Jon, age 46, started out chasing after runaway sailboats for the older guys at the Model Boat Pond. 35 years later, the sailboats are radio controlled and don't need little kids to fetch them, and the boats for rent at the Pond have been designed by him.

I've been sailing boats here since I was nine years old. I used to ride my bike around the bicycle path, as we all did as young kids, and I'd ride down here, and I was an avid modeler, building models, and the guys here just took me in and helped me. We didn't have radios then, and so we'd sail free-sailing boats, and they were an older group and I was young and I'd run and get the boats for them ... I would be their mate, as they would call it. So I was be-fathered by the people here and they took me in and I was taught how to build boats by one of the gentlemen here, and I just never grew out of it. I built my first sailboat when I was 10 or 11, and my first real racing boat here when I was 12, and I've built literally thousands since then.

I started winning Nationals when I was about 15, and I stopped counting at 30 titles. We have a community of model boaters all over the world, and the world championships are in the strangest places, and we all travel. So I feel like I have family all over the world!

I designed the boats that are rented at the concession here. Originally, the concession guy had boats that were similar to the boats that were in France. He had this vision of these colorful small little boats, and I said, "Listen, I support your thing, but these boats will fall apart. You're not going to be able to have a concession because these boats aren't durable enough." And within a month he had one boat left working! So he comes to me with his tail between his legs, and he says, "OK, Jon, I think I have to buy your boats." They're not the most aesthetic boat, but they're not meant to be. This was in 1994 or '95 that this thing got set up, and he retired a boat with 70,000 hours of use on it.