It’s Oldies Week Starting Monday!
Fellow Woody Boater Bob Menzel sent this in yesterday.
“Here is one from around 1954 or so. Me on right with my Dad driving on Conneaut Lake, PA. The boat is (I think) a 15 foot 1953 Chris Craft plywood kit boat built by Press Reel in Pittsburgh. 15HP Johnson. And yes, my lil sister Diane still has all her fingers…”
This week we are going to feature some of your oldies, no not your elvis collection.. We want to feature old pictures of you and your family. Yesterday Texx featured a fun old family snap shot and it triggered a fun response. So we decided to make it a fun feature on Woody Boater, so go up into the attic, and start digging. You will need to scan any print images. Don’t worry about the edges or bad color or scratches, we will clean them up for you. You can post your images starting monday and join in the fun.
I found these a couple years ago in a slide box. Yup, thats yours truly at the helm of a early 70’s 40 ft River Queen. Twin 440 super bee engines. What a two week adventure.
Me learning to use a sextant.
Here is a shot of a 13 year old yours truely on the bow of my Uncle’s 1948 30 ft. CC Sedan Cruiser. A WoodyBoater in the making! The photo was taken at Island Harbor Marina on Lake St. Clair in Michigan. We had built the dinghy on the cabin top as a winter project. I logged many hours on that dinghy, with a 4 hp outboard, just running around the marina. Great Memories!
Great Idea!
Hope I can find some old Pix, but will love looking at all the others sent in even if I don’t.
Mom, Daniel, David and Trygve – the three oldest Rhude boys – circa 1959. There are three wooden Thompson boats in the picture. The three little boys (including me) were not around yet!
Forgot to add. I got one of those pair of red plaid swim trunks as a hand-me-down many years later!
wow. They had color photos in 1959 ? What generation of iPhone was that photo taken with?
Matt – what exactly is a “snap-shot” ??
And a ‘sextant’ ?? I did not see Miley Cyrus in the photo….
No that is probably not real color film. I think Matt and Texx sent the black and white (sepia?) images to Ted Turner to have them colorized.
The images were taken on a crude device called a Kodak Brownie. It was a small cube with a roll of “film” made from cow bone gellatine coated with toxic silver halide chemicals. They were so cheap, there was no LCD screen. You had to mail the thing back to the company in Rochester NY and a few weeks later you would get one or two of your pictures on tiny pieces of paper plus a bunch of blurry images of nothing on the same paper.
A sextant is not Miley Cyrus. It is a pre-historic navigation device used by cave man fishing boats to locate early whore houses where they could trade their fish and crabs for sex.
Thanks to you m-fine, a sextant will never be the same for me.
BTW, do they make a modern version? And will they work in cars too?
Oh wait. The Internet.
Luckily, I am so young that there are no “old” pictures of me yet.
Circa, early 50’s, Scugog River, Trent Canal.
Does anyone know the builder of this boat?
Given the location I would think your boat is a Peterborough. I have seen similar runabouts at a few boat shows.
I’ll defer to Graeme on this as he is Canadian and more familiar with their models. Looking at the photo, it looks likes someone took the front half of a Disappearing Propellor Boat (Dippy) Scout model (with the forward cockpit and decked midship engine hatches) and grafted it to the after half of a Duke Playmate late 30’s model (from the square stern and seating arrangement). As Graeme alludes, there were many boat builders and they probably copied other’s best products.
Possibly Lindsay boatworks which was based in Lindsay Ontario (and through which the Scugog river runs).Lindsay aquired the rights to the dispro patents in the late 1920s and some years later sold them to Greavette boat co. Although the boat in the photo is no dispro its lapstrake construction looks very similar to that used to build dispro in fact those planks look like Cyprus or mahogany material that peterborough seldom used on its small boats
Save them til monday when we start the week. Send any photos to us matt@woodyboater.com I will aslo clean them up so you can have a nice new digital version of the shot
My brother Charles driving his 1956 Peterborough runabout powered by a 30Hp Johnson outboard engine. That’s me doing a headstand on an aquaplane! Photo taken in front of our cottage, Ste. Anne, Lower Rideau Lake part of the Historic Rideau Canal. Near Rideau Ferry, Ontario Canada c1972
This is a postcard of my family’s sailboat the Stardust. She is a 16′ 1937 Grew gaff sloop dingy with a beam of 6’6″, a draft of only 3″ and made of B.C. cedar in the lapstrake fashion. Purchased for the princely sum of $450.00.
She became famous around the Rideau Lakes by winning more races than any other sailboat including an unprecedented 3 championships at the Rideau Ferry Yacht Club’s annual regattas. Picture taken on the Big Rideau Lake near Rideau Ferry, Ontario Canada in 1951.
Do fiberglassics count? Here are my kids when I gave my son Chris his 1st boat 20 years ago. It was originally my 1st boat in 1963. We still have it.
David Willard, my dad in his 1950 19′ split cockpit Chris Craft.
The boat in the boathouse was my Grandfather’s. He built that boat at his manufacturing plant.
I have the plans he used for it and a model he made of the boat as well as pictures of it running across the little lake in our hometown…I wonder if it has survived…
Story goes, Grandpa always wanted to have the fastest boat on the lake…so when someone came out and beat him he took out the original engine (either Tucker to Lincoln or Lincoln to Tucker) to again hold claim to the fastest boat on the lake.