The Gondola: Meher Baba’s Boat Part One

One morning in 1949, Elizabeth Patterson was sitting in Youpon Dunes reading the New York Times, as she did almost every day. At the end of a column in the business section was a misplaced classified ad with just three lines. It read: “Two gondolas for sale. $25 each.” And then it listed a telephone number. [1] Elizabeth was swept away by “memories of moonlit gondola rides with Baba” in Venice in 1932. [2]

At the time, she was in the process of preparing the Center for Meher Baba’s upcoming visit and thought how wonderful it would be to have a gondola on Long Lake to remind Him of those glorious times. She picked up the phone and dialed. The man who answered said he had one left.

“Well, I bought it,” Elizabeth told Daniel Montague in 1976. “And then I picked up the phone and called Margaret (Craske) in New York, and I said, ‘Margaret, I’ve just bought a gondola and it needs to be transported down to Myrtle Beach, and I want you to get it on a train, on a flat car.’”

Margaret reportedly replied, “You’ve done what?!”

Those early days traveling through Europe with Baba were extraordinarily happy times for both Elizabeth and Margaret. They were in the early part of their lifelong romance with Baba and, from all accounts, it was magical. And gondolas played a role. Of her moonlit gondola ride with Baba in 1932, Margaret wrote: “It was divine, really divine. Baba, Adi Jr., me and one other in one gondola; for an hour, drifting up and down, under the moonlight with the gondolier singing in Italian. It was one of the most beautiful nights of my life.” [3]

Many years later, when she recalled that night to John Haynes, she also told him about one of the legends in Venice about the Bridge of Sighs. If you go under the bridge with your beloved during a full moon, this legend asserts, you will be reunited with your loved one forever. “And then she smiled and said, ‘It was a full moon and we were with Baba,’” John recounts.

Anxious for more, he asked Margaret about who was with her in the boat and what Baba had said. “My dear,” she told him, “I can’t remember everything. But it was perfect.” And then she paused and said very quietly, “It was the happiest moment of my life.”

Baba also used gondolas to help allay anxieties. In October of 1933 in Venice, Baba and the group were about to board a train for Paris. Half of the luggage was already loaded, the train was getting ready to leave, when Baba asked Kitty for the group’s passports. She didn’t have them. She had given them to the clerk at the hotel when they first arrived and forgotten to retrieve them, according to Lord Meher.

“Kitty was distraught over her negligence, but Baba was as calm as ever, spelling on the board, ‘Do not worry. We will have lunch and take a gondola ride on the canal. I can do more work here, and we can take the night train to Paris.’” [4]

When Elizabeth bought the Center’s gondola in 1949, she was told that it was one of two that were made in Venice for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. John Haynes remembers her telling him the gondola had been used in an Italian parade related to the fair. Daniel also recalls her saying that a canal had been dug so the gondolas could be displayed.

After this article was originally published, Frank Young reached out with a wonderful addition. His mother, Biagia-Bessie Patella, a first generation Italian American, actually took a ride on a gondola at the fair. She lived to be over 100 and stayed “an inspiringly close lover of Jesus Christ,” Frank says. But she was always a bit suspicious of “that Baba fellow.”

“But she also knew Baba helped me somehow to keep what she called a ‘good heart,’” he says. “I like to think Baba helped her to have that “first rider” experience on our gondola, and so prepared her to hear Baba’s name!  Thank you Baba!”

Over the years, the gondola has given many people great pleasure. While Baba never went out in the gondola Himself, He thoroughly enjoyed watching others.

When He visited the Center In 1956, He celebrated Elizabeth’s birthday with a cake and ice cream in the dining hall. [5] He gave her seven hugs and then they all went to the Barn for discourses. After that, it was time for a boat ride.

“With all of the group at His heels like a pack of sparrows, Baba walked as rapidly as ever back to the main Center,” Filis Frederick wrote in The Awakener Magazine. “The children were all in the boat house, waiting to go out on the lake in the black Venetian gondola. Baba entered the boat house and fondled each child lovingly. Then we all stood close to the shore watching with Baba as the gondolier took the children in groups for their ride. Baba asked one little boy if he could row and he said yes.” [6]

Larry Karrasch was one of those children to go out in the boat that day. (He can be seen standing behind Baba in the picture of Baba leaning against a tree and watching other children out on the lake.) Larry also got into a bit of trouble on the gondola all on his own.

He was 8 years old at the time. While in the hotel in Myrtle Beach, he had built a model seaplane. He decided to see if it could float. He took it to the Center and climbed into the gondola and put his model plane in the water.

“And the plane started drifting out further and further,” says Larry. “I panicked and tried to reach for it and fell in head first.”

He pulled himself out but was sopping wet and his feet were full of mud. He told his mother what happened just as Kitty was walking by.

“She makes a big fuss and goes into the Lagoon Cabin and tells Baba what happened,” Larry says.

Baba had Ned Foote drive Larry and his mother in his brand new, powder blue ’56 Cadillac El Dorado to their hotel where Larry changed clothes. Then it was back to the Center and Kitty told them that Baba wanted to see Larry.

“I’m going ‘Holy smokes, now I’m in trouble with God,’” he remembers. But when he gets into the Lagoon Cabin, Baba didn’t appear angry, only concerned.

“He said to me, ‘Be careful, there are big alligators in that lake,” Larry recalls. “It was like more of a warning, like, be careful in your life, period.”

The gondola also played a role in the birthday party for Baba that was thrown in 1958. While the soundtrack from the film “The King and I” played, Baba cut a huge five-tiered birthday cake and then gave out lemonade and tossed the children prasad. “He left at about 3:00 P.M. and went back to his house, while the children went for rides in the gondola on the lake,” according to Lord Meher.

Charles Haynes was one of those lucky enough to go for a ride. “I was amazed at how smoothly we glided across the water,” he says. “It felt thrilling and exotic to move across the lake so quickly and gently.”

Over the next twenty years, the gondola was moored by the boathouse on Long Lake. Elizabeth loved it and was “very careful and protective of it,” says Charles.

She was very proud of it as well and used to joke, “I’ll have you mind that it cost me a lot more money to have it shipped and transported here than to buy it,” according to Daniel Montague.

In time, though, the heat and humidity in Myrtle Beach took its toll and the gondola began to deteriorate. But that is not the end of the story. Part two recounts the restoration and rebirth of Meher Baba’s boat.

 

[1] ”Meher Baba’s Boat” an album compiled by Daniel Montague, copy in Saroja Library
[2] Ibid
[3] Lord Meher Online Edition, by Bhau Kalchuri, p. 1464
[4] Lord Meher Online Edition, by Bhau Kalchuri, p. 1553
[5] The Awakener Magazine, Volume 4, Number 3, p. 34
[6] The Awakener Magazine, Volume 4, Number 3, p. 41The Gondola: Meher Baba’s Boat, Part One