photo by Magri

photo by Magri

TimePiece

Hidden away in boathouses of the Lakes Region are wonderful stories.   Tales of tradition, passion and searches, these are the head turning antique wooden boats.   Often coming out only at dusk, some are legendary names; "Mandoshumi V", "Will-O-The-Wisp", "Sophie".  This story is about a boat named "Timepiece" and it moves from Michigan to New York to California, finally ending on Lake Winnipesaukee.  It is a story full of charming coincidences and serendipity.  

Jack and Elizabeth Magri fell in love with a particular boat at a boat show Lake George, NY in 1989.   Called "Ankle Deep", it was the only surviving GarWood of it's kind, a 1937 Custom Utility.  Two years later, after countless phone calls, magazine ads and boatyard visits, they had pretty much given up finding it.  Jack went home for lunch, made the decision to buy a 25' Chris-Craft Sportsman and closed the deal by phone.   That same afternoon, he was stunned by a call the owner of a derelict 1937 GarWood.  The owner was planning to burn the boat if Jack wasn't interested.  Now one of only two known to exist, it had a six foot hole in it's side from a collision sinking years ago (see photo).   Anxious, Jack agreed to pay three times the asking price to forestall the burning.  It wasn't exactly a fortune, the asking price was $100. 

Classic wooden boats of the early 20th century were oak framed with African mahogany exteriors.  They carried twelve coats of premium varnish, real leather upholstery and primordial iron engines.  They made by turn-of-the-century manufactures like Hacker, GarWood, Century and Chris-Craft.  They were launches for the wealthy, family utilities and fearsome racing boats with thousands of horsepower.  Today, gathered at the annual boat shows at the Weirs, Alton Bay and Wolfeboro, they can be an overpowering sight.

Magri's boat seller, a shipwright, estimated it would take a year to restore the boat but it took three.  The engine in it was a Chris-Craft, incorrect for the GarWood.  However, the Chris-Craft Jack had bought the same day was, amazingly, a Chrysler Royal, the correct engine for the GarWood. He swapped them.

The unusual metal windshield of the Magri's GarWood was nowhere to be found.  A year into the renovation, at a New York boating picnic, the owner of it's sister boat,  Reverend Ted Brothers, presented the Magri's with an original from his barn.  A year later, at the same annual boating picnic, a chance conversation with a local boat dealer yielded the massive end castings needed to complete it. 

These high quality boats had incredible attention to detail.  The grain in the hundreds of tiny wooden screw head covers, called "bungs", are oriented to matched to the surrounding wood.  Grain on adjoining planks or even opposite sides of a boat are book matched, an almost impossible task today.   Jack and his restorer somehow found a single sawn tree in the stock of a specialty veneer company.  It supplied ribbon grained, book matched, perfect colored mahogany for the complete restoration.

Gar Wood was a very successful industrialist with a passion for high speed and high quality.  He won an extraordinary number of races and when competition thinned, he arranged to race the fastest trains of the day.  In 1931 Wood’s boats were the first to exceed 100 mph.   Between 1922 to 1947, some 3,300 Gar Woods were hand built in it's various Michigan facilities.  Anthony Mollica, author of the brand's definitive history, estimates that only 500 remain. 

Of the 26 Customer Utilities GarWood made in 1937, only three are known to still exist today.  Finished in June of 1991, the Magri boat was first shown here in 1994 here at Weirs Beach on Lake Winnipesaukee.  It won five awards, including Best of Show and Antique Boat of the Year awards.  And it remains a charmed antique  A few years ago, at a boat show in Mt. Dora, NY,  Jack found an elderly man staring at his boat.  When Jack described the history of the boat, the man exclaimed, "Oh, my! I installed the engine in this boat!".  He had been the engine installer at the GarWood boat factory in Michigan from 1936 to 1938.    The Magri's "Timepiece" is now a robust antique, strong in an ancient sort of way and charmed in it's restored life.

photo by ACBS, Adirondack Chapter