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| Hemingway's Pilar - preserved in Cuba |
At the foot of Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn was
Wheeler Shipbuilding. They built pleasure boats and commercial boats. During WWII they built 230 patrol craft and mine sweepers. There was a line of pleasure boats called Playmates. The most famous of them was
Hemingway's Pilar, a Wheeler Playmate he commissioned. A
Pilar replica was built for `Hemingway & Fuentes' an Andy Garcia movie (
now filming)about Hemingway and his captain - Fuentes to whom Pilar was bequeathed. Hemingway and Pilar did 40 days of submarine patrol duty in 1942 on the coast of Cuba, spotting only one sub.
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| Top Hat |
Here at
City Island Yacht Club George Ignatius Robinson had the same vision for his Wheeler Playmate Top Hat. Robinson applied to the Coast Guard hoping to convert his sailboat - usually chartered for weekend cruises - into a patrol craft complete with foredeck mounted machine gun and depth charges.
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Page 1 of George Robinson's application to the Coast Guard to convert
Top Hat from weekend cruiser to anti-submarine patrol craft. |
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