Artist Management: My Life with Jim Moores

Dear friends,

Many of you already know, but here it is: Jim Moores, 69, passed away suddenly on Oct. 25, 2024 at his home in Beaufort, N.C., two weeks after a catastrophic accident doing what he loved most, poking around an interesting old boat.  

This will be the final “Dear friends” for this site, the last one I edit, and the last one I will personally write.

I know Jim lived much of his later years to have interesting stories to share here. Nothing delighted him more than getting emails and calls in response to his latest “Dear friends” letter.

If he was anxious or if the business was in a slump, the quickest way to brighten his mood was suggesting it was time for him to write another newsletter.

He would hand me scribbled yellow legal pad pages that he’d ask me to immediately edit and put into form. My hair could be on fire and bombs could be exploding around me, but I had to drop everything and start right away on “Dear friends.”

His handwriting was terrible and his spelling was even worse.  But the bones were there and he was an excellent and natural storyteller, which isn’t a skill that is easily taught regardless of proficiency in grammar or spelling.

We started the first newsletter as an homage to his father, James Phelps Moores Sr., an Indianapolis wholesale lumber broker, who created the “Moores Log” that he sent to his clients.

Jim was the oldest son among six children. His patriarchal father was suffering from cancer and knew he didn’t have long to live, so he started succession training while Jim was still in elementary school.

As a boy, Jim would help his father count the railroad cars carrying Moores lumber from the West Coast to Indianapolis. Then the timber would be distributed to buyers across many states. Once a month, his dad would send out the “Moores Log” with little stories from his buying trips and a list of hardwoods that would be available. Jim’s father, called “Shake” for his childhood dancing prowess, used a mimeograph machine, and the smell of that ink and the endless Coca Colas in his father’s office were some of Jim’s fondest childhood memories.

We didn’t have to use mimeograph machines, but our first newsletters were all-consuming, all-hands-on-deck affairs. After burning through a half-dozen laser printers and copiers, we started taking the originals to Staples. We sent out 600 newsletters a month. After we got all the pages back, they had to be collated, stapled and Z-folded, address labeled, stamped, stuffed in envelopes and mailed. It took several days. Jim insisted on hand signing every letter in blue ink so readers would know it was his real signature and not a print.

When I met Jim, he worked and lived at Cracker Boy Boat Works in Riviera Beach, Fla. He had a Grumman bread truck converted into a mobile woodworking shop, and a trailer with a table saw mounted over it. And he lived on a Stonington motorsailer that was docked near the haulout pit at Cracker Boy.

For our first date, he picked me up in a box truck. He didn’t have an operational regular car, though he did have a Volkswagen Baja bug that he got in lieu of payment. It was always in the shop for repairs. He talked about things I knew nothing about and had little interest in, such as cruising, the America’s Cup, Leeward and Windward islands, cup showers, different types of rigging for two- and three-masted ships and free diving for lobster.

I was not eager for more such conversations; we had no common interests. I was far from smitten. But he was tenacious. He sent flowers every day to my office for a week until I agreed to see him again. I still wasn’t sure about him, but that changed one day when he was driving my Honda Civic hatchback down Broadway, a sketchy road that links Riviera and West Palm Beach.

A small Hispanic man with a sack of laundry was curled into a fetal ball on the sidewalk outside an open-air laundromat. Two young men were standing over him, kicking him and screaming to give up the money. Jim drove my car over the sidewalk and laid on the horn. Then a taxi driver pulled up behind us and did the same. I was stunned. I didn’t even notice the man on the ground until Jim swerved and suddenly drove over the curb.

The crack cocaine epidemic was still raging and migrant workers were called “walking ATMs” because they usually kept their cash on them. I wrote about murder trials for a living back then, but witnessing the brazen attempted mugging on a major roadway in broad daylight was shocking. I realized then that Jim was a good man. There was substance and character beyond his suntan and his swoopy blond hair and his Kennedy-like looks. He said when he first came down from Maine, he regularly got mugged in Riviera Beach. A lanky 6’ 4” blond white guy obviously stood out in the hood. He learned his lesson to keep at least $20 in cash in his pocket and a razor knife because the worst beating he got was when he was dead broke and didn’t even have change.

I met Jim Moores in my late 20s. He has been a part of my life for most of it. Even after our marriage ended, we remained business partners and close friends. We had once built a life together, a business and a family, and parting ways in our marriage didn’t change our friendship or trust in each other. 

I knew all of Jim’s faults. He could be overbearing, demanding, quick to anger if you went against his directions or did subpar work, and more. 

One captain friend described my role in the company perfectly: Artist Management. Not only did Jim have the personality of a temperamental artist, so did many of our most talented carpenters. I spent a lot of time soothing hurt feelings after blowups and trying to cajole people to come back to work so we could finish projects.

But Jim’s good qualities were also over the top. He could be immeasurably kind. Not only did he step in during the attempted mugging, he gave a $3,000 carbon fiber racing bike to a stranger. On his morning commutes, Jim would often see this one guy bicycling in the same direction from West Palm Beach north. One weekend, Jim went to our neighborhood grocery store and ran into the bike guy. He told the man to wait at the store because he had a gift for him. Jim came home, grabbed the bike and went back to the store to give it to him. 

Not that long ago, I was driving down Broadway and saw the same guy on the same bike. He changed out the tires but I recognized the bright orange racing frame. It’s been at least 15 years. Jim gave up the bike because he had gotten too heavy for it but the guy was still as lean as ever. 

There were other instances of Jim’s kindness. Against my vehement opposition, he gave a former worker a second chance after he served his prison term on drug charges. Jim only drew the line when it came to thieves, and this guy turned into one. The guy stole our power tools over the weekend and Jim and my brother drove to every pawnshop near the boatyard to buy them back. 

Another time, a former client ended up in federal prison for smuggling illegal immigrants from the Bahamas on his boat. He was addicted to gambling and desperate for money. Jim wrote letters to him in prison until the guy told him to stop because the feds were reading all of his mail and he didn’t want Jim in trouble. Jim said the guy always paid his bills and must feel lonely in prison and that’s why he kept writing to him. It made no sense to me.

There were other instances, probably many more that Jim kept secret from me, but one final story of Jim’s kindness involved Mike Doyle, better known as “Epoxy Mike” because, not only was he good with it, but the gooey substance usually ended up all over him. 

Back then, Jim worked alongside his three-man crew. After a client failed to pay for work on a derelict Trumpy or even the boatyard bill, Jim and his crew took parts off the boat including an Onan generator that Jim finally managed to sell.

Meanwhile, Mike ended up in jail on a probation violation for an old charge, I don’t remember for what. After his release, Jim surprised him with his share from the Onan sale. Mike didn’t even remember that he was owed money for the job.

Another of Jim’s great qualities was the potential he saw in people. He would take kids who had never even worked with their hands and turn them into helpers then carpenters. He hired assistants who were HIV positive at a time when AIDS patients were treated like lepers as well as a friend’s mother suffering from Alzheimer’s. 

He did it with me as well, whether I wanted to or not. I had never even worked retail, never handled a cash register. I had worked a couple of times as a part-time server in high school and college.  Seating drunks at Denny’s and burning sukiyaki at the table while wearing a kimono in a Japanese restaurant does not prepare you for the marine industry. The only real work experience I had was 17 years as a reporter in daily newspapers. 

Jim convinced me that we needed a marine and exotic lumber store and he believed I could set one up. I do not have any entrepreneurial interests. Never had a desire to go into business for myself. Certainly not own three businesses in two states. We had two boatyards in North Carolina as well as the Florida shop at one time. I was fine working in a cube farm that came with health insurance and 401(k) plans. 

But I was born with a strange kind of fearlessness with nothing to back it up. I’m not big or strong and didn’t grow up powerful or rich. As a reporter, it was nothing to me to knock on doors in the projects where even police went in pairs armed only with a reporter’s notebook to get background or color for stories. And I didn’t fear authority or people with power or wealth because they were just news subjects to me. 

When I first met Jim, he was getting ripped off by shady owners and he had a lot of uncollected debts. One guy in particular made me furious. I particularly hate money grubby cheats and bullies. He wrote Jim a $3,000 hot check to release his boat for launch. When the check bounced and Jim called him about it, the guy had the audacity to say, “I live in Palm Beach. What are you going to do about it?”

I was covering courts then and knew the State Attorney’s Office had a hot check division and the amount of the check made it a felony. That’s what we were going to do about it. He paid.

I collected every debt owed to us or we owned the boats. Our guys worked hard outside in brutal heat and humidity, even getting injured while working on luxury toys, and the owners were going to pay for the service as agreed upon. Work boats or liveaboards were a different story. These owners paid us how they could –  in more fresh shrimp than we could eat or even freeze, as well as art work, jewelry and even a Yugo automobile. Jim said it was better to get paid in something than not at all. 

Jim believed I could start and run a business so I had no choice but to do so. I figured other people are in business and they didn’t seem particularly smarter than me, so how hard can it be? I researched point of sale and inventory systems, went through our past orders to see what we should stock, etc. Studied markup and margins. It was very hard, indeed, particularly for someone who had never even balanced a checkbook. Now I was looking at balance sheets and P&L statements. I also knew nothing about boats or all the hardware and materials involved. But somehow we managed.

Cracker Boy, like any workplace, was filled with petty politics and rivalry. Jim said he was tired of being another “schmuck in a truck” and wanted a brick-and-mortar boatshop where he could have more control of his business. I agreed and took out the mortgage for our first shop on Avenue E, a former glass company that was in the heart of the ghetto. Jim didn’t have any credit history since he didn’t even have a debit card so we used mine.

At first, I continued to work at the newspaper because that’s how we had health insurance as a family, we had a son as well, but when I was helping him with tax preparations, I noticed some discrepancies with the bank accounts handled by his assistant. After that, Jim no longer trusted anyone else and wanted me to handle the financial and administrative end of his business.

In the beginning, I managed while continuing to work at The Palm Beach Post, but eventually it became too much, particularly with a child. I quit my steady job with a bi-weekly paycheck and benefits to run Moores Marine full time. It was all or nothing. We had to succeed because so many people depended on it – the people who worked for us and my entire family, including my brother.

Our first boat shop and marine store on Avenue E in Riviera Beach was a no-frills operation. We didn’t even have air conditioning in the store. I finally convinced Jim we needed to cool the store when a customer had to keep running back and forth to his air-conditioned car while shopping and called our sauna-like concrete block building “the waiting room to hell.” 

At first, I ran it alone because we could hardly afford inventory, never mind a store clerk. Jim and the guys were usually at the boatyard down the street unless they needed materials or needed to use the big planer. We were open six days a week and I set up a playroom with a small TV and a toy box for James to stay after school and on Saturdays. His section was the all glass front office that was designed for Pizza Huts and as hot as a pizza oven.

The neighborhood was dodgy. Our customers feared for themselves as well as for me. “You’re in here by yourself?” A clerk at the corner convenience store was killed in a robbery. The auto parts store next door had constant break-ins, usually for car batteries. My brother gave me a taser, probably illegally strong, that he bought for me at a gun show. I also had an aluminum baseball bat behind the counter.

Everything in my closet was nautical at this point.

I was never in danger. I even chased off drug dealers and prostitutes when they loitered in front of the shop. I told them I didn’t want to interfere with their business but they were interfering with mine. They needed to move it down the street. They looked at me with incredulity but they complied. They probably thought this small Asian woman must know martial arts or something because I was so brazen and fearless.

We did do some good for the neighborhood. Other people had to live there, including many children, while we got to drive away every night to the safety of our house in West Palm Beach. Jim asked me to handle it and I did. But it was his idea. An abandoned motel a few blocks west of our shop had become a crack house for years and all manners of posh people in BMWs and Mercedes would drive by daily to score drugs and prostitutes. The motel had the remains of a fetid swimming pool. We petitioned the city for condemnation of the old motel, citing not only all the criminal activity and code violation liens, but the pool as an immediate health and safety hazard. I knew that would get politicians and bureaucrats to move. The city razed and cleared the old building and filled in the pool. A code enforcement officer came to our shop to thank us because she and the residents had been trying to get it done for years. It just took an angry mother with good letter writing skills for it to happen.  

And we had a friend in the neighborhood, Clyde, who would watch out for us, roaming the streets on his boy’s bicycle because he was quite short. He was homeless, usually spent nights at a bank’s drive-through for shelter and had a drug problem, but maintained his integrity. He was ripped with muscle and had a black belt in karate. His kata, or karate forms, were precise, fluid and beautiful. 

But he couldn’t get off the streets despite the efforts of his sister who kept trying to take him home with her. I never learned his last name. He would wash our cars, do odd jobs, and if I worked late, which was rare, he would wait by my car to make sure I got in safely. He even got into a fight to stop some thieves from climbing over our fence. He was a good man.

Jim’s bread and butter was specializing in Trumpy yachts. There were only about 300 built and fewer than 100 remained, many of them were not even on the East Coast. We chose the most specialized, arcane path to make a living. We tried to broaden our scope to all American antique and classic wooden boats. It was a mouthful when someone asked what we did. That was our idea of casting a broader net. 

These projects were so difficult to find that I resorted to crunching U.S. Coast Guard databases to extract information on documented vessels and boat registrations in nearby states in the hunt for wooden boats. Our son, James III, probably called it right, saying his parents had to find the most ridiculously specific and difficult way to make a living. And, he had no interest in carrying on the legacy.

Our biggest project was the 1929 John. G. Alden 96-foot schooner, the “Summerwind.” She was featured in Professional Boatbuilder magazine because of the speed we completed a project of that scale. The refit involved a complete rebuild in two years, in time to compete in the Newport Bucket. After decades of neglect as a head boat in the Mediterranean, she not only had to be strong enough to sail but to race. A few months after launch, she won in the grande dame class. 

"Summerwind" in action in the Newport Bucket.

We got that project through our website. The owner had bought the boat in Isle de Majorca in Spain and his son found us through an online search for wooden boat restoration outfits. Moores Marine was an early internet adopter in the marine industry. Because of my background as a business writer then, I knew all the big publicly traded companies were online, but even the larger boat yards with websites had little more than stagnant brochures with info pages and a list of services back then.

We hired a young college student, Andrew Peeling, who wrote HTML and came in every weekend to scan and post old project photos, add and update new projects and add our monthly newsletters to the site. Ours was content rich and compelling. It told our history, what we were up to, and it was frequently updated. 

I told Jim he could be the greatest craftsman in the world but it didn’t matter if no one ever heard of him. They heard of us. Moores Marine has been featured in every major American boating magazine from Yachting to Wooden Boat, and even in Europe. And we were basically just a mom-and-pop operation. But our marketing was fierce. 

Jim had never undertaken a project on the scale of “Summerwind.” He hired and fired dozens of men. He would claim a hundred and it was only a slight exaggeration. Or they went away on their own, used up and burned out. We worked six days a week to make the deadline. Jim ended up in the hospital from the stress. We had to find a meeting room at the hospital and cover up his hospital gown and tubes so he wouldn’t look so sick and weak when meeting the owner to discuss the project’s status.

Both of us nearly lost our minds from the stress but we were able to pay off the boatyard we bought in Beaufort, N.C. that we opened in 2007 within a couple of years. I will forever be grateful to that project because we had mortgaged our house and Florida shop for that first boatyard.

We opened Moores Marine Yacht Center in Beaufort, N.C. in 2007 because we were about to lose everything we’d worked so hard for in South Florida though eminent domain in Riviera Beach. We bought 17 acres of wooded swamp in Beaufort, N.C., one of the worst possible sites for a boatyard. We had to clear the trees and brush and dump endless amounts of fill to elevate the site by four feet just to be able to build, then we had to compact the soil to withstand the weight of a 200-ton Travelift with a boat rolling over the same ground. 

We were building the North Carolina facility when the Florida Supreme Court found that taking private homes and businesses to give to private developers was unconstitutional, which ended Riviera Beach’s so-called redevelopment efforts. 

If it was easy, Jim wanted no part of it. Everything we did together was a project, a major undertaking. The house we bought in Beaufort had flood damage requiring replacement of electrical wiring and walls.. And the boats, including the Trumpy M/Y Aurora II, every single one that Jim bought, was a project.  

His final newsletter most likely would’ve been how he still had the juice to helm the 100-foot “Canim,” over the summer in Michigan when the boat had to be moved and about the month he spent sailing with his youngest son, James Moores III, from Marblehead south, toward Beaufort.

James shares his father’s love of boats and projects and bought a Catalina 30’ from money he earned working as a mate on the Trumpy M/Y “Innisfail.” The “Innisfail” was Moores Marine Yacht Center’s first major refit that we completed in 2008. And Jim was especially proud that James cleared his 6-pack and 100 ton certifications and was pursuing his 200 ton next.  

The 2008 launch of "Innisfail" after a major refit at our North Carolina yacht center.

Long before the end of his life, Jim said he absolutely had no regrets. He had done more than even he could have imagined. He met and worked for some of the finest owners, gentlemen who owned Baker’s Furniture and Dickies clothing, and talented craftsmen; restored storied, spectacular yachts, including the Presidential Yacht, the “Honey Fitz” and built boats including his own fever dream with “Patience” as well as owned two boatyards including Beaufort Marine Center we bought because it was on the Intracoastal Waterway.

We were fortunate to sell both boatyards before the economy came to a halt due to Covid in an unsolicited offer but he continued to do what he loved, restoring smaller wooden boats and consulting on larger ones.

He became much more than a “schmuck in a truck,” in his life, respected and well known in the wooden boat community. 

Our company’s motto had long been “We Keep Legends Alive.” 

James Phelps Moores Jr., became the legend himself.

Farewell,

Stephanie Smith

P.S. James Moores III has decided to maintain this website as a legacy site in honor of his father. 

We sincerely thank everyone for your interest and support of Moores Marine and Jim Moores.