I really enjoyed seeing Bob's early work and reading his story. It struck a real cord with me, since when I was growing up I too wanted to be a yacht designer, and would scour the pages of books and magazines memorizing designs in much the same way as other kids memorized baseball statistics.
When I look at Bob's early work, the artistry is the first thing that strikes me, but there are certainly plenty of DNA from other designers. to some extent there are certain resemblances to the work of Rhodes, Alden, Atkins, Morse, Stephens, Garden. But the reality is that a yacht designer rarely if ever does a design which is totally original. Most great designs evolve from prior works and are at best unique in the way that their creator combined their DNA to produce something better than what came before.
Regarding Killarney's post, There are a whole bunch of begets but I suspect that there is more incest than produced the guys from 'Deliverance'. There is certainly a lineage that passes through George Steers (designer of the America) who begat Edward Burgess (who was associated with Steers early in his career) who literally and figuratively begat Starling Burgess who begat John Alden, Olin Stephens, and to a lesser extent L.Francis Herreshoff and Clinton Crane. (E. Burgess also begat BB Crowninshield who helped begat John Alden) Olin Stephens begat a bunch of the 1960's-through 1990's stars and starlets such as German Frers, Bill Shaw, Bill Tripp, David Pedrick, Brit Chance, and so on.
Nat Herreshoff made himself from whole cloth. Its hard to say that anyone influenced him. But Nat was the other begatter of L.Francis as well as Sydney DeWolf Herreshoff.
I am not sure that guys like Rhodes and Alden were all that influential in the big picture, but they certainly influenced and were influenced by a bunch of great and semi-great designers who worked with them or were influenced by them, like Geiger, Alberg, Aage Nielsen, Ray Hunt, Charlie Wittholz. There are a bunch of designers whose work was evolved from the work that preceded them. They were just very good at improving what they inherited.
There are also very strong lineages that can be found in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
On the topic, I have always enjoyed the designs of Mark Ellis and I think he said that he worked with Rhodes and was much influenced by his designs. I think he also worked with C&C at one time but might be wrong. What were Hood's design influences? He seems very much part of the NE group.
