CYC Home
Monday, August 9, 2010
By Peter LeSourd
Editor's Note: Peter LeSourd, the author, is the elder son of the late Staff Commodore Francis A. LeSourd
CYC Staff Commodore Fran LeSourd passed away on July 17, 2010, four weeks after celebrating his 102nd birthday.
Francis LeSourd
CYC members, Staff Commodore George Miller, Gayton Bailey and Staff Commodore Hans Otto Giese introduced my father to the sport of sailing shortly after World War II. (Dad and Hans Otto met in the 1920s as skiing companions.) Dad immediately became active in CYC, and served as its sixth commodore in 1952.
In 1947, Dad bought our first sailboat, Sunny, a one-of-a-kind Norm Blanchard-designed-and-built 25-foot deep-keel cruising sailboat, built in the 1930s. Of course, she had a wood hull and spars. Sunny slept two in the cabin, and had a most unusual design feature, a one-burner alcohol stove which folded down on top of the head. We had the choice of using the former or the latter, but not both simultaneously! Until the late 1950s, our family (including my mother, Burgess, and my brother, Chris) cruised Sunny each summer on Puget Sound and in the San Juan and Gulf Islands, often joining the CYC annual cruise. Dad would rig plywood over the cockpit and a canvas tarp over the boom, under which Chris and I slept on air mattresses.
Competing with many of our club's early Commodores, including Bill Lieberman, Don Fleming and Dick Marshall, we raced Sunny in the CYC Lake Washington round-the-buoys events with starts from the Race Tower, as well as in "long distance" races on Puget Sound sponsored by CYC and PIYA. Sunny rated as cruising Class "C", the smallest and slowest of the racing classes for cruising sailboats, and our class would usually struggle to the finish line long after the larger boats. My parents were great friends with Chrissy and Dick Marshall, and also the Liebermans. Those families also raced cruising Class C boats, and were very keen racing competitors. Nevertheless, we won our share of trophies both in Lake and Sound races, and at PIYA regattas.
In 1964, our family and the Tom Foster family jointly bought Fugitive, one of a new, 37-foot, fiberglass cruising class, designed and built by Bill Buchan Sr. Her interior seemed like a palace compared to Sunny's! Fugitive would cruise north to Desolation Sound every summer in early July, and not return until the end of August. Members of our family and the Foster family swapped boat for car at the end of the road in Lund, B.C., on a weekly or biweekly basis.
Each spring and fall, my father and I raced Fugitive on Puget Sound. Bill Lieberman had also purchased the Buchan 37, Vamose and Don Fleming raced Pursuit. Competition was even stiffer than it had been in cruising Class C, however, because the sons of Bill Buchan Sr., John and Bill Jr., also raced their own Buchan 37s, along with boats skippered by other expert racing sailors. We always gauged our success in a race by how close we finished to the Buchan brothers (world Star-class champion, etc.).
By the mid-1970s, Dad retired from racing and turned the race skippering over to me. The Fosters sold their interest in Fugitive to Dad, and in 1986, my father sold the boat.
Of note, Dad was heavily involved with the Seattle Sailing Foundation's sponsorship of the America's Cup 1973 defender selection campaign of the 12-meter Intrepid. As a tax lawyer, Dad devised a plan for the Foundation to own Intrepid and finance its operation through tax-deductible contributions to the Foundation. Unique was the concept of an America's Cup campaign being sponsored by a vast number of relatively small contributions, in essence a publicly-owned America's Cup racing yacht. Previously, America's Cup boats had been campaigned by a few very wealthy patrons.
First presented in 1998 by his law firm in his honor, The Francis LeSourd Trophy is awarded to the best performing yacht in the annual Pacific Northwest J-fest Regatta.
A memorial celebration of Fran's life will be held at the Museum of History and Industry, 16 September 2010 at 1530 (3:30 PM).