Living Large On Edgartown Harbor

Part I: An Irresistible Force Collides With An Immovable Object (Just Like The Titanic & The Iceberg!)

Part II (Next Week): Who Won

Where are Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald when you need them? Every so often in our modern lives, a character comes along that is every bit as juicy as Daisy Miller or Jay Gatsby, and no one is available to capture his or her essence. Such was the case with Ernest J. Boch, car salesman of the western world, 1926-ish to 2003, who came, saw and maybe conquered the old WASP bastion of Edgartown society, blew its mind, and may or may not have imploded himself in the process.

As we look at the recent battlefield of American social hierarchies – holy moly! Is this column intellectual or what?! – The only slot at the top is now being identified, and not with any degree of affection, as the 1%. Within that 1%, Ernie Boch was absolutely a denizen; in fact, you might say he helped define the category.

So what happened to those once-proud families of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, with generations of money kept in blue chip stocks, who sent kids to academies with names like Miss So-and-So’s, and who had themselves earned monikers like Piffy, Jib and Boots, who packed even their perfect idiots off to Yale and Harvard and the highest executive offices of the land, and whose idea pre-prandial exercise was a jog along the harbor, three sprints up and down the water tower, and bench-pressing the anchor of granddaddy’s yacht before tucking into a cart of gin and tonics back at the “cottage”?

What happened to these guys? Are they anywhere apparent in the 1%? Do they matter anymore? In other words, did the late Ernie Boch, who was never quite able to join them, in fact help to deconstruct them?

Let’s find out.

A flashback from a college lit class: We were reading something by, hmm?, Edith Wharton? Wherein a poor stumblebum of a new millionaire is snubbed by New York’s upper crust. And why? Well, first they held it against him that he worked at all, earning his own money rather than managing his grandfather’s. But also he made his fortune from the manufacture of some unmentionable modern product. The narrative details were coy, so you were left to fill in your own blank: toilet paper? Ear wax remover? Deodorant?

Such were the niceties of old WASP society that even into the last days of our last century, the last of our old patrician families carried on in their Edgartown waterfront summer homes without anybody outside of themselves ever really cracking their arcane codes.

I would peg their final heyday to the 1980s when Edgartown boutiques rolled out clusters of kelly-green, pink, brick-red or pastel plaid jackets, Polo shirts, and slacks – and these were just the men’s racks! -- A fashion statement which in its pure ludicrousness said, “It doesn’t matter what we wear, we’re all that!” In future decades, this role would be taken over by rap artists making the same claims with entirely different yet equally goofy styles.

So within this old Edgartown bastion, you could parade mauve pants and julep-green blazers and still be a standup dude with membership in Skull & Bones. Far be it for an outsider to barge into the redoubt with any traits new and colorful of his own.

So imagine young Ernest, with his auto dealerships in Norwood, Massachusetts, evolved from an old Rambler firm of his dad’s which young Boch, still in his teens, jumped into in the 40s. Ernest loved to sell stuff, especially cars, and he arrived on the national American scene with commercials starring himself pounding Subaru windshields with sledge hammers, and inviting people to “Come on down!”

At last, rich beyond measure, in 1985 he carried his carpetbag to Edgartown and purchased fifteen acres on Katama Bay. He exercised his “come on down” prerogative with the shabby house on the site, and banged up three stories and 11,000 square-feet of dazzling new white Hummer Home. At night, the proud owner lit up the manse like the marble monument in the Piazza Vittorio in Rome.

This house might sound modest by today’s standards, but here is the sum of its parts: 80 skylights, 17 heat zones, 5 miles of copper pipe (my, that’s a lot of fondue pots!), a wine cellar for 1100+ bottles, 10 bedrooms, 3 kitchens, and Italian cobblestones in the outdoor driveway. Ernest and wife Barbara also had five daughters and two sons, one of whom, Ernie Boch, Jr., succeeded his pop as CEO of Boch Enterprises, a one-billion dollar business. Most famously, to the rolling fields facing the sea to the east and Katama Road to the west, Mr. Boch introduced an ingeniously charming donkey named Kramer, and three llamas, Chico, Burrito, and Shaman.

Oh, and he also owned boats (just like those Reading Room guys but . . . not quite), and a 7-passenger Citation CJ2 jet with a private pilot and co-pilot.

Apparently Edgartown gentry never fully accepted their splashy-rich neighbor, much to his chagrin (see how we need Henry James to elucidate this story?), and Ernest may have been the first of the 1%-ers to say, tacitly or otherwise, “Kiss my Subie-bumper, I’ve got more money than all of you combined!”

He died in a way that accentuated the deep pockets of his heart and generosity (to be continued); something we’re going to be asking more of in our coming dialogue with the 1%.

So who triumphed in Edgartown in the early years of this new millennium? The class of folks with an unholy amount of new money, or the old guard, now known disparagingly as Rich White People? Stay tuned for next week in this column, during which time the NY Museum of Natural History is mounting a diorama of R.W.P. and its proud lost tribe as exemplified by Edgartown summer folk.

I kid those R.W.P.s . . .

For a cool experience, go the Ernest J. Boch Memorial website at www.rt1automile.com and you’ll hear Old Blue Eyes singing “I Did It My Way.”