Businessman's Dream

Many a U. S. businessman, dreaming in his swivel chair, has gone a-voyaging to the South Seas. But few are the voyages that have not been abruptly terminated by the jangle of a telephone. Alfred Thornton Baker of Princeton, N. J. is one businessman who not only dreamed but did.

When he steered his 70-foot schooner into Miami, Fla., last week, 46-year-old Oilman Baker had fulfilled a lifelong ambition: to make his fortune and then go for a good long sail. With the same daring and dynamic enthusiasm that characterized his younger brother, the late, great Hobart ("Hobey") Baker, who has been immortalized since his Wartime death as the greatest U. S. college hockey player of all time. Skipper Baker, accompanied by two sons and a crew of three, had just completed a 30,000-mile cruise from Hong Kong.

That cruise started in March 1937 when the Bakers christened their American-designed, Chinese-built schooner So Fong (which they were told meant "everything beautiful in woman"), set sail for the U. S. via the Philippines, the South Seas, the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, Mediterranean and the South Atlantic. Not for glory, not for science, but just for fun, the Bakers bucked monsoons for 600 miles from Sumatra to Ceylon, saw their main boom snapped during a vicious squall in the Indian Ocean, spent three days on a tiny tropical island while the spar was being repaired.

At San Juan, Puerto Rico, his first U. S. port of call. Skipper Baker found that he had to register his Oriental So Fong, pay $2,200 duty before continuing on the last leg of his dream-come-true voyage.

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