The Wizard’s custodian

Mystic, Connecticut, is almost as charming as its name, which is inseparable from its eponymous museum that covers over 19 acres, with more than 60 buildings and 500 vessels, from rowing boats to the last surviving whaleship, the , recently restored. For a town whose museum receives quarter of a million visitors a year, the population of just 4,000 is fractional. Among them is Evelyn Ansel, the definition of a local, whose grandfather and father were both shipwrights at the museum, which also houses a considerable working boatyard. Evelyn was working there herself, by the age of “12 or 13”, volunteering at the boat hire shop, where visitors can take out a rowing boat, or a small sailing dinghy to