TOPIC: Interesting article on the boom of power boating

Have a place on Lake Ozark and saw this article posted on a local site. Interesting read, may be old news to many on here...

www.lakeexpo.com/boating/a-look-back-at-boating-in-the-s-the-first/article_2570ca88-5074-11e7-b748-3bdcc19e5cbb.html

His comments about building the dam bring back memories. My father worked on the building of Grand Coulee Dam during the same period of time, along with a lot of my relatives. Grand Coulee was also a magnet for men looking for work. My father moved from Minnesota to work on the dam.

Interesting article but it has some really glaring falsehoods. Lake of the Ozarks is definitely not the largest fresh water reservoir. Roosevelt Lake behind Grand Coulee is 9 times larger and it isn't even the largest. Plus he claims it is the most popular boating lake in the country. I can think of many other places that make the same claim. I haven't been there but I am sure it is beautiful and very popular.

Hacker did not invent the V hull, but may have been the first to use it in production boats. But round chine planing hull boats had been around a while. V hulls were just faster and more stable. Huckins (the PT boat people) were building V hulls as early as 1928. Actually most of the early research and designing on V hulls was done in England. A Brit named Lindsay Lord published what is considered to the "bible" on planing hull design, in 1945, Naval Architecture Of Planing Hulls, and it is still in publication. Someone stole my copy back in 1986. Anyway he had been involved in it for many years and this was a compilation of all the research done up to that time.

Chris Craft boats were still "hand built" just not one at a time. They developed a production line, but real mass production didn't come until fiberglass and small aluminum boats. And there were others doing the same thing just not as much as Chris.