Over at Phil Kunz Photography (in case you haven’t visited the “Updates to the website” section) We have all new photos opening up and scrolling across the home page.
In the Scrapbook section, there is almost 500 new ‘old’ photographs now posted. As you view all the boats in the Scrapbook, wherever possible, one can read the boat name, number, owner, driver, race site the photograph was taken and year. And NEW this year — we added the builder’s name for all the boats you see. Enjoy.
Adding all the boat builder’s name was an interesting delight. In the course of a few evenings, Phil would be telling me who built what boat and I was typing furiously as we went through each boat, one-by-one. Amazing the memory this man has. This all would have gone quicker, but most boats have a story and Phil and I would get sidetracked often as his stories veered us away from the task at hand.
Danny Walls
Newport, Kentucky 1957
homemade built
I was amazed at the number of boats that were either “Homemade built” or built from “xxxx plans”. Ya know, when I think about it, it is quite interesting (historically speaking), back then – how many inboard hydros were built by their owners and/or friends, jack a motor somewhere, tear it down, hot rod it out….and show up at a boat race ready to kick some ass. Maybe the boat sanctioning organizations, today could take a page from this and try to inject some classes that have this flavor. But on the other hand – maybe there is not enough young folks these days that would take on the challenge of building your own inboard hydro, trips to the junkyard or speedshop, steal a motor from something, build a trailer, find some used tires for it, etc…..then hope to have some cash leftover to drag it to all the races during the summer.
