BEHIND THE LENS WONDERFUL WOODIES Reading the title of this column, you’re probably thinking I’m going to be talking about those beautiful woody wagons of yesteryear: Fords, Pontiacs, Packards and Chryslers—all boasting more than 150 hand-crafted pieces of varnished ash, birch and mahogany wood—that we’d pile into for family road trips. Sorry, but no. I’ve got something else in mind that is a little closer to my heart, and whenever I’m assigned to shoot one, I can’t slow the adrenaline flow: wooden boats. Wood has been a component of marine craft since about 8200 BC. It has great SCOTT MEAD With a little help from his grandfather, Mecum’s senior photographer, Scott, started driving at the age of 3 and was racing go-karts by the time he turned 8. He received his first camera (a Kodak Instamatic) around the same time and started photographing car events, races, rallies and concours. Before coming to Mecum, he was a writer and photographer for Edmunds.com, Motor Trend and spent 15 years in Hawaii photographing the island’s splendor. Scott’s wife swears he gargles with 100-octane race gas and bleeds 20/50 motor oil, and when he’s not on the road, you can find him in his garage, wrenching on their DeTomaso Pantera or Porsche 914. floatation properties, is easily malleable for shaping into a variety of forms and can be trimmed with primitive tools (though it would take a long time to carve out a hull with a rock). The wooden boats I’m thinking of come from the heyday of Michigan and Ohio boat building, primarily the 1930s through the early 1960s, the likes of Chris-Craft, Garwood, Hacker Craft, Lyman and a host of others. These are boats primarily built of Philippine mahogany (and we’re talking millions of board feet), which in the early days, were powered by Naptha engines, then gasoline. My first foray into the world of wooden boats started courtesy of a neighbor. He had a 1930 Chris-Craft 103 triple-cockpit barrel back, plus a Chris-Craft unicorn, thought to be one of Bill MacKerer’s (Chris-Craft designer and later executive VP) personal boats. Allegedly, MacKerer would have a custom boat built every year, taking pieces from multiple designs and melding them together. My friend’s “Utility” boat was a mixture of models: the bow of a Continental, cockpit of a Sportsman and the aft of a Deluxe Utility. It was a striking and gorgeous design, to say the least, with a serial number that has no hull card. At a wooden boat show on our local lake, my friend had both boats in the Village slips, and at the end of the day, he needed someone to drive one of the boats back to his dock. I offered to take one back, and he tossed me the key to the Utility. Flicking the key and firing up the Chrysler FirePower V-8, I cast the lines and idled out of the No Wake zone. 58 // MECUM.COM
