Eddie Cutts lacks no self-awareness that he and his brother Ronnie grew up in the house of brilliant, if eccentric father. Self-taught and obsessed with design and craftsmanship, Ed Cutts, Sr. broke away early from Long Island and took his young family to Oxford fifty years ago to establish Cutts and Case to pursue those passions. Within a decade, Cutts, Sr. had established himself as one of the great wooden boat builders of his era.
It is never a given in any family with such an intense intellectual and engineering foundation that the children would have the genetic gene pool, or the desire, to follow a father’s footsteps. And yet both Eddie and Ronnie never thought of a life without boats. Taken under their father’s wings early and often, both boys not only provided the manual labor required in the boat business, but were quickly brought into decisions of design with some of the leading engineers of the day.
In his interview with the Spy, Eddie Cotts recalls the inheritance of design and craft from his father, the impact it has had on he and his brother, and the fundamentals of wooden boat building that continue at Cutts and Case to this day.
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