Menger sailboats: a father-and-son catboat yard born on Long Island
Menger built small fiberglass catboats out of a single family shop on Long Island, New York — a business that began as an oyster-boat builder and became a catboat maker almost by accident, through a teenager's high-school project.
Origins and ownership
Bill Menger — born in Brooklyn on May 27, 1934 — set up shop in a Babylon, New York, industrial plant in 1976 to build fiberglass-hulled oyster boats. Catboats were not the original plan: they arrived when his son Andrew designed a pair of them as a high-school project, and by 1980 the catboat had become the firm's mainstay product. One catboat-history reference credits the operation as Menger Catboats Inc.; other accounts describe it more loosely as Bill Menger's boatworks, and no source gives "Menger Boatworks" as a formal company name. In 1989, a fire destroyed the molds for the company's fiberglass hulls and nearly ended the business. A Long Island newspaper obituary of Bill Menger reports that he and Andrew rebuilt in a former seaplane factory in Amityville, New York, with sliding doors opening onto Ketchum Creek — though other accounts continue to place the yard in Babylon across its whole run. The company's production ended in the early 2000s; one source dates the close to 2004.
The designers
The partnership behind the boats was really a division of labor. Andrew Menger managed the books and marketing side of the business, while his father Bill, the firm's president, did the hands-on shop work. Bill is credited as the designer and builder of the Menger Cat 17 and Menger Cat 19; no designer is documented for the Cat 15 or the Cat 23. The catalog's largest boat, the Cat 23, is sometimes linked to naval architect Francis Sweisguth, who is noted for large gaff- and Marconi-rigged catboats in the 1920s, and whose design Secret became the basis for the fiberglass Americat catboat roughly fifty years later — but no source ties Sweisguth's work, or the Americat, directly to the Menger Cat 23, and that credit remains unconfirmed. Andrew Menger died in 1999, at age 37, from complications of multiple sclerosis.
Construction through the eras
The Menger Cat came in four sizes — 15, 17, 19, and 23 feet — built across the company's Babylon-based run. The Cat 17, from 1983, was the line's first production size. After the fire, Bill Menger and Andrew designed the Cat 19, introduced in 1990; boat-review author Steve Henkel later described it as an "expanded and improved" version of the 17. The Cat 15 followed later, in 2001, as the yard's smallest and last-added size.
All four were catboats in the traditional sense: a wide-bodied, single-masted type first designed in the 1850s as a working boat, according to The East Hampton Star. The type's beam runs to roughly half its length, with the mast stepped well forward in the bow, a single gaff-rigged sail on a boom running nearly the length of the hull, and keel and ballast provided by a retractable centerboard.
Who Menger is for
Menger suits sailors drawn to the catboat type itself — beamy, shallow-draft, and simple to handle on a single sail — as much as to the brand. After the company's run ended, its former manager, Jerry Thompson, took over the molds and continued building the 15- and 19-foot models under his own name, Thompson Cat.
