The biggest wooden sailing vessel Lou Linden needs to worry about these days is the Barry Duckworth, his long-idle 35-foot pleasure sloop. With any luck, Linden says, he will finish the little sloop's new icebox this summer, and get it back under sail in time for a cruise of the Chesapeake this fall.
For the first time in 3 1/2 years, Linden has a little leisure time to spend on such simple concerns. Last month, he resigned as executive director of the Constellation Foundation, where he was chief fund-raiser, cheerleader and mother hen for the 176-foot Constellation - the last Civil War warship afloat and centerpiece for Baltimore's Inner Harbor renaissance.
He ventured an explanation for his departure as he relaxed recently in the shady confines of the patio behind his fraying South Baltimore rowhouse.
"I think primarily I'm a start-up and turnaround type of guy," he says. "In discussions with my executive committee, we decided I had provided what they needed and it was time for us both to go on."
Under his watch, the big ship has been saved again from oblivion. It is scheduled to be refloated on its new hull Aug. 21. Completion of its upper decks, masts and rig over the coming year is expected to lead to Constellation's triumphant return to the Inner Harbor in June or July of next year.
"And to a certain extent, too, I'm tired," Linden, 51, confides. "I've been going since February 1995 virtually without vacation, never less than 50 hours a week. It had been nine months since I had seen my mother in Florida; my house is in shambles, and my boat has not been out of the slip since 1996. There comes a time when you say, 'Basta!' [Enough!]."
"He's a done a terrific job," says Gail Shawe, the foundation's chairwoman. "There's no question we would not be in the position we're in now if it were not for Lou. He came at a time when there was a question whether the ship would be taken out of water and saved. He's done a great job of leading us to where we are today."
The foundation's board has begun to contemplate the ship's management and mission after it is returned to the Inner Harbor next year. One option may be to turn it over to the nonprofit Living Classrooms Foundation, which provides hands-on education and employment training for at-risk young people.
The organization's "floating classrooms" now include the Lady Maryland, a full-size replica of an 1880s pungey schooner, and the Mildred Belle, an authentic oyster buy boat built in 1948.
Linden is a loquacious former labor organizer, Texas criminal-defense attorney and political campaigner. Despite his boyhood in Minnesota, he is partial to Texas hats and boots, and harbors a love of sailing and maritime history.
He has crewed on tall ships, commanded charter vessels and sailed the Atlantic and the Caribbean with his wife, Nancy, a professional artist, aboard the Barry Duckworth. Their sloop is named for a friend and ship's carpenter who died aboard the original Pride of Baltimore when it sank in May 1986.
Linden is confident the most critical part of saving the Constellation has been accomplished.
"It's real important for people to remember where we came from on this," he says. "Three and a half years ago this was a dead ship, with no future at all. My original contract was for [four months] or whenever the money ran out, whichever came last."
Navy inspectors in 1993 had toured the ship and found it to be in advanced state of decay, unsafe for tourists and likely to sink at the dock if the money -- estimated then at $25 million - were not found to save it.
Only an innovative rescue plan conceived by Pride builder Peter Boudreau brought the price tag back within the realm of possibility - $9 million. His design called for laminated hull planking strong enough to support the ship's sagging timbers. The new hull is now a wooden reality, and will get its first test at the Aug. 21 launch.
"Peter is doing a magnificent job, and he's doing more with less than anybody I've ever seen," Linden says. The ship is structurally sound, watertight and, when finished next year, will once again be accurate to its 1861 appearance.
"There has been no scrimping on the quality of materials or workmanship. Nothing has been done in a second-rate fashion for lack of money," he says. "She is going to be exquisite."
Linden praised the Maryland General Assembly for its support of the ship - $1.8 million so far of the $3 million Gov. Parris Glendening has promised to provide. Baltimore City has also pledged $3 million. The rest must come from private donations.
He also had kind words for Walter Sondheim, a longtime advocate for downtown revival; former mayor Tommy D'Alesandro III; and other business and community leaders whose service on the foundation's board helped assure the ship's rescue. He called them "wonderful folk who have done a very difficult thing."
That's not to say Linden is leaving his post without regrets.
"One of the things I always
attempted to do was to expand the [Constellation's] fund-raising base nationally," he says. "That's a difficult thing to do, and I can't say honestly that I was tremendously successful at that."
The ship is a "national treasure," he says. "From our 20th-century perspective, it is in many ways a more important artifact than the frigate would be."
The "frigate," of course, refers to the original Constellation, built in Baltimore in 1797 and immortalized by victorious skirmishes in the Caribbean during the nearly forgotten Quasi-War with France. This was an undeclared naval war stemming from French interference with U.S. commerce as the 18th century turned into the 19th.
For decades, Constellation's Baltimore caretakers sought to portray today's ship as that frigate, to the extreme of altering its -- appearance. But historians today say the ship's true history and original appearance are unique, and well worth preserving in their own right.
The present Constellation was built in 1854 to replace the frigate. It is a sloop of war, and a veteran of both the fight against the West- African slave trade between 1859 and 1861 and the Civil War.
"It speaks in a very direct way to who we are and what we are as a nation today," Linden says, "if only because of the Civil War and the issues of class and race that arose out of it. The Quasi-War with France does not define who we are as a people."
Linden says one of his greatest satisfactions has been the opportunity to research Constellation's history, and to tell her story whenever he got the opportunity.
Early in the ship's reconstruction, workers tore off the old hull planking and discovered a line of portholes on each side of the berth deck. The portholes were visible in historic photos of the ship, too, but not in a Civil War-era painting. Some people argued they were added after the war, when she had become a training vessel for the Naval Academy.
It was only last December, as Linden was reading the newly discovered 1860s diary of the ship's yeoman, Moses Safford, that he discovered the truth. Safford wrote that while the ship was at anchor in the harbor at Naples in 1862, a storm wave struck and poured water through the "air ports" on the berth deck and soaked the sailors' beds.
"That's probably as close to being Indiana Jones as I'll ever get," he says. "I jumped up and danced around. I felt like I had just found the Holy Grail."
As a result, the ship is being restored with portholes.
Linden, who will collect severance checks from the foundation for a time, says he has had little opportunity in the past three years to chart his next career move.
"I'm looking for a project," he says. He would like to stay involved somehow with historic preservation and maritime issues - something that would make use of his legal training and communications skills. But he has no plans to practice law again.
"I'm looking for something that resonates with me and my values," he says, "and which pays my rent and my mother's rent."
He does expect to stay in Maryland. "I've got a house here, and the fact is I've put down roots here without hardly noticing it."
Roots of wood, it seems, like the Barry Duckworth.
Pub Date: 7/19/98