Word: chris
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Chris Smith was turning out a 26-ft. boat that did 18 m.p.h. Remembers one son: "One day we ran a race with another local boat and won. We didn't know it then, but this was the beginning of the speedboat boom." Beginning in 1908, Chris Smith built about 36 racers a year, sold them for $550 apiece...
...After Chris married Anna Rattray in 1884, ne settled down to raise a family-four boys, two girls. As soon as the youngsters were old enough to hold a clamp, he set them to work in the waterfront boat shop. In 1896, two years after his success with his first naphtha-gas boat, he and Hank tried a 2-h.p. Sintz gasoline engine. "It never ran well," says Chris's son Jay, 74, "until Charles Sintz showed up from Grand Rapids two years later with a gadget he called a carburetor...
Gallused, collarless and tieless, his straw boater firmly planted on his head, brush-mustached Chris Smith spent a lot of time sitting in the sun whittling decoys, puffing his big cigars down to a stub (held with a wooden peg), and just thinking. He got to wondering about the waterbugs he saw skating the waters around Algonac. "Some day," he told Jay, "somebody is going to build a boat like those bugs-one that will go on top of the water instead of through...
...Rocks. Harsen himself has not yet bought a house, lives with his wife in a simply furnished apartment overlooking the harbor in nearby Fort Lauderdale, keeps a weather eye on the passing parade of boats ("When 70% of them are not Chris-Crafts, I'll know something is wrong"). Tanned, -blue-eyed May Smith. 51, is a Smith only by marriage, so she is understandably lacking in some of the finer points of salty boatsmanship (she insists on calling the galley a "kitchen.'' and on cruises she insists on plugging all boat drains at night to keep...
...Though Chris-Craft has the longest history and is the acknowledged leader in the inboard field (its sales are more than three times those of Owens, its closest competitor), the boom is big enough for all. Owens sold $12 million worth of boats last year v. $1 million in 1953. Such companies as Matthews, Wheeler and Richardson, who specialize in custom-quality boats, have shared handsomely in the general boom...