Young Krogens in Key Biscayne

Jim in his design office.

     It's boat show time again, and we gladly wait in lines to see all the new boats. It seems more so than ever before, trawlers and cruising motorboats command center stage. One of these boat builders is Kadey-Krogen Yachts. The familiar shape and style of the popular cruisers-known for comfortable cruising and quiet, relaxed living aboard-have attracted a cult-like following.
     With Kadey-Krogen's recent 25th anniversary, it seems appropriate to look at the history of a company that has brought capable trawlers to those interested in cruising under power. It is a story of the devotion and honor of two men whose lives were as big as they come. It is the story of Jim Krogen and Art Kadey, and the two sons who took the company far beyond the horizon ever imagined by its founders.

Roots In Great Lakes
     James S. Krogen is the well-known designer of the Krogen family, born in 1928. Young Krogen grew up in Manistee, Michigan, on the shores of Lake Michigan. The son of a dentist, Jim always wanted to spend his time designing boats, a pursuit no doubt influenced by his mother's boat-building brother.
     Krogen graduated with a degree in naval architecture and marine engineering from the University of Michigan in 1952, where he met and married his sweetheart, Jean VanderArk. Responding to his country's call, the couple moved to Seattle, where Jim served as a lieutenant in the Navy during the Korean War and until 1956. During that time, their first child, daughter Kim, was born. With full-time Navy duties as engineering officer, Jim still had time to design and build a gaff-rigged catboat, and the young Seattle family began a lifelong love of boating and cruising.
     After the Navy, Jim moved the family to Florida in response to a job offer, and while the position never materialized, the Krogens fell in love with Key Biscayne. Over the next few years, Jimmy and Kurt joined the growing family (in 1958 and 1960), and the Krogen family enjoyed Florida life and its boating opportunities. In the 1960s Jim opened his own design office, where he focused on yacht design while continuing heavy involvement with commercial architecture that remained a steady contract source. His commercial projects included dry docks, tankers, fishing boats, landing craft, ferries and charter boats.
     There were always boats in the family, and the boys especially loved a 30-foot sailboat named Mischief, and a double-ender, Siva Siva, on which the family explored southern Florida, the Keys and the Bahamas. Boats were such an integral part of the family's life that Kurt's earliest memory (at 4 years old) is of his 6-year-old brother walking around with a dog-eared copy of Yachting. Jimmy drew boats all the time, and the two boys routinely begged their father to draw them yet another new design.
     In the '60s, Jim designed a robust wooden motorsailer, known as the Krogen 42. American Marine of Hong Kong built a handful of these cruising sailboats in teak. The design, like all those coming from James S. Krogen and Company, stressed rugged simplicity and conservative style. It was his trademark.
     Young Kurt followed right in line with the family passion for boating. When he was 10 years old, he was the U.S. Optimist champion.
     Jimmy was as avid a boater as his younger brother. In fact, in the childhood years of the '60s, sister Kim interviewed her family for a school report. When she asked Jimmy what he wanted to be when he grew up, his response was, "I want to be a bald-headed naval architect like my dad."
     In his teens, Jimmy crewed on large charter boats, making several transAtlantic crossings that gave him valuable experience. He even served aboard Pinocchio, the Art Kadey-built 60-foot schooner that later was renamed Cyrano and immortalized by William F. Buckley in the book Airborne.

A Bull In The China Closet
     By all accounts, Art Kadey was a person larger than life who had a big impact on the Krogen family. Art seemed like a character from a movie script about a man who lived life to the max.
     Art was born in Michigan in 1925, and while not much is known of his early years, he left school at 17 to become a U. S. Army Air Force pilot during World War II. Damage to his hearing precluded a later career in the aviation industry, so he got started building small motorboats, first in Marine City, Michigan, where he started Holiday Boats.
     Art's many adventures, which included boating in all it’s forms, a successful car-racing career at Sebring and an appearance in TV ads for Camel cigarettes, spanned several decades, eventually luring him to Florida. It was here that he met his wife Maria, and together they developed a charter business in the Bahamas and Caribbean.
     In 1962 they built Pinocchio, a Ben Sawyer-designed schooner with an 18-foot-long bowsprit (hence the name), which they also ran in charter. But after eight years, they were ready for a change, so the couple sold the boat to Buckley, and Art became involved with a small freighter service between the Bahamas and Caribbean.
     But good times did not last long after, as Maria was soon fighting for her life against cancer. She lost the battle, dying in her early 40s and leaving Art with medical bills far beyond his means. It was a tough time for the bighearted man.
     Now widowed, Art got into yacht brokerage, opening his own office in the early 1970s in Coconut Grove. It was here that his path crossed with Jim Krogen's. At first they knew each other professionally.
     "He had great respect for my dad's design work," said Kurt, and the relationship between the two men later developed in a social level. Coconut Grove in those days was a tight-knit little marine community. The local bar was a gathering hole for the nearby marine guys, and a perfect backdrop for Jim and Art to become friends.
     It was in the mid-1970s that Art showed Jim Krogen some drawings for a new boat he wanted Jim to design. "Art understood the advantages to a full-displacement boat," Kurt remembered of Art's early meetings with his father. "I know he wanted to live aboard and cruise on a trawler. That was his dream."
     And Art knew Jim was the man to help make it happen. Art had been to Taiwan and knew of one possible builder for the project, Trans Pacific Marine. Those crude drawings eventually became the now-classic Krogen 42, and Trans Pacific built the first five boats. By all accounts, Art was the man behind the Krogen 42, following up on his hunch that a full-displacement trawler yacht had a place in the market. It also was precisely what he wanted for himself. "The 42 was Art's baby," Kurt told me.
     And the man showed a genuine intensity when it came to building boats. He once told Kurt, "Your dad is the best architect in the world. But he doesn't know anything about propellers. He doesn't know s--- about propellers," Kurt laughed at an inside joke that existed between Art and the Krogens. "I'll never forget," Kurt recalled, "whenever we came into the port, he used to look at propeller sizes and calculate pitch and diameter, and tell me, 'No way this bucket could do more than 20 knots with the wind behind it!'"He was really into propellers. It was the one side of engineering he really loved," Kurt continued. "My dad's dream was more about sailing, which is why the Krogen 38 was developed right after the Krogen 42, because my dad wanted a cutter rig and shoal draft to sail Key Biscayne Bay."
     "Kadey was really the full-displacement guy, to cruise and live aboard that trawler. My dad wanted to sail to Tahiti."