Fathers' boat story binds families

SANDPOINT — This is the story of two fathers and how their shared love of a 19th Century rowboat plied the tributaries of time until it was passed on to a new generation.

The passing of that torch was delayed for nearly 20 years, put on hold until one son rediscovered his father’s passion and the daughter from another family was reintroduced to her dad’s inspiration.

And the catalyst for this reconnection, this circumnavigation of family tradition, was a simple boat mold that had been stowed away since the early 1990s. Once recovered and pressed into service, however, the form worked its old magic again, bringing back memories that were on the brink of being forgotten.

“Frank was a boat nut who always needed a new challenge,” said Sandpoint’s Bev Kee, describing her father, Frank Wright.

Wright, who hailed from the East Coast, was a big man with big ideas and ever-changing interests. Unlike those who were content to dream but never actually do, he pounced on his passions like some ancient hunter, wrestling them to the ground and conquering them, one by one, before moving on to the next challenge.

In 1977, the challenge before him was to construct an exact replica of a Whitehall “pulling boat” — a vessel used for nearly 100 years by police, postmen, freight haulers, gun runners and smugglers of every stripe who needed a fast, seaworthy way to get around on the water.

Using plans he found in a book about American small sailing craft — plans that were reproduced in type so small that it required a magnifying glass to read them — Wright spent more than 300 hours creating a full-size plaster mockup that would be wrapped by the “female mold” used to build his Whitehall boat.

True to form, Wright, who passed away in 2001, completed a perfect replica, pronounced it satifactory and moved on to find some new item of interest.

“He built one boat off of that mold,” said Troy Weill, whose own father also plays a big part in this story. “My dad bought it and went into production in the spring of 1978. He made about 25 Whitehalls and sold them all the way from Flathead Lake to Lake Tahoe.”

Steve Weill kept building the rowing boats until the timber market heated up and there was more money to be made in logging than making historically accurate rowboats. In the interim, he also apprenticed and worked for master instrument builder R.L. “Bob” Givens in the Sandpoint luthier’s mandolin and guitar shop. When Givens died in 1993, Weill gained permission from the family to use Bob’s jigs and building plans to carry on under the name Givens Legacy and later created a separate instrument line under his own last name.

In the meantime, the Whitehall mold had been sold. But its lure was never completely lost on Troy Weill, whose earliest memories include being rowed around in the boat by his father.

“From the age of one, dad would take my brother and I out on Lake Pend Oreille in all kinds of weather,” Weill the younger said. “It got wild and wooly sometimes, but we always made it back. And that’s a real testament to the quality of these boats.”

A few years ago, Troy developed his own interest in rowing boats and, in 2008, located and repurchased Wright’s original Whitehall mold. Last winter, he started work on his first boat and made an accidental connection with Bev Kee when he stopped by the Paint Bucket — Wright’s business that was passed down to his daughter, Liz Stephenson and her husband, Harold — to by supplies.

“I was introduced to Troy as ‘the guy who’s going to start building dad’s boat,’” Kee said. “I said, ‘I have to have your first one!’

“I need another boat like a hole in the head,” added Kee, whose classic, wooden Chris-Craft now sits in the slip next to the Whitehall she put in the water a little more than a week ago. “But the love of wooden boats was dad’s legacy to us.”

On a recent drizzly morning, the two kids of the boat-building dads got together to row around in the Whitehall. Even under a sky obscured by low-hanging clouds, the boat stood out sharply on the jade water, its Honduras mahogany seats, vertical grain white oak trim and copper rivets from England adding crisp detail to the elegant lines of the white hull.

Kee sat back and smiled as Weill dipped the hand-carved oars and pulled in an arcing motion that made the boat look like it was born to the water. From 1820 to about 1910, when the gasoline engine crowded out strong backs, the same rowing motion made boats like the Whitehall the primary means of transportation along the waterways of America. Speed was its hallmark, as it could easily maintain 5 m.p.h. with a load of passengers or cargo and make short bursts of 7 m.p.h. or more when the need arose.

According to Troy Weill, there is really nothing left to improve on a boat that already has everything going for it.

“The original Whitehalls were being built by hundreds of different builders and it was refined and brought to perfection by trial and error,” he said. “It’s a perfect combination of speed, stability and load-carrying capacity.”

The single boat Wright made from his mold now belongs to his grandson, Jim Woodward of Sagle. Following in his father’s footsteps, Troy Weill already has completed a second vessel from that original form, for a total of 30 Whitehalls since the small print in a little-known boat book inspired the first project.

“The mold is still in great shape, 33 years after Frank built it,” Weill said as he stepped out of the rowboat and onto the dock. “He was an incredible craftsman. All you have to do is look at the lines of this boat to see that it was built by somebody with skills.”

“This is a real tribute to him,” Kee said of her father. “He would have been very excited to see this boat back on the water.”

In a way, Frank Wright will experience the rowing motion and ride in the Whitehall once again later this summer. In a ritual that has been waiting nearly a decade for the right moment to happen, his children will climb into the boat as a family. They will row out onto the Pend Oreille River and, in a boat their father created on a waterway he loved, they will travel together and choose a spot to spread his ashes.

For information on the Whitehall boats, as well as a new, 15-foot Lake Oswego model being made by Troy Weill, visit: www.classicrowboats.com