By Doug Adams, Finger Lakes Chapter
I had just walked into my brother’s office at work when I heard him say to someone over the phone, “Yes! Certainly! We would be glad to come!”
What was he promising me to do this time? Pressing the speaker button, all three of us were able to talk together. It was an amazing telephone call!
Ten minutes later I heard myself saying, “Sure, we’ll come. And yes, we will bring our boats.”
Inside cover of the 1927 catalog showing Thompson’s Cortland and Peshtigo plants as artist renderings.
Sunday June 7th, 2009, that call came true. We towed our boats to the (Chris-Craft) Thompson Boat Company employee re-union picnic, held for the factory employees and their families. It was the third year they had the event. This year it was held at the Solon Sportsman’s Club east of Cortland, New York, because Cortland was one of the home bases for the Thompson Boat Company.
Our phone call cam from Ted Thompson, son of one of the original Thompson brothers who had founded the boat company in 1904 in Peshtigo, Wisconsin. Ted, who had organized this event, and his brother Bob ran the Cortland factory. The family had three main locations by the late 50s. Cortland made wooden runabouts and a lot of sea-going, deep V-hull boats for the east-ern seaboard; Peshtigo, made runabouts for the Great Lakes and the in-land waters of the Midwest; and Cruisers, Inc. in Ocento, Wisconsin, which offered similar boats with slightly different options and styling, through a completely different set of dealers.
The Thompsons opened the Cortland factory in 1926. At one point they even had their own sawmill. During WWII many employees enlisted or were drafted and wood became scarce. Demand fell off. After the War at the peak of production, they had about 200 employees working three shifts around the clock. In the good years, the Cortland plant was producing about 4,000 boats annually. The sixteen footers were coming off every one and a half hours, seventeen footers every two hour and a half hours, and the eighteen footers every four hours. Both Wisconsin factories were also producing at about this rate, so collectively the three factories built many thousand boats each year.
When he still lived in Simsbury, Connecticut, my brother Peter had written to Ted in Cortland trying to establish the year that his Thompson boat was built; later, they decided on 1928. This was just about the time Peter moved his family back to upstate New York.
Ted met us when we arrived with the twoThompson boats. Peter’s 1928 was still in a state of half- restoration, and my 1934 that was completely re-painted and varnished.
Bob Chorley worked at the plant for forty years.
The first employee we met was then ninety-one-year-old Bob Chorley. He worked at the plant in various functions for about forty years and still collected a pension from Chris-Craft. Bob told us they built three or four hulls a day and someone else painted and varnished them. They would build the boat upside down laying the keel and the transom first, then the ribs, and finally the cedar bottom strips. They used temporary nails to hold it together and then tightened bands around the hull before putting the final screws in the bottom of the boat. A compressed seam is what he called the joining of each bottom strip—there was no such thing as 3M’s 5200 back then. [Author’s note: when I took my 1934 Thompson apart there was twisted twine in between each cedar bottom strip. Its purpose was to swell when wet and seal the seams.] The hardware on the finished boat was optional and the sales catalogues Ted showed us had all different options.
The workers were paid by each hull they produced; they were handed “tickets” for the completion per hull. Interestingly, though, they would horde the “tickets” then turn them in during deer hunting season so they would receive an income during the time they went hunting. The foremen didn’t like that!
Ron Anderson, 74 at the time, went to work at Thompson, then went into the Army. Later he lived in Germany; when he came back to the United States, Ron returned to the factory where he cut transoms.
Bob Buchanan made flying bridges. They told us how Bob Thompson once challenged them all to sell boats, saying there were 1,100 towns in the state of New York and they ought to be able to sell just one boat in each city.
Ken Roundy and Howard Henry were there to add their stories, too. They noted how New York state-grown oak was not conducive to building boats. It was too porous. If they wet one end and blew on the other end bubbles would appear on the wet end. Think they were pulling the author’s leg?
All the employees who had built boats and hulls told us they would sign their initials and the date somewhere on the boat.
“Have you found any of your initials in any boat since then?”. I asked Herb Neal. Herb had painted and varnished finished hulls.
He laughed and said, “Well, we did sign it in pencil!”
“Pencil?”
“Yeah, that’s all we had—there weren’t any pens then.” It was true and all of us got a laugh out of that.
Herb and Ted told me about “sloshing” the boats. They tried pouring varnish/sealer inside the finished raw wood hulls and sloshing it all around to be sure the liquids got into and under every rib and wooden surface of the interior, as opposed to doing it all by hand. Apparently the results were mixed.
When fiberglass came into being, to compete, Thompson offered as an option, to sell you the new wooden boat with a fiberglassed bottom (over the wood!). They discovered that if they painted the hull first the fiberglass didn’t bond well to the wood.
Ted showed me a newspaper article about Thompson custom- building a 50 ft. wooden boat in 1915 and shipping it from their Wisconsin factory to the Texas buyer—they always have to have it “bigger” in Texas, huh?
In Cortland, they hired Fred Scott, an engineer, from the Skaneateles Boat Company in Skaneateles, New York (home of the Skaneateles Lightning sailboat, and my home village as well) to come and offer engineering changes to the boats. Fred invented the ventilated keel; the ribs were in the boat in such a manner to allow water to run the length of the keel to the back of the boat and not pool up on each rib. Thompson felt it would improve the duration of the bottom and allow for better drainage. Al Munson described how he scarfed plywood boards together to make stronger materials. They were then cut into narrower boards to become the lapstrakes in the joint clinker-style boats. He showed us some of these seams on one of the other boats that had been brought here for display.
Gloria and Ted Thompson, another one of the founding Thompson brothers
sons, organized the reunion.
We sat down to lunch with Ed Wightman and Dennis Karalow, both of whom were on the board of directors of the Fingerlakes Boat Museum and members of Wine Country Chapter, and their friend Randy Heinle from Ohio. They brought a small Thompson row boat that was donated to the museum. It had a fiberglass coating on the bottom of its hull and was still unrestored. The bow hardware was very unique. Ed told a story how in 2006 they invited Bob Thompson, Ted’s brother and Bruce’s father, to speak at the Wine Country chapter’s event. Bob talked about history of the Thompson companies. They commented on how memorable the speech was, and the sad fact that the very next March Bob passed away.
One final story came out: in every single Thompson Boat Company sales brochure from the 20s and 30s, one option offered was a Lockwood outboard engine. Lockwood had added an electric start to one of his engines and his wife liked it so much she thought she could sell them that way to everybody. The electric starters on those engines were made in Syracuse, New York. Evinrude bought Lockwood in the late 20s or early 30s. I’m not sure of the dates.
In 1958,Thompson, split up among family members into three parts along the lines mentioned earlier. In 1962 the Cortland company was sold to the Chris-Craft Corporation. Today a company in Wisconsin owns the “Thompson” name and they supposedly are making and selling fiberglass boats, so the name is not gone from boating.
Originally printed in the Fall 2013 issue of ACBS Rudder.
What an interesting article. Some insight into the Cortland operation from the people who worked there! I developed an affinity for wood boats and especially Thompson’s spending the summers of my youth on the Chesapeake in the 60’s. I bought a 1964 17′ Thompson by Chris Craft 10 years ago. The brochure I saw for that year called it a 17′ Utility. It has a varnished deck, partial cockpit liners and all wood ventilating windshield. Great boat and we get to use it a fair bit, mostly at Lake George or the Thousand Islands. I currently have a collection of Thompsons from a 12′ Take A Long to a 18′ Sea Lancer and everything in-between. My favorite though is the 17′ Cortland boat with the ventilated keel.