Chapter 30

“This is a Minox I had during the war. This will take good pictures of the documents. I have two rolls of film still sealed in the original package and I have kept them in the freezer as instructed.

They will be good pictures. We will have your Uncle Jimmy develop them.” Dad’s brother Jim is an amateur photographer and has his own darkroom.

We talked for another hour but it always came back to the same conclusions. The Logan County Historical Society and Janet Rupert should get something out of this. The Shawnee Tribe in Oklahoma should get the medal and letters.

We were asking for nothing directly if the boathouse turned out to be a positive purchase that would be good, but we wouldn’t cry if it wasn’t.

I read some of Scheherazade’s stories that night. She certainly could come up with cliffhangers. My version was an illustrated one by the English explorer.

Sunday had Dad and me up at Radford’s near Lewistown at two o’clock. She was a short stout woman with dark hair which highlighted her mustache. We didn’t stay very long, just long enough, for him to write a check and her to sign over the deeds and give Dad the keys to the buildings.

Even during that short of a visit, she managed to be nasty. She was nice to Dad but wanted to know if I was that Englishwoman’s child. He told her yes and let it go. She gave me a glare as though I were the snake in the Garden of Eden.

As we were leaving she said, “Jack, don’t even bother to look, I had the fuel tank drained.”

After that pleasant remark, we headed to the Indian Lake Marina. Dad had arranged for a local fisherman who ran a water taxi service for locals to run us over to Bellefontaine Island.

I asked Dad, “What is her problem. Did you dump her daughter or something?”

I was only kidding so was very surprised when he responded,

“Her daughter dumped me, but she can never remember that. I had dated Doris before I joined the service. We had even talked a little about getting married. Before we could get serious I was sent to England. We wrote back and forth for almost a year when she wrote that she had met another guy and was going to marry him.”

“Oh,” was all I could say.

Dad continued, “Luckiest thing that ever happened to me. I ended up meeting your mother. If you ever want to know what a woman will look like when she is older look at her mother. Doris looks just like Della today. When she was young her figure was what we called, svelte. Today she is just plain fat.”

This all came under the heading of information that I didn’t need.

Fortunately, the trip to the boathouse was only fifteen minutes to the dock where the waterman was waiting for us. We had rough old clothes and brought flashlights. We didn’t think we would be very long so Dick Meyers agreed to wait for us. He accompanied us to the boathouse.

Dad now had all the keys so we were able to get in with no problems. There were wooden Chris Craft boats up on cradles, but as Dad had thought all had some degree of rot and none of them looked salvageable.

Dad and Dick made an arrangement right then and there that they would come back and examine the boats in greater detail and that Dick would salvage the controls and brightwork. The engines had all been removed and were gone.

After setting aside what seemed like a ton of empty cardboard boxes we found a large wooden crate. It was stenciled 1947 17’ Chris Craft deluxe runabout. Dick rummaged around and found a crowbar.