Posted: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:01 AM - 10,722 Readers
By: Larry Edsall
photo by Andy Manis for The New York TimesKEVIN MUELLER’S car collection started with his grandmother’s 1957 Chevrolet sedan, which he received as a high school graduation present in 1980. In the years since, he has added a few classic Chrysler Corporation cars and a red-and-white ’57 Chevy Bel Air convertible. But his collectible that draws the biggest crowd at car shows isn’t even an automobile: it’s a 1958 Glastron Seaflite, a fiberglass boat with tailfins much like those on the ’57 Chevy that tows it.
In the late 1950s, Glastron and other fiberglass boat builders produced vessels with headlamps, tailfins and other flourishes borrowed from automotive design. Today, Mr. Mueller, a jeweler in Rockton, Ill., is among the most ardent of those who find, restore and collect these boats. While finned boats are now worth many times their original list prices of roughly $1,200 to $2,000, they remain fairly affordable — if you can find one.
Mr. Mueller, who owns 25 boats, said that while American automakers produced some five million vehicles a year in the late 1950s, “in 1958, Glastron made 3,878 boats, but that included everything, including canoes, and they were possibly the largest or second-largest fiberglass producer of that time.”
While none of these boats exist in large numbers, collectors covet truly rare models like the Glass Slipper built in 1958-59 in Hillsdale, Mich., by the Marlin Marine Division of the 13 Corporation, which had just three employees and built only 20 boats.
Even more rare than the Glass Slipper is what Mr. Mueller considers the holy grail of finned fiberglass boats, the Cadillac Sea Lark, of which only three were built.
“I have the only one known to exist,” Mr. Mueller said. “There’s probably another one or two that survived, but they have to be found.”
Like other finned boats of the period, the Sea Lark was inspired by the dream cars of General Motors’ hugely popular Motorama shows. Executives of Evinrude, the boat-motor maker, commissioned the industrial designer Brooks Stevens to create a concept boat to showcase the company’s newest outboard motor. “The boat had unbelievable tailfins, about two feet above the deck and real wide, like a ’59 Cadillac on steroids,” Mr. Mueller said.
Evinrude had two of the boats, called the Lark, built to show. It then asked boat builders for proposals to put the craft into production. The Cadillac Boat Company of Cadillac, Mich., received rights to the design, which it called the Cadillac Sea Lark. Research by Mr. Mueller and other collectors indicates that Cadillac built only three of the boats before deciding they were too expensive — nearly $2,000 without a motor or a trailer — and, with just two seats, too impractical.
“I was really stressed out whether I’d ever find one,” Mr. Mueller said of his quest for one of the five Larks or Sea Larks known to have been built. He finally found one, a Sea Lark that had been stored for decades in an old chicken coop in New York State.
Perhaps the first finned boat was the Meteor, developed by Robert Hammond when he was working for Lone Star, a boat builder in Grand Prairie, Tex. “I was always kind of a car nut when I was younger,” Mr. Hammond, who is 80, said in a telephone interview from his home on Lake Austin, Tex. Having seen the Motorama cars, Mr. Hammond said he wondered how futuristic fins and other car-styling touches would look on a boat. This was in 1956, he recalled, before large fins became common on cars.
Mr. Hammond said his design “in retrospect was kind of ugly,” but Lone Star put the Meteor into production.
Before long, Mr. Hammond left Lone Star and started the Glastron boat company. Production started with the Glastron Fireflite and Surfflite.
While the 1956 Lone Star Meteor was perhaps the first of the finned ’50s boats, the craze really took off in 1958, Mr. Mueller said: “Everybody and his brother was making crazy things, though only a few of each.”
Fiberglass made it easy to get into the boatmaking business, Mr. Mueller said, but many of the builders didn’t realize how labor-intensive the business was. Failures were common.
“There were very few of any individual boat, but there were very, very, very many people who each made a very few, so you had tremendous variety,” Mr. Mueller said.
