Sport: Boat Fever

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Harsen Smith had long thought in terms of family. The Chris-Craft business itself is a closely knit family enterprise. It was founded in 1894 by Harsen's grandfather, Christopher Columbus Smith, when he installed a naphtha-gas engine in a homemade rowboat and began selling rides. Today, 54 members of the Smith family still firmly control and share in the direction of the company he started.

Fish & Fiddle. Christopher Columbus Smith was born in 1861 in the treetopped village (pop. 1,200) of Algonac, Mich, on the St. Clair River. Algonac was a tough sailors' town situated in the midst of busy Great Lakes maritime commerce. There were a few small hotels, a general store, plenty of canvasback and redhead ducks, walleyed pike, yellow perch, black bass and an occasional sturgeon—and lots of sitting in the sun.

Chris's father James Smith ran a blacksmith shop but seldom worked in it (he always said it was too much trouble holding the horse up). He liked guns better, and he could also scratch out a middling tune on the fiddle. Young Chris's closest companion was his older brother Hank, who regularly got one haircut a year (from his mother), boasted that he never changed his winter underwear in summer. The brothers spent most of their time hunting and fishing on the flats and marshy lands that flank the river. Chris Smith never bothered with high school; instead, he shoved off as a deckhand on the steamer Arundel, worked summers on the lake boats. But as vacationing sportsmen came to Algonac, Hank and Chris began building small boats for rent. Hank and he would search the woods for a walnut stump, dig it out and work up a naturally curved boat stem from stump and roots.

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."

By 1906 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.

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 it."