloop. The boat featured a highly original, innovative—and untested—design, which Loomis and Thorne hoped would give them the edge in the competition and win them the right to race against the British, namely Sir Thomas Lipton, in one of his periodic attempts to capture the cup from the New York Yacht Club. As one critic marveled at the time, “No cup yacht or any other racing craft ever carried quite so many newfangled ideas, and anyone who has the opportunity should carefully examine this marvelous creation.” The Whirlwind’s radical design was created by L. Francis Herreshoff, son of the famous Bristol naval architect Nat Herreshoff, who had turned out the previous five America’s Cup defenders. Rumor had it that the father had lent a hand in the design, and the boat, which was being built at Lawley’s shipyard in Boston, was the subject of many flattering notices and much fanfare, accompanied by intense speculation. “There has been much mystery about her,” The New York Times reported in March 1930:
Until the Whirlwind is overboard and rigged it will be impossible to pass judgment on her beauty. She is the longest and largest of the four defense boats, stretching several feet more on deck than any of the others, and is 158 tons, thirteen more than Yankee, the second largest. . . . She is the only real cutter, depending entirely on her keel, whereas the others have centerboards to put them in the sloop class. Also she is the only one of the four to have wood planking. She is of composite construction, with mahogany over steel frames. . . . With her large hull the Whirlwind will not be able to spread as much sail as the other boats. If she did she would not keep within the measurement limitations. A larger, lighter hull with less canvas is the plan for her.
Although his sailing experience had been mostly in racing small boats, Thorne was determined to take the wheel, while Loomis, who was an expert navigator from his days on Long Island Sound, tackled that job with his usual acumen and unwavering self-confidence. Naturally, Loomis adopted a scientific approach and enlisted the help of MIT’s Naval Architecture Department, and together they undertook a thorough study of hull shapes. During the test program, they also decided to replace the 158-foot mast with a metal one—at a cost of approximately $25,000—constructed of duralumin, the strongest and lightest aluminum alloy. In the preliminary races, the yacht still did not seem balanced, or “in her groove,” and they thought if they stepped the mast twenty inches forward, it would improve her windward handling and make her faster. But it took two men tugging at the wheel to keep her sails full and drawing in a breeze, and one time a helmsman was thrown clear over the wheel. In an effort to correct the fault, they decided to move the mast up again, a total of five feet forward from its original position. The boat was hauled out of the water so many times that summer, and was so many weeks behind her three rivals in shaking out her sails, that the odds were heavily against her in the preliminary betting.
Loomis hoped to improve her chances by seeing to it that the Whirlwind was outfitted with any number of ingenious devices of his own design. At the time, people joked that you could always spot the Loomis-Thorne boat a mile off because of all the whirling gigs and wind trackers that covered the deck. “Of course, Uncle Alfred developed some navigating equipment that was kind of the last word, and later a lot of people adapted his ideas to other things,” said Ed Thorne, who was sixteen at the time and split the job of cabin boy with his brother, taking turns reading the courses and speeds at ten-minute intervals for the navigator.
During the trials, according to Ed Thorne, Loomis never once came above deck but remained below, surrounded by all his gadgets: “We had a couple of races on foggy days, those days when you couldn’t even see more than a couple of hundred yards. And of course in those days, you didn’t have radar. But with Uncle Alfred’s calculations, we’d always find the mark, even when all the other people had trouble. The only race we ever won was because of his navigation skills. We cut the right buoy and everyone else cut the wrong one. It never even occurred to my father to come abou
t that buoy, because Alfred said it was another fifteen seconds or thirty seconds, or whatever. They had complete trust in each other, they had that kind of partnership.”
Ultimately, the Whirlwind proved to be something of a clinker and finished dead last in the final race off Newport, Rhode Island. The victor, Vanderbilt’s Enterprise, later defeated Lipton’s Shamrock V. The Whirlwind was the outstanding failure of the America’s Cup that year: in twenty-two starts, she won only one race. The yacht, expected to be the one with the greatest power, never attained her potential and at times “looked as if she were trailing a sea anchor.” Everyone agreed, however, that she had by far the most spacious and luxurious living quarters of any America’s Cup defender. While some later carped that the yacht might have fared better if Thorne had allowed himself to be relieved at the wheel by a more experienced skipper, the larger problem—which would often prove to be the case with the younger Herreshoff’s creations—was finding her proper trim and rig. But at the end of the season, when it came time to settle the expenses, which all hands knew had run nearly half a million dollars, Thorne forever endeared himself to his friends when he told them “to forget it,” adding that he and Loomis “would look after the matter.”
In 1931, finding Long Island too tame and increasingly suburban, Thorne saw an opportunity to buy Hilton Head Island, in South Carolina, which before the bridge was built was an isolated strip of beach reachable only by boat. The island paradise, once home to wealthy southern landowners and sprawling plantations, was occupied by Union forces during the Civil War, and on General William Sherman’s orders, the confiscated land was sold to freed slaves for a dollar an acre. When the cotton crops failed, many abandoned Hilton Head, and the island was almost forgotten. In the 1890s, hunters began buying the property for recreational purposes, and a New Yorker named William P. Clyde eventually managed to acquire nine thousand acres, including the last of the antebellum houses, Honey Horn. When Thorne, whose ancestors had owned plantations in the Sea Islands for generations, heard that the current owner, a northern industrialist named Roy Rainey, had been ruined in the Crash, he proposed that he and Loomis buy the land and turn Hilton Head into a private hunting and fishing resort for family and friends. Loomis, who was by nature a loner, loved the idea of having his own island and was all for it.
“They paid about $120,000 in cash, because they had cash on the barrel head in those days,” recalled Ed Thorne. “They bought up about twenty thousand acres, which was virtually the entire island. There was almost nothing on it, except what had been an old Confederate fort, and the Honey Horn plantation, which was a one-story house that dated back to the Civil War. They fixed that up and expanded on it, and they turned it into a marvelous sporting preserve. They built another boat together, the Northern Light, which they took there.”
Even today, Betty Evans remembers being struck by how remote and fantastic the island was then: “There was no one there at all, only a few black families, and they spoke nothing but Gullah. It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen. Julia brought her horses there, and fixed up the house with the most elegant antiques and rugs. They threw huge house parties there, inviting all their family and friends. Early in the mornings, a boy would come and light a fire in the bedrooms while we were still asleep, and get the potbellied stove going in the bathrooms. Everybody would be up at the crack of dawn to go hunting. And you never saw such hunting. It had every animal known to man.”
Loomis and Thorne hired a local islander, Mose Hudson, to patrol their property on horseback and keep trespassing hunters away, and to make sure the reserve was always well stocked with mink and other game. “This was hunting in a grand style, with horses and dogs, and elegant picnics,” said Frederick Hack Jr., who grew up on the island and whose family later bought Honey Horn in 1950. “The whole plantation more or less operated on that level. It was quite something.” After a typical morning shoot, the party would find a shady spot and set up camp. “It was just like on safari,” recalled Paulie Loomis. “A black man would come along, all trimmed out in a waiter’s uniform, and bring tables, and tablecloths, and chairs, and china. You couldn’t believe your eyes. We’d have this fancy lunch outside, and they would grill quail, and great big oysters in the shell and melt butter. It was a feast.”
In the evenings, everyone would dress for dinner, and Julia would arrange for a wonderful feast in the big dining room. There would be a roaring fire afterward, and Loomis would keep the boys busy by giving them mathematical problems to work out or challenging them to a game of chess. Loomis, of course, always played with his back to the board and often played several matches at once, all the while keeping up a lively conversation with his other guests. Sometimes he could be persuaded to put on a magic show, and he would mesmerize them for hours doing tricks with a quarter and a few matchsticks. At the end of the evening, they always brought out a bottle of what Thorne called “sippin’ whiskey.” The island was littered with illegal stills, and he and Loomis took great pleasure in locating them all and helping themselves. Added Evans: “It was 120-proof bourbon—it only took one sip.”
At Honey Horn, Loomis enjoyed playing the country squire. He re-created Highhold, Stimson’s gentleman-farmer’s estate on Long Island where he had spent his happiest times as a boy. Over the years, with the help of a devoted manager named Ted Armstrong, he and Thorne transformed Honey Horn into a working farm, adding stables, servants quarters, a guesthouse, and laundry room. It was a totally self-sufficient compound, with its own milk cows, chickens, and a large vegetable garden. The generous offerings were described by a visitor:
The big kitchen at Honey Horn sent out a tempting fragrance of roast turkey and venison, of duck with orange sauce made from bittersweet island oranges, Carolina shrimp pie, oyster stewed with crisp bacon and onions and served with fluffy rice. There was crunchy benne seed candy in the crystal dish, or perhaps a plate of pecan pralines, with the nuts fresh and crisp from island trees.
Having made their fortune in rural electrification, Loomis and Throne fittingly imported an electric generator, bringing the first power to the island. Compared to the simple farms kept by the neighboring black families, Honey Horn was a mecca of modern engineering: the mere fact that they had the only tractor had a huge impact on the local economy. Over the years, Loomis and Thorne bought land from any families willing to sell, and by 1936 the black population on the island dropped to only three hundred as compared with three thousand forty years earlier. The northern conquerors even managed to acquire the last large lot, the 803-acre old Confederate Fort Walker site, from the federal government, for an additional $12,600. They had the island virtually to themselves until World War II, when the turn-of-the-century lighthouse in Palmetto Dunes became the site of a marine encampment. Gun placements, for target practice over the Atlantic Ocean, were set up on the beach, and Loomis’ sons remember collecting the shell casings that washed up on shore.
Over every winter for almost twenty years, Loomis and Thorne, along with their five sons, hunted to the hounds, shot skeet, fished, sailed, and entertained friends and important business executives, politicians, and a growing number of Loomis’ scientific colleagues. Stimson came to stay, as did Ernest Lawrence. On one occasion, they even played host to the king of Sweden. Guests would take the train from Penn Station to Hardeeville, a small station on the Atlantic coast line about twenty miles north of Savannah, where they would be met at the station and brought over to the island on a small boat. One frequent visitor was Karl Compton, who together with Loomis spent countless hours digging up the beaches in search of old Indian burial grounds, arrowheads, and other artifacts, all to no avail. In the process, they discovered that the place was teeming with poisonous snakes—huge rattlesnakes, water moccasins, and copperheads. Loomis had Compton call on his experts from MIT. “They would come over and trap them, so they could extract the venom to make serum,” said Evans. “I think Alfred also saw to it that some were sent to zoos.”
Loomi
s and Thorne loved the island and collected all the information they could on its early history and the wealthy men who had come before them and built the “Big Houses,” whose haunted ruins lay covered by weeds. There were also practical business reasons for becoming steeped in Hilton Head’s past. Eventually the land would be divided, sold, and developed, and prospective buyers would want a clear title and the names of the previous owners and dates of sale. They faced only one problem: Beaufort County’s land records had twice been destroyed, and no complete official history existed. Loomis and Thorne decided to fill in the gaps themselves and began researching the previous residents, their lots, titles, and sales, compiling detailed records of their own. An artist was commissioned to create a map showing the antebellum plantations, and the illustrated drawing was framed and hung in the hall at Honey Horn.
Loomis dedicated himself to making a scientific survey of the island, enlisting Compton’s help on more than one occasion, and over the years he had a number of elaborate maps drawn up. He also attempted to give a full account of the wildlife on their island paradise, noting for the record that “as many as 4,000 Widgeon have fed in the duck ponds during a winter”:
The island is used entirely for sporting purposes, ie:
Quail
Snipe
Dove
Duck
Deer
Wild Hog
Wild Turkey
Coon and Possum
Fishing (Sea-trout, Bass, etc. in the rivers and creeks;) (Blue fish, Red Snappers, etc., in the ocean.) (The oysters are plentiful and unusually good—also crab and shrimp.)
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