Customer Reviews

Twilight on the Bay: The Excursion Boat Empire of B.B. Wills

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That certainly was the case with B.B. Wills. After graduating college in the early 1920's, he sought his fortune in Florida real estate boom. When that boom turned to bust in 1926, he went back home to Maryland. Luckily, because he was working primarily as an agent rather than as an investor, he lost little in Florida.

Scratching around for the next entrepreneurial idea, he decided to buy some land along the Potomac in southern Maryland, near his birthplace, and develop it into a small-scale amusement park and picnic venue. He quickly learned that many of his potential customers in Washington, D.C. were prevented from reaching his park either because the inadequate highways of the day made the journey too arduous, or simply because most of them did not own cars. Eventually, in 1934 he bought and refurbished an ancient Hudson River excursion boat (built in 1880!), rechristened it the "Potomac" and used it to ferry customers from Washington to his park.

Soon, Wills noticed that he was earning much more from fares on the "Potomac" than from admissions at his park. This lead him to close the park, sell the land and concentrate fully on excursion boats: day trips, dinner and dancing cruises, etc. He would expand his interests to include ferry service across the Chesapeake from Baltimore to the Eastern Shore (this was long before a bridge was built over the bay), ferry service to the Statue of Liberty, Hudson River cruises and service across Boston Harbor. He even briefly ran boats from various Gulf of Mexico ports and in other venues. Prior to purchasing the "Potomac," he had no knowledge of ships or navigation.

Always looking for an angle, he also took advantage of legal technicalities to run a casino boat in the Chesapeake for a time. During World War II he got around fuel rationing by successfully arguing that his excursion boats on the Potomac also provided some vital transportation links, given that there were no bridges across the river's lower reaches then. A true bargain hunter, not once did ever have a boat built for him; he always bought and refurbished older boats. The venerable "Potomac" was 68 years old when it was retired in 1948. By the 1960's, interest in excursion boats was waning, so he shut down his remaining boating ventures and redeployed most of his capital to real estate development in the Washington, D.C. area. He died in 1986, aged 89.

If the name of B.B. Wills is unfamiliar, it should be. Even at the apex of his career, he was content to keep a very low profile. Not one of his boats ever bore either the Wills surname or the first name of any member of his family. He had no interest in being a celebrity, just in making a buck relatively quietly. He became wealthy, but not extravagantly so. The antithesis of Donald Trump, if you will.

Perhaps accordingly, this book strictly deals with Wills the businessman. We learn very little about him as an individual, except through his business dealings. He was never bashful about asking to renegotiate a deal. When a car rental company tried to collect daily charges for a long-overdue car (a careless employee had damaged it and then left it in an obscure corner of the boat line's property for months), he countered with a demand for storage fees. It's hard to escape the conclusion that his work indeed was his life, and that he could be a tough cookie. Similarly, his family is treated in only the most cursory fashion. The Willses were an old-line tobacco-growing southern Maryland family, B.B.'s grandfather was a doctor and a friend of the ill-fated Dr. Samuel Mudd, B.B.'s father was involved in a variety of business pursuits, and B.B. was the only southerner in his college class at Holy Cross in Massachusetts (the Willses were Catholic; so were the Mudds, by the way). Apart from a family photo, little is said of his wife and children. This is a business history, straight up.

The book is an easy read; I polished it off in just over 2 hours. It should appeal to those who would enjoy a case study in entrepreneurship, or who have an affinity for maritime history in general or excursion boats in particular, especially those on the lines that Wills ran.