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My first motor was a 1969 Merc 80 on my first boat…a 13′ Hustler Wildcat which was also my first race boat.
A 1956 Johnson 5-1/2, CD-12, I must have been 13. I’d saved all my grass cutting, window cleaning, car washing money. Hung it on the back of the Optimist pram my Dad built for me (I paid for materials). 3 or 4 other buddies had small boats with small outboards and we ran them from May to September, every day, in our little harbor off Long Island Sound. We’d stick the handle end of an oar in the water at speed and try to soak each other with the rooster tail, fish, swim, run up creeks and backwaters. Pretty sweet memories. Love to have another CD-12.
I grew up on Long Island Sound also…My parents used to rent out our home near the city to city people, and we would rent out a shack on Fairfield Beach for the summer….The Sound was our front yard, the “creek” was our back yard. My brother and I destroyed several mid 50s fleetwins, I think they spent as much time under the salt water as they did right side up. Always got em restarted though, surprised none of them ever threw a rod. Then one day, my brother brought home a beautiful looking 58 Fleetwin, but we never got it running on both cylinders…This one probably had a thrown rod, and we didn’t know it. Probably why it was nice looking, never got any use. A few years later, I would get my own 68 Lightwin for the 8′ flat bottom “skimmer”. Our summers were most kids “dream come true”. Both parents worked, so us four “delightful” Kellogg kids were left “home alone” on the beach for the summer, quickly learned how to “spin the bottle” and smoke cigarettes watching the older siblings having fun.
It is ironic that our dream summers were born out of financial need…Parents rented out our home across the street from the sound for big bucks, and we all jammed together in a summer shack for much less. I have many great memories with my brother on the beach, before he got old enough to drive and chase girls….1 user thanked author for this post.
I may have posted on this thread a couple years ago , but I don’t want to go through it looking so here goes, maybe again:
First one I operated was Dad’s 1946 4.2 HP Champion model 1J – When I was 5 years old, he would go to the front of the 14′ cedar-strip boat and let me steer it. I still have that motor. It’s now unique because living in St Paul, he used to take it to the Champion factory in a suburb just north of St. Paul/Minneapolis for service and one time when it was there in the early 1950s, when he picked it up, at no cost to him, they had run it through the paint booth and put on new decals, so what was a silver motor is now a factory -painted blue motor!
The first motor I owned was a 1953 Champion 4LHD “Hydro-Drive” 8.5 HP that I got for $30 in 1961 when I was 14 and put on an 8 foot , 3 -point hydroplane I built in the basement from plans in a magazine. I was able to run that motor into the mid-1980s, because Lyle Swanson, who got the remains of the Champion factory parts when they went out of business had his stock and shop 20 minutes from the family lake place. When I was 14, I got really good at getting that motor going again after taking waves wrong with the hydroplane and dunking it. Photo below (taken in the mid-1960s) of it on the hydroplane after a dunk.
Dave
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My first motor came with my first boat, a ’74 chrysler 75hp. This was 3 years ago when I was 17, I wanted a boat for my birthday so I bought one. Now I have over 40 classic motors and about 10 run. That Chrysler will idle all day but refuses to run in gear, oh well it’s being saved for a later date. Something about the gold and white scheme captivated me.
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