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GETTING STARTED IN BOATS, ONE BABY BOOMER’S RECOLLECTION

GETTING STARTED IN BOATS, ONE BABY BOOMER’S RECOLLECTION

by James Thomas

My experience with boats started in 1954 when I was six and my family was living in St. Louis. That’s when my Dad built a 14 foot boat from a kit he got from Sears Roebuck.   But before the building of that boat, and before the arrival of my two youngest brothers, when it was just my parents and my brother Paul and I, my parents would load us into the 1952 Chevy Bel Air and my dad would drive us to backwaters of the Missouri and the Mississippi River where side channels of the rivers wound around and through oxbow islands. There were ramshackle marinas there that catered mostly to fisherman where you could rent a leaky open boat with an outboard. My parents outfitted us with giant orange kapok life preservers and after renting a boat, my father would take us in and through the quiet sloughs for the afternoon. I remember the 8-1/2 x 11 charts by dad brought to help navigate the tangle of waterways as kind of treasure maps, the coolness of the river under the overhanging trees in the back channels, and the fishy smells of the rented boats. After we’d return to the marina, there’d sometimes be greasy hamburgers and soda pop from a floating bar at the marina where I think my first memory of the smell of stale beer dates to. 

Such was the start of my boating experience and probably what inspired my father to order the Sears kit boat, though, to my knowledge, he’d not grown up with boats in Iowa, and since he’d served in the Army Air Force, not the Navy during WWII, there was nothing in his war experience that introduced him to boating. But St. Louis was hot and humid in the summers, air conditioning was uncommon back then, and so I can understand how the image of a boat planing over the water with a good looking woman next to you and maybe a nautical hat on your head might have sealed the deal for him.

Both Sears and Montgomery Ward sold completed boats or, if you were handy, a boat kit.  From what I’ve found online, these boats were sourced from a variety of builders located in places as far apart as Penn Mar, New York in the finger lake district to an outfit in Texas. The kits ranged in cost starting under $100 and going up depending on how elaborate the kit was. My dad’s kit was listed as $174 in one ad I found. It seems small today, but in a world where homes sold for less than $5,000, I imagine it was a substantial expense, though I never heard my mother complain about it.

My dad’s boat was known as a runabout. I don’t remember much about the building of the boat other than the kit came with a copious number of brass screws, a push drill, and a Yankee screwdriver, whose head rotated when you inserted the bit in the screw head and pushed. The construction was of plywood panels screwed to stringers and frames. It was pretty basic, or at least the version my Dad purchased was, with the idea being that the builder could spiff up the boat over time, perhaps fiberglassing the hull, adding a windshield, navigation lights, a steering station and throttle, and perhaps instruments on a wood dash. Over the years that’s exactly what my father did turning his basement project into a kind of poor man’s Chris Craft.

After the boat was completed it was used mostly on the same waters as before, but now we were free to take more time and wander more. I recall crawling under the cover of the foredeck where it was out of the sun to feel and hear the water as the boat slapped into waves on a plane. My mother would bring a picnic lunch with a jug of lemonade and after cruising backwaters, we’d head onto the main channel in search of an un-peopled sandbar and some breezes to keep the mosquitos off. My father would beach the boat, we’d have a picnic and my brother and I would be allowed to wade into the river with our life preservers attached to long lines my father tied to us to prevent the big river from drowning us.  Then after getting sunburned and covered in sand we’d be loaded up in the boat again and it would be time to head back to the boat ramp and home. If this was later in the hot St. Louis summer, we might stop at a truck farm stand for a watermelon to have at home or a root beer from A&W in cold glass mugs.

These excursions went on for several years, before prosperity began to bring more and more people to the river in ever larger and faster fiberglass boats whose owner’s seemed oblivious to the safety of themselves or of others sharing the river around them. By 1960, a 14 foot plywood boat with a 25 hp outboard must have seemed small indeed on a big river filled with half drunk boaters throwing big wakes.  So our outboard boating came to an end, my dad sold the runabout, and our boating shifted to a 17 foot Grumman aluminum canoe and family trips down the spring fed rivers of Missouri. But that’s another story. •SCA•