John Podmajersky III is “probably the only guy who grew up in his ward who sails,” says Mark Kastel, a farm policy analyst who has known him for about 20 years.
As a child Podmajersky Jr. helped his dad deliver milk, but later he worked as a structural engineer for the city. In the mid-1960s he started buying buildings, mainly condemned and abandoned properties that he could get for cheap, and encouraging artists to move in. The family, which now reportedly owns hundreds of properties in and around Pilsen, has been both lauded for its patronage of the arts and reviled for its role in gentrifying the neighborhood.
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Podmajersky started sailing as a teenager. “I cleaned out people’s boats to earn money to buy my first boat,” he says. He sailed for the University of Chicago team, and early in his sailing career joined the Chicago Corinthian Yacht Club, based at Montrose Harbor. He’s vice president of the Mumm 30 North American Class Association. (A Mumm 30 is a fast, sleek 30-foot boat; Podmajersky reportedly bought his used in 1999 for $80,000.) And for the past 19 years he has been an active member of the city’s preeminent yachting organization, the Chicago Yacht Club, serving on various committees dealing with the promotion of the sport and internal administration. “I’ve been racing sailboats for 30 years,” Podmajersky says. “I taught sailing at the yacht club. I’ve spent a tremendous amount of my time getting people into the sport.”
Ultimately Podmajersky did decide to helm his own boat for the race, and when the Illusion took the Mackinac Cup, awarded to the winner of the large-boat division, he assumed his name would appear both on the various trophies and in the annals of sailing history. At an informal ceremony immediately after the race, Brandenburg was announced as the skipper, but a Rolex intended for the winning helmsman was given to Podmajersky–who then gave it to Brandenburg, says Kastel, because “it was really important to Rob and Rob had just gone through all these health problems.” But several days after the race, Podmajersky learned that Brandenburg’s name, not his, would be inscribed on the trophies, to be presented at a formal ceremony in November.
Podmajersky says he would like to believe the initial error was an honest one on Brandenburg’s part. He has a July 25 E-mail from Brandenburg apologizing to him, as well as the letter Brandenburg wrote to the yacht club. But in the fall, he says, Brandenburg stopped communicating with him and stopped professing to be upset about the error.
On October 2 the Tribune ran a lifestyle feature about Brandenburg, framing the Mackinac win as the capper to his battle against cancer. The piece referred to him as the Illusion’s skipper and gave no indication that Podmajersky had even been on the boat. Podmajersky is quoted, however, as saying he turned over “100 percent of the logistics” of preparing for the race to his friend.
On March 26 testimony regarding the misconduct charge was heard by a three-member protest committee, which found that Podmajersky’s breach of Rule Three was “gross” and therefore also an infringement of Rule 69. It issued him a “stern warning” and recommended that the yacht club ban him from competition for a year–which would mean Podmajersky couldn’t enter the 2003 Race to Mackinac, whose registration deadline is June 13.
