CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Seventy years ago, some boaters got together and formed a club on the Kanawha River.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Seventy years ago, some boaters got together and formed a club on the Kanawha River.
Nobody knows exactly how it started. The club's early history perished somewhere in time, destroyed by fires and floods, buried with the memories of deceased charter members.
The incorporation paper, dated June 3, 1938, lists five prominent Charlestonians as incorporators - M. (Mike) K. Hearne, J.C. Hofgaard, Joe Silverstein, A.S. Thomas Jr., and A.W. Cox.
So much for historic details.
"Except for the incorporation paper, the oldest thing I have is minutes from a 1957 meeting at the Gazette auditorium and a copy of the 1957 mooring fees," said longtime board member Tom Battle. "A bunch of records have been lost in the floods."
After all, June 3, 1938, was a very long time ago.
D. Boone Dawson was mayor. Homer Holt was governor. The South Side Bridge was one year old. Buses had just replaced trolleys. Kanawha Boulevard wouldn't be finished for another two years.
That's how long ago it was.
The front page of The Charleston Gazette featured stories on Congress debating a 25-cent hourly minimum wage and FDR conferring diplomas at the Naval Academy. The president implored graduating cadets to study world problems.
A country just pulling out of the Depression faced a war heating up in Europe. Hitler was Time magazine's Man of the Year.
That's how long ago it was.
Superman made his comic book debut that year. Joe Louis reigned as heavyweight boxing champ. Bette Davis won an Oscar for "Jezebel."
Sirloin at the local A&P sold for 27 cents a pound. A. W. Cox Department Store, owned by one of the boat club's incorporators, advertised $4.95 party dresses for $1.99. Penney's offered housedresses for 25 cents.
That's how long ago it was.
At 85, boat club stalwart Bill Knox knows how long ago it was. He was 15 when his father, Tip Knox, joined the boat club as a charter member.
"I remember when they had barges made of wood instead of steel," Knox said. "Boat club members used the sides as gunnels to moor their boats. Fifty-five gallon drums under the barges kept them afloat.
"You know how long a barge is? Well, the gunnels were that length, with three or four more hooked to it, depending on how many boats they had."
His father, playboy scion of the U.S. attorney general, had plenty of time for boating, he said. "My father was spoiled. He didn't do anything. He played a lot.
"My grandfather was Philander Chase Knox, U.S. secretary of state, U.S. attorney general and a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. He cosigned the note for Walter Clark to buy the Charleston Daily Mail."
A job on the paper brought his father to Charleston. The job didn't last two weeks. "He was going back to Washington when he met my mother at the train station. He came back and married her."
The Knoxes enjoyed a life of leisure, especially on the water. "My dad was the first to have a Chris Craft cruiser on the river. I must have been 12 when we got the boat. He called it 'Miss Gloria,' what they were going to name me if they'd had a girl."
He kept "Miss Gloria" at Glen Clark's seaplane base at the levee, later at Knox Landing at his home on Kanawha Avenue and, finally, at the new Charleston Boat Club.
Reared on the river, Bill Knox remained a lifelong boater and boat club member. He owned several boats, all named "Cindy Lynn" for his daughters, Lynda and Cynthia. He stopped with "Cindy Lynn V," a 30-foot twin engine Regal.
"Now I'm too old for a boat," he said. "Having a boat is about 90 percent work and 10 percent pleasure. I used to have to take it to Cincinnati just to get the bottom painted."
And now, there's another nasty hitch. Gasoline at the boat club sells for $4.70 a gallon to the public, $4.50 a gallon to members. "When my dad started boating, gasoline was 10 cents a gallon. There wasn't a road tax back then."
Not that his parents didn't have gasoline worries. When Knox was off fighting the Second World War in the South Pacific, his parents coped with gas rationing. It didn't keep them from boating.
"They would start up the river as far as maybe this side of Marmet, stop the engine, tie some boats together, drink and talk a while, then float back down river."
CHARLESTON, W.Va. - Seventy years ago, some boaters got together and formed a club on the Kanawha River.
Nobody knows exactly how it started. The club's early history perished somewhere in time, destroyed by fires and floods, buried with the memories of deceased charter members.
The incorporation paper, dated June 3, 1938, lists five prominent Charlestonians as incorporators - M. (Mike) K. Hearne, J.C. Hofgaard, Joe Silverstein, A.S. Thomas Jr., and A.W. Cox.
So much for historic details.
"Except for the incorporation paper, the oldest thing I have is minutes from a 1957 meeting at the Gazette auditorium and a copy of the 1957 mooring fees," said longtime board member Tom Battle. "A bunch of records have been lost in the floods."
After all, June 3, 1938, was a very long time ago.
D. Boone Dawson was mayor. Homer Holt was governor. The South Side Bridge was one year old. Buses had just replaced trolleys. Kanawha Boulevard wouldn't be finished for another two years.
That's how long ago it was.
The front page of The Charleston Gazette featured stories on Congress debating a 25-cent hourly minimum wage and FDR conferring diplomas at the Naval Academy. The president implored graduating cadets to study world problems.
A country just pulling out of the Depression faced a war heating up in Europe. Hitler was Time magazine's Man of the Year.
That's how long ago it was.
Superman made his comic book debut that year. Joe Louis reigned as heavyweight boxing champ. Bette Davis won an Oscar for "Jezebel."
Sirloin at the local A&P sold for 27 cents a pound. A. W. Cox Department Store, owned by one of the boat club's incorporators, advertised $4.95 party dresses for $1.99. Penney's offered housedresses for 25 cents.
That's how long ago it was.
At 85, boat club stalwart Bill Knox knows how long ago it was. He was 15 when his father, Tip Knox, joined the boat club as a charter member.
"I remember when they had barges made of wood instead of steel," Knox said. "Boat club members used the sides as gunnels to moor their boats. Fifty-five gallon drums under the barges kept them afloat.
"You know how long a barge is? Well, the gunnels were that length, with three or four more hooked to it, depending on how many boats they had."
His father, playboy scion of the U.S. attorney general, had plenty of time for boating, he said. "My father was spoiled. He didn't do anything. He played a lot.
"My grandfather was Philander Chase Knox, U.S. secretary of state, U.S. attorney general and a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. He cosigned the note for Walter Clark to buy the Charleston Daily Mail."
A job on the paper brought his father to Charleston. The job didn't last two weeks. "He was going back to Washington when he met my mother at the train station. He came back and married her."
The Knoxes enjoyed a life of leisure, especially on the water. "My dad was the first to have a Chris Craft cruiser on the river. I must have been 12 when we got the boat. He called it 'Miss Gloria,' what they were going to name me if they'd had a girl."
He kept "Miss Gloria" at Glen Clark's seaplane base at the levee, later at Knox Landing at his home on Kanawha Avenue and, finally, at the new Charleston Boat Club.
Reared on the river, Bill Knox remained a lifelong boater and boat club member. He owned several boats, all named "Cindy Lynn" for his daughters, Lynda and Cynthia. He stopped with "Cindy Lynn V," a 30-foot twin engine Regal.
"Now I'm too old for a boat," he said. "Having a boat is about 90 percent work and 10 percent pleasure. I used to have to take it to Cincinnati just to get the bottom painted."
And now, there's another nasty hitch. Gasoline at the boat club sells for $4.70 a gallon to the public, $4.50 a gallon to members. "When my dad started boating, gasoline was 10 cents a gallon. There wasn't a road tax back then."
Not that his parents didn't have gasoline worries. When Knox was off fighting the Second World War in the South Pacific, his parents coped with gas rationing. It didn't keep them from boating.
"They would start up the river as far as maybe this side of Marmet, stop the engine, tie some boats together, drink and talk a while, then float back down river."
A towboat served as the boat club's first harbor house. At the top of the hill, members built a clubhouse, space now leased by a day-care center for hospital workers.
At one point, they rented the clubhouse to the Candlelight Club, a popular nightspot.
"The boat club bought what extra property the hospital needed to put in the day-care center," said 82-year-old Gene Stuck, a club veteran. "The club still controls the entire parcel. That keeps the place going."
Seventy years ago, acquiring property for a boat club wasn't much of a problem, Stuck said. "Fifty-foot lots would probably have been maybe $50. They own about three blocks of riverfront property, lots not large enough to accommodate houses."
One of the most remembered boats in the club's history belonged to jeweler Marcus Berman. A charter member, Berman docked a 50-foot boat there that boasted its own toilet - a toilet seat with a hole that went directly into the river.
"There was nothing like it," Stuck said. "We took that thing from Charleston to New Orleans during the World's Fair. Another time, 12 or 14 boats took a trip to the WVU-Pitt game. There were 13 locks to go through."
A former commodore who owned a 28-foot twin-engine cruiser called "I Reckon," Stuck eventually retired from the phone company and used his free time to help at the boat club, adding covered slips and generally upgrading the facility.
"For about 30 years, members did all the work, built the docks, cut grass, anything that needed to be done," said Riley Brothers, owner of Charleston Marine and a club member since 1979. "In the mid-1960s, they got their first commercial slips. Before that, people built their personal boat houses."
More covered slips were added as demand and finances permitted, Brothers said, "and now most of the club is commercially built covered slips."
His former father-in-law, the late Fritz Howard, joined in 1960. In 1997, members dedicated the new harbor house to him. Constructed on a work barge, the harbor house was lowered into the river with a crane and towed by Howard to its new address.
The old harbor house and wooden gunnels, described by one old-timer as "a shantytown," begged for renovation.
"First, they had to put in new steel gunnels to hold the new harbor house," said Stuck. "They were built in Indiana in two sections. Tom Jones brought them into Nitro, welded them together and put them back in the water with a crane and brought them to the boat club in one piece."
Members keep the facility under lock and key. "Used to be, the club was wide open, and people who weren't members thought it was a little country club, and they'd go down and have parties," Douglas recalled.
"When I became commodore in 1982, one of the first things I did was put up gates and have a secure place for people to have their boats."
Today, 150 members enjoy the club's amenities, which include 110 slips. Mooring fees, like the club itself, grew considerably. "The annual rate for a 30-foot cruiser would be around $1,000 compared to $10 per month in 1957," Battle said.
The club's endurance chronology includes many floods and at least two fires, one in 1960 and one in 1978.
"The winter of 1978, I had a 25-foot Criss boat that I'd just bought. It only had 18 hours on it," said stalwart board member Bob Douglas. "One of our board members called me at 1 in the morning and said my boat had just burned up. Eleven boats were lost in that fire.
"I looked at the hull and the lines that were burned, and I made up my mind that I would buy another boat. We've made a lot of trips on the 'Nancy Sue II.'"
Knox, Tom North and J. Horner Davis all lost boats in the 1960 fire. According to lore, Davis loaned his boat to some teenagers to water ski. "They brought gasoline down in 5-gallon cans," Knox said. "The fire was caused by gasoline in the water. Someone lit a match to melt the end of a rope to keep it from fraying and tossed the match in the water.
"All that was left of my boat was the bottom," he said. "The fire warped the door of the refrigerator in the dockhouse and melted a case of empty glass Coca Cola bottles."
More tragically for his daughters, the fire consumed their irreplaceable collection of original Barbie dolls and Barbie costumes.
Undaunted, Knox wasn't boatless long. "That's when I bought the 27-foot Owens," he said. (Five feet longer than the one that burned, of course.)
Construction of the two Interstate 64 bridges to Kanawha City probably caused more consternation and inconvenience than anything in the club's long history.
"They had to separate the docks into two sections to give them the room they needed," Stuck said. "People on the upper end came in one way, and the lower end got used to the lower level. We put in a new gunnel once it was over with, so it turned out to be a good thing for the club."
"This is the finest boat club on the river," said Douglas, a former commodore and a member since 1978. "I was down in Kentucky and Ohio the other day, and a fellow there told me that the Charleston Boat Club was the finest he'd been to. We have people from Ohio tell us that routinely."
Reach Sandy Wells at 348-5173 or san...@wvgazette.com.
Post a comment
Many months later, North told me that I would be a asset to the united states navy.. I could sink (3) cabins curisers,a Criss Craft runabout along with several smaller boats,and boat houses with (1) pack of matches..
But as you know the river flows down , but the fire after it started went up river. Boats below the original starting point was not damaged with the exception of heat damage. It was determined but never revealed to the public was a cabin curiser that was six moorings up from where the fire actually started had a bad gasoline leak from the bilge pump opening. And thats where the combustiable liquid came from.
Results . Lawsuits were filed with partys involved. Lawsuits never heard. Settled out of court. Involved high profile politicans and Charleston businessmen.
How do I know this ?...I'm the teenager that struck the match.. My loss ? $80.00 in cold cash that was in Sen. J.Hornor Davis boats glove compartment, plus all my clothes and shoes . In 1960 , $80,00 was $80.00 !