A Visit With Mac McDerby, owner of the
Yellow Jacket
Boat Company
By James Riley
(Sometime in 2003)
When I
purchased my Yellow Jacket I was talking to a guy in a boat store and he mentioned “the man that
designed and built the Yellow Jacket boats lives here in
When asked how he got into the boat
business, Mac relayed several stories to us, they are:
During WWII, Mac worked here in New
Orleans for the Higgins Boat Co., his job was to train the coastguardsmen who
operated the landing craft that were manufactured by Higgins. I was surprised
to find that the guys that operated the landing craft were Coastguardsmen, not
Navy, not Army. Mac trained hundreds of
these guys on the proper technique of beaching the boat and backing it out, the
training was conducted in the marshy areas around New Orleans.
During WWII Mr. Higgins asked Mac to
pilot a landing craft up the Red River as part of a war bond drive, he was to
stop in all of the small towns, show the folks the boat and generate interest
in the purchase of the bonds. He was told to “taker it as far up river as it
will go, then turn around and come back”. “As far as it would go” ended up
being Denison, Texas, where Mac met a girl who he ended up marrying after the
war. She wanted to live in Denison so Mac decided to build his boat business
there.
Mac told me that he settled on the
name Yellow Jacket because they were small and fast like the boat, he never
mentioned that the Denison High School football team was named the Yellow
Jackets.
Mac operated his boat company like an
automobile company, in September he brought out the next years new model, he
sold “distributorships” (the only people who he would sell boats to) such that
they were no too close together, he had special trailers designed and built to
transport 10 boats at a time from Dennison to the dealerships, his new model
brochure was sent along with the shipment of boats.
Roy Rogers was an investor in the
Yellow Jacket boat Co. and he was an avid boater who really “liked to go fast”.
Yellow Jackets were used on his show several times and he set a speed record in
the California to Catalina Island race in one (later to be broken by Mac).
Mac had the Mercury people build him a
counter rotating motor to use as one of the two on his Catalina Island race
boat thus eliminating the “torque steer” problem with two outboards that
rotated in the same direction, Mac felt that this improved the top end speed of
the boat and he didn’t tell anyone about it until years after the set the
California to Catalina Island speed record.
When Mac saw that I had a Mark 78 on
my boat he said “one of the boats claims to fame is that you can’t turn it
over, it will skid/skip across the water prior to turning over and that is true
with most outboards on it, 35HP, 40HP, 55Hp. etc, but I was demonstrating a
boat in the Harvey canal (just outside of the New Orleans city limits) with
about 50 potential dealers watching, I had the new Mercury Mark 78 on it and in
a hard turn I turned it over. I came up inside of the overturned boat, thought
about just staying there, but finally came out to face the embarrassment.”
The Yellow Jacket Company had only one
“salesman”, he carried with him scale models (about 24” long, made exactly like
the real thing, stained and painted like the original) of each new model of
Yellow Jacket. The problem was that each time he came back from sales calls he
no longer had the models, it seems that every potential distributor purchaser
begged him for one of the models and more than one
distributorship was sold, contingent on the purchaser getting the model.
Mac said that he would typically spend $1000.00/year replacing the models which
were built by one person in Texas.
With
the building and opening of the “
As
an interesting side note, I went aboard PT 309, the last PT boat to see action
in WWII, that is still around. It was traveling from
New York to Texas and stopped in New Orleans. From the dock I noticed that the
hull was made just like a Yellow Jacket with angular strips of wood, when I
went into the engine room I could clearly see that the hull appeared to be the
cross laminated strip design…. Mac worked for Higgins Boat Co. who built PT
boats, Mac designed the Yellow Jacket hull, had it built in Canada, eventually
had the manufacturer move to Dennison and absorbed him. Could it be that the PT
boat hull design was the inspiration for the Yellow Jacket design?