“A Word About Fiber-Archaeology “

    In 1956, at the very dawn of the Fiberglass revolution in boating, a 15 foot Meteor struck the Chicago and New York boat shows. The excitement that was thrown up into the atmosphere quickly suffocated and killed the Dinosaurs which had been thriving there from the start. Today, their fossilized remains of glistening mahogany remain quite beautiful and can still be seen lovingly preserved at all the finer maritime museums and classic boat shows. Never again, however, would the dinosaurs dominate the rich fertile wetlands of North America as they had in the past.

     

 But what of this Meteor and its kind? These were smaller, more manageable creatures, better adapted to life on a boat trailer than in an expensive boathouse. They were easy to care for and had a much smaller appetite for the family budget. These new and exciting Fiberglass boats, sporting their colorful plumage and shiny chrome, were typically fitted with a plentiful and convenient new form of power, the outboard motor.

 

  Outboards had finally evolved into something truly desirable with many new creature comforts such as electric starting and built in generators. Boasting fashionable and futuristic styling, these motors could easily migrate from one boat to another so that a buyer wanting to move up in size or to a newer model could simply swap boats and keep the motor, that is until such time as it too might be traded up or put out to pasture.

 

                                                        

 

   

      The really big improvement, however came in the amount of time needed to service and maintain the animals hide. No longer was it necessary to re-varnish a wooden boat and gone forever were the worries of a rotted hull. Boating was finally accessible to and affordable by, Joe Lunch Box himself.

As it happened, there was a secondary impact across the room from the initial Meteor strike at these major boat shows and it was called the Evinrude Lark, it was a one-two punch. This boat was designed by Milwaukee's own independent designer, Brooks Stevens. As explained by noted writer Lee Wangstad in an article for Boating World magazine and in the words of the Meteors designer, Bob Hammond, “We took the prototype [Meteor] to the New York show where it was quite a hit, Brooks Stevens had his boat there for Evinrude [the Lark] and the two boats kind of played off of each other, they really made a big deal of it in the media”

 

 

   This bird was one of a set of two matching boats built at a cost to Evinrude Motors of $11,000.00 nineteen fifty six dollars. The Lark had towering tail fins foreshadowing those of the 1959 Cadillac cars and a Batmobile style windshield, many years before the 1955 Ford Futura served the caped crusaders. Of the Evinrude Lark, Brooks Stevens had this to say; “The dyed in the wool connoisseur had a fit over it, but we were out to sell boats to coal miners and lathe operators, not to connoisseurs in blue yachting coats, if this new customer wanted his boat to look like a swept wing car, we made it look like a swept wing car!”  This is not  to say that everything from the period pounced on the buyer all teeth and claws, there were plenty of ordinary looking designs and quite a few conservative builders, like Crosby for instance, but these conservative builders and their ordinary looking products, are not what hard-core collecting is about. We celebrate the abominable, and even Crosby managed to build a few stunning pieces which they called the Swept Fin.

      These two small boats, the Meteor and the Lark, taken together had an impact on the boat shows and the industry itself, far beyond their diminutive size.

 

 

   Throughout the country many builders began to try and outdo one another in a mad dash to create the sleekest, raciest looking boat ever made. In addition to the unlimited new shapes that Fiberglass afforded to decks and hulls, things like jet air scoops, Jet exhausts, two headlights, four headlights, floor consoles with integral controls, double bubble windshields, bucket seats, spaceship bow lights and chrome rocket ship adornments were added. These styling cues joined the ubiquitous tail fins and pastel colors, to dress up the sparkling new runabouts.

 

    

      In these prehistoric days of Fiberglass, it quickly became apparent just how easy getting into the boat building business was, since the start up costs were very minimal. Many Neanderthals began converting their caves, barns, garages and rented space into impromptu boat factories and the transition from dugouts to Fiberglass came seemingly overnight. Because of the small start-up nature of most of these companies, however, there were no formal design review committees, as exist in our modern age, to club a designer over the head if his products weren't conservatively styled enough to appeal to the greatest number of people.

    It is hard to explain to the younger generations of today just how different the design mind-set was in the late fifties.  Everyone’s product strove to gain it's own unique identity through a careful breeding of form and function. The resultant offspring held a more personal appeal for the buyer. While there might be fewer buyers available for any particular model, there was a much stronger bonding with the model those buyers ultimately chose and many were willing to pay a premium price for what was to them, a more natural selection.

      By way of comparison, and using cars as an example, then as now you might have a 10 year spread of vehicles on the road but due to radical yearly design changes the visual impact of those changes on the road was simply breathtaking.

 

 The model year differences were much more apparent than today so it was much easier to tell who had a new car, and who's car was outdated. The future was clearly hurtling towards you at freeway speeds while the past clung , for a time, in your rear view mirror.  Nowhere is this diversity better demonstrated then the landmark Stanley Kubric film “It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World”

   

 

 

  Into this design oriented mind-set came the rush of new boat builders eager to add their artistic talent to the nations waterways. As it turned out, however, some of them didn't really have any artistic talent! In fact a few designers were so off the wall it's hard to know what they were thinking, or if they could think at all! While many designs were beautiful and very well bred in form and function, others were just plain weird, ungainly and even grotesque. Today we celebrate these extremes with all the admiration afforded a duck billed Platypus!

  

  What seemed elusive or was perhaps ignored at the outset, was just how labor-intensive the process of working with Fiberglass would become. This difficulty along with the realities of marketing, shipping and administration would quickly take their toll on the fledgling builders. More than anything, the most beautiful and detailed designs seemed to have had the longest gestation periods and production crawled along at a snails pace. What you ended up with, were hundreds of designers, each making only a handful of boats. A production of only 10 to 20 hand crafted boats per year was commonplace given a lack of manpower  and experience. What remains today are hundreds of wonderful designs, each of which may be represented by only a small handful of examples. The perfect collectible!

 

    There are those among us who remember with particular fondness the classic wooden boats of their youth. These dinosaur hunters sought out the best examples they could find and vowed to save them from the land that time forgot. As the preservation and restoration of the mahogany dinosaurs grew to become a major hobby in it's own right, brilliant methods of re-animation and re-incarnation and even dinosaur cloning worked in concert to bring these great wooden beasts back to life in such numbers that they have since become nothing short of iconic.

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Meanwhile the tremendous numbers of Fiberglass boats produced since those early days has ensured the continuing success and dominance of their species well into the foreseeable future.

  Unfortunately, however, many examples of the ancestral Fiberglass boats have begun dying off in recent decades from natural causes. Today our modern boats, like our modern cars, show very little to get excited about from an artistic point of view and these exotic early beasts are seldom seen in the wild today.

 

  Fortunately A second generation of maritime archaeologists have recently begun to unearth the decaying remains of these earliest Fiberglass boats which darted about before the cookie cutters began stamping out great schools of sameness. This new breed of collector, inspired by the heroic efforts of the dinosaur hunters, have taken up the challenge of resurrection they had so successfully pioneered. It is with reverence for their efforts in preserving the great wooden boats of the past that we carry on the task of preserving the early Fiberglass boats that we ourselves so admire.

    Here then is a stunning insight into the lost world of what some consider the most interesting boats ever made from a standpoint of design and artistry.  

 

 Come along with us now on the hunt, as KevFin briefly introduces you to some of the the more interesting members of the species that killed the dinosaurs!

 

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