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New Read: Whortonsville Yacht and Tractor Club
First On T-Shirts, Now A Book
August 28, 2016

T
o most ears, it sounds made up, a fictional place. But The Whortonsville Yacht & Tractor Club did exist. It sprang to life in 1990 about 10 miles outside of Oriental and had a 20 year run. There are the t-shirts to prove that. Membership cards and burgees, too.

WYTC Book burgee
The WYTC burgee has made its rounds, day and night, along the eastern seaboard and to the Caribbean.
And now, there is the book, The Whortonsville Yacht & Tractor Club.

The author, Nick Santoro, knows the subject well. Nick and his wife Jeannette was the driving force behind the WYTC. It based at Ensign Harbor Marina on Brown’s Creek in the backyard of their home in Whortonsville. They’d founded it a few years after moving to Whortonsville from New Jersey.

The back cover of the book calls it “an account of one man’s attempt to escape the harried, impersonal life of a New York commuter in hopes of finding a more fulfilling life-style in a tiny North Carolina coastal village.”

That man “survives a subway fire under the Hudson River on his way to a job he did not like, to realize that there must be a better way for him to spend the rest of his life. With no clear idea of what that better way might be, he decides to invent one.”

 WYTC Bookreviews
Nick Santoro of the Whortonsville Yacht and Tractor Club.
To those who know, Nick Santoro, this may sound familiar. Nick did survive a fire on a train while commuting to work one day in the 1980s – he was compensated for his ruined clothing. And that did set up his move to NC, all of which make up the core of his book. But he says it’s a ‘work of fiction’.

It’s in keeping with the spirit of the WYTC and its ficticious-sounding name… that the book isn’t quite non-fiction.

“The book is semi-historical fact, but the way I have written it,” Nick says, “it has to be called fiction.” For instance, the main character is not named Nick, but Walter Smithwick. Other characters from Whortonsville and Oriental and the county go by other names in the book as well. But they all are readily identifiable, particularly for the reader who spent time in Whortonsville a few decades ago.

 WYTC Bookreviews
The book: Whortonsville Yacht and Tractor Club. The TownDock copy is now looking well read. You can get your own copy – click here.
“There were several things behind the book.” Nick Santoro says. “First, it is sort of a retrospective on Whortonsville back when I first moved here. Whortonsville was such a magical place then. In some small way, there was an intent to capture and preserve those days. This was a welcome change of culture for me. I wanted to preserve that time.”

So how did Nick Santoro, New Jersey commuter in to Manhattan, wind up in Pamlico County in the 1980’s? “I grew up in a tiny little Jersey town where everybody commuted in to New York in the morning and then at home at night. I saw that was happening to me.”

“Jeannette and I have known each other since grammar school. We got married, we worked across the street from one another in New York. Our pre-nup was that we were going to quit our jobs and get out of that life style.”

They went across the country, “We ended up in Oakland,” Nick says. “San Francisco was too expensive.”

Nick went to work for a Bay Area ad agency. Then, around that same time, Jeanette’s father suffered a series of heart attacks and she was traveling back East often to see him. Nick says it became “too much, so we moved back and I was back in the trap.”

Back in Manhattan, Nick says, he lost one job “because the word got out I was interested in another. I moved to another company, but then that company decided to move to Connecticut. I did not want to move to Connecticut.”

“We started looking for a quiet place in the South.” Being able to have a boat nearby and sail it often was a priority. He had in mind the idea of running a marina.

WYTC Book sailboats
Nick Santoro at his Ensign Harbor Marina. Tractors once had a quantitative edge, but now sailboats appear to be more common in Whortonsville, home of the Yacht and Tractor Club.

If things had panned out as he initially wanted, there may’ve been no Yacht and Tractor club, at least not in Whortonsville. Whortonsville was not his first choice. As Nick tells it, “we found Vandemere. I put in an offer for Vandemere Marina but they chose another bid.”

“So we came to Whortonsville.”

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In the book, Nick’s alter ego goes into real estate and partners with another realtor who talked extreme politics all the time. They eventually parted ways and Walter takes over Sunbelt Realty (its real name) and goes off on his own, just as Nick did after his partnership with Billy Paul.

A few years later, he was founding the Whortonsville Yacht & Tractor Club. Most of the members were sailors, and Nick says, “We wanted to be a part of the community.” The “tractor” part was a reaching-out to the people living in the area – some of whom were literally working the land – before the sailors arrived.

WYTC Book tractors
Tractors once outnumbered sailboats in Whortonsville.

As the name Nick came up with implies, the WYTC “was intended from the outset to be as inclusive as possible. Most of the people in the community owned tractors, but not everyone owned a sailboat.”

As befitting an advertising industry background, the name Nick came up with had traction. it was celebrated every June .

For 20 years, from 1990 until 2009, the WYTC hosted a June event called the Summer Solstice Sailebration. The festivities involved a sailboat race (more of a group cruise around an established course), and potluck afterward – no one was excluded for lack of a sailboat. Prizes included loaves of home-baked bread for the winners and for the last place finishers. (The WYTC no longer hosts the event, but a Solstice Day regatta continues in Oriental.)

WYTC Book winners
Some of the locals who won summer solstice races appear in the novel under fictitious names, but their real names are recorded in the WYTC Hall of Fame.

During that 20 year run, a commemorative t-shirt with a new back-of-the-shirt design was drawn up for each year. The 1992 editon riffed on Columbus finding W’ville, another depicted the exploding fireworks barge. Decades later, you can still find them being worn. The new book puts 20 years of design on display – photos of every shirt are archived there.

WYTC Book puccini
Spreading the word. Santoro presented Giacomo Puccini with a WYTC lifetime membership in Puccini’s Square in Luca, Italy. Reports of sightings of Whortonsville Yacht and Tractor Club T-shirts and burgees range from Nova Scotia to Puerto Rico to Cuba to Bermuda.

While the photos provide a fully historic record, the narrative takes a few diversions in to the semi-historical what with the made up names. But the veil of pseodonyms is gauze thin.

Nick says those who’ve read the book easily pick out the characters representing, among others, Oriental’s late police chief, Jim Bunn, late historian Bill Mason, hardware store owner, the late Ray Creech, and of course Miss Winkie.

“Santoro said, “A local audience reading the book will recognize local characters even if they have different names.

By their real names or not, Nick says in writing the book, he wanted to “chronicle our first years in Whortonsville.”

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The WYTC may have been based at his marina, but Nick Santoro says the hub of Whortonsville was Miss Winky’s store near the end of Lupton Rd leading to Point Marina. Kathleen “Winky” Slade’s store was the only one for miles around. The coffee was instant, the creamer a powder, the sandwiches encased in cello with a Stewart label. There were community parties – alcohol free.

The building still stands but Miss Winkie’s closed her store there over a decade ago. With that, “the feeling of camaraderie seems to have diminished,” Santoro says. “A lot of people have died and others have moved. The store was the center of town. It was here people went to find out what was going on. When that closed, that went away. People that settled here in the late 80s and early 90s are mostly gone.”

And so, the spark to write the book. “A hundred years from now, what I have written may be a vague memory. In a subway car, you can be with the same people taking the same trip each day, but not know any of them. Whortonsville is like a subway car, but you have a whole different relationship with the other people on the car. You know everybody and everything about them. I have tried to present that atmosphere of the town.”

The early reader was Miss Winky herself. “When the book was read to Miss Winkie, she loved it. Just seeing her reaction was wonderful. She was part of the motivation for doing the book.”

“The thing I hope comes through is that life is uncertain and you have to take responsibility for it and take control of the tiller; control the direction that you choose; work hard at pursuing your goals; it may be bleak; you may not get there easily, but it worked for me.”

WYTC Book
Nick Santoro, at home in Whortonsville, reflects on the transformation of his life from Manhattan to rural Pamlico County.
“I wanted to try to try to describe the problem young people face when confronting an uncertain world. Back in the day where I came from, you went to college, got out of college, and did what job you could, either related or unrelated to what you studied. You fell into a slot, and 30 years later, you were working on a job that you couldn’t wait until the clock ran out.”

“Not enough thought in school is given to teach students to be conscious of more things, to teach them to constantly be on vigil in pursuing a path for those things that have meaning, and to teach them to seek what that is rewarding personally, rather than pursue a slot that is simply a luck of the draw.”

“Hitch your star to a wagon, and that way you can make a bigger difference for yourself and the world.”

“My take from people that have read it is that they have enjoyed it, but I feel they have enjoyed it more for stories of the characters than for the greater philosophical statement that I was making.”

The first edition of “The Whortonsville Yacht and Tractor Club,” a 208-page work labeled as historical fiction, is limited to 200 copies. The self-published book can be purchased at the Pamlico County Chamber of Commerce office in Grantsboro, the Inland Waterway Provision Company in Oriental, and online:
whortonsvilleyachtandtractorclub.com

Future plans include a discussion of providing the book in an electronic version for sale on Amazon and the possibility of audio tapes.

WYTC Book dark burgee
The WYTC burgee glows in the dark.

Posted Sunday August 28, 2016 by Melinda Penkava


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