Outboard museum gears up

Boat/US Magazine, May, 2005 by Ryck Lydecker

When the late Vernon "Duke" Montgomery started out as an Evinrude dealer in the early days of outboard motors, he knew he had a real selling job to do. Even in northern Wisconsin's lake country, outboards were still something of a novelty in 1934, so Montgomery decided he had to shoulder his burden--quite literally.

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"My dad would walk around town with an Evinrude Lightwin motor on his shoulder to let people know he was in business," says his son, Jim Montgomery, who now operates his father's business, Duke's Outboard Motor Service in Rhinelander, WI. "Dad figured this way people could see what he was selling. They'd be curious and get to touch the motor and lift it up and say, 'Gee, this might work on my boat.'"

The technique to kick-start the business worked so well that Montgomery's shop, on the shores of Boom Lake on the Wisconsin River, is still a full-line Evinrude dealership seven decades later, but with an interesting twist. Outboard motors on racks three-deep are on display all around the showroom, testament to the history of a uniquely American invention that revolutionized recreational boating worldwide.

Duke's Outboard boasts a collection of 76 antique and collectible "kickers," plus photos, product literature, racing trophies and a few restored boats, spanning the Age of the Outboard. The shop's collection includes motors from every major marque plus some brands that only antique outboard aficionados would recognize, ranging from a 1914, 1.5-hp Lockwood-Ash engine marketed by Sears-Roebuck under the name "Motorgo" to a 1958 Mercury Mark 30.

"People come in my shop and they're just fascinated by these old motors so I thought, why not put them on display in a museum setting where more of the public can see them?" Montgomery says.

Montgomery started promoting the idea for an outboard motor museum in Rhinelander about five years ago. It's been gaining horsepower ever since and has become a privately funded community effort. In September, Rhinelander High School's building trades students will start construction of a 30-by-40-foot building to house the Duke Montgomery Antique Outboard Motor and Boat Museum. Located right next door to Rhinelander's Logging Museum and historic Soo Line Depot railroad museum, it will also provide a venue for other collectors to exhibit their two-cycle treasures on a loan basis.

"There are people all over who have beautiful collections but, unlike me, no place to show them," says Montgomery. "They keep their motors in garages and basements and stuck in closets. Now they'll have a place to show their outboards for a period of time and that way, the face of the museum will be constantly changing, too."

It's certainly no surprise that veteran boaters shopping at Duke's Outboards for the first time would spy a familiar motor, plop a palm on the cowling and begin a memory with, "When I was a kid ..." But will the general public visiting this Northwoods resort country or just passing through share that affinity?

"Hey, you don't have to know a thing about art or history or science to walk out of a museum having learned something and appreciated its exhibits," says Montgomery. "People are amazed by the designs and styling and engineering ideas the manufacturers came up with to grab the eye of the customer and to make their product stand out from the competition.

"This is an effort to collect and preserve much of this history while it's still available," he adds.

As it turns out, Montgomery couldn't have picked a better time to break ground for the museum, since 2005 marks the 100th anniversary of the outboard motor.

Portable Power

The general consensus is that the Age of the Outboard began in 1905 when C.B. Waterman demonstrated the first practical "detachable rowboat motor" on the Detroit River. Inspired two years earlier while tinkering with a recalcitrant Regal motorcycle engine, Waterman set out to design a motor that could take the "row" out of the rowboat that he and his father used for summer fishing on Lake Superior.

According to an article the then-law student wrote 13 years later in the April 1916 issue of National Sportsman magazine, Waterman "experimented during every spare moment with this idea." His friends, he wrote, "laughed at my tinkerings. The scheme seemed utterly ridiculous to them."

He went on to make what, in hindsight, seems an astounding observation about his early efforts to perfect an "outboard motor," a term he apparently coined. "At that time, internal combustion engines of any kind were still very crude affairs," he wrote. "They were far from being in their present highly developed state."

Nonetheless, Waterman must have astounded his peers in 1905 when he clamped his contraption on the transom of a 14-foot steel rowboat at Grosse Ile, MI, started it up with a crank, and crisscrossed the river, dodging ice flows along the way. The next summer, 1906, he put his motor to the test on a five-mile trip from Lake Superior's Spruce Harbor to his favorite fishing grounds, "breaking all rowboat records" in 35 minutes.