Division 7 - District 7 

About the Coast Guard Auxiliary

History of the Coast Guard Auxiliary
by John A. Tilley, 1994

Pleasure boating emerged as an American sport in the 1930s - for those who could afford it. Improvements in small, gasoline-powered engine technology let companies like Chris-Craft and Dodge mass-produce boats that the upper middle class, at least, could buy in considerable numbers. By the end of the decade, despite the pressures of the Great Depression, over three hundred thousand motorboats and four thousand sailing yachts with auxiliary power were registered in the United States.

Presiding over this armada, at least in theory, was the U.S. Coast Guard. The service's mission included the enforcement of federal laws and safety standards relating to recreational watercraft, but statistical reality eroded the Coast Guard's ability to carry out that mandate. Budget cuts had reduced the service's manpower to about ten thousand officers and enlisted men. Few of those personnel were stationed on inland waterways (where the majority of pleasure boats operated), and most the Coast Guard's energy was siphoned off by its other duties.

The 1915 act creating the Coast Guard described it as "an armed service," but it differed from the Army and the Navy in at least one fundamental respect: The Coast Guard had no peacetime reserve. The idea of creating one had surfaced occasionally (the oldest reference to such a concept dates from 1851), but the federal government had never acted on it.

In the summer of 1934 a yachtsman named Malcolm Stuart Boylan planted the seed that eventually sprouted as the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary. Boylan had just been elected commodore of the newly-created Pacific Writers' Yacht Club, which was about to undertake a cruise from its home in Los Angeles to Catalina Island. Boylan asked a Coast Guard acquaintance, LTCDR C.W. Thomas of the cutter Hermes, to inspect the club's boats before their departure.

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