In a river town that shuns frivolity, they put glamour on the water - Murphy Boats recreates vintage wooden powerboats

Nation's Business, July, 1990 by Michael Barrier

In A River Town That Shuns Frivolity, They Put Glamour On The Water

La Crosse, Wis., is a non-nonsense sort of Mississippi River industrial town, with a few small, green parks hunkered down on a river-front otherwise dominated by such serious subjects as cement, beer, and cheese. As Francis B. Murphy says, "Nothing frivolous."

Murphy's business, a block from the water, is something of an exception to La Crosse's rule. He and his partner, James Sebranek, operate under the name Murphy Boats. They make sleek wooden powerboats, modern versions of the luxurious Chris-Craft and GarWood boats that plied resort lakes and coastal waters in the '20s and '30s.

Despite their glamorous good looks, those earlier boats suffered under some powerful disadvantages: They required a lot of maintenance, and they had to be kept in the water so they wouldn't dry out and spring leaks. They faded away decades ago, displaced by boats with more practical fiberglass hulls.

The Murphy wooden boats incorporate enough modern technology to bring them even with their fiberglass competitors. the wood is held together with epoxy resins, for example, and epoxy-impregnated fiberglass cloth covers the hull below the water line; there is thus no need to keep the boats in the water. "We're building a modern boat out of wood," says Sebranek, 38. "Our boats are lighter, faster, and stronger than the old runabouts, with a lot less maintenance."

This mixture of elegance and convenience does not come cheap. The starting prices for Murphy Boats' runabouts and cabin cruisers range from $36,773 to $78,450, considerably more than comparable fiberglass boats. The manufacturing process for wooden boats can't be as efficient as producing fiberglass boats, Murphy explains, because a wooden boat has to keep doubling back for another coat of varnish.

Murphy Boats made only 18 boats last year and has never made more than 25 any year since production started in 1980; no more than six craftsmen are ever at work in the Murphy plant. Francis Murphy thinks 25 boats is about the limit before it would become necessary to compromise on quality: "If it gets beyond that, boats will go out of here that neither of us has ever seen."

As it is, Murphy's boats benefit from scrupulous attention to detail. Had you stood at the pow of one under construction last spring, for instance, you would have seen that the grain of the wood matched precisely on both sides.

Murphy, 57, grew up on a farm in Iowa, about 40 miles from La Crosse, and left school after the eighth grade. "There was no need to go on for higher education," he says, "unless you wanted to be a priest or a country agent." Over the next few decades, he started one successful business after another--he made wooden duck calls, and, under the name Great Circle Films, he made movies about hunting.

He met Sebranek through another of his businesses: taking aerial photos of farms in the Midwest, then selling the photos to the farmers door-to-door. Sebranek came to work for Murphy as a pilot in the mid-1970s and stayed around as Murphy shifted his attention to the boat business; now they are full partners. Essentially, Murphy oversees the production of the boats, and Sebranek sells them.

Murphy's enthusiasm for wooden boats is not a late passion: He remembers watching wooden boats on the Mississippi--"I thought a Chris-Craft with four portholes was far more interesting than a tractor"--and he built his first one when he was 12. He had an inkling there might be a business in them when, in 1960, he restored a derelict wooden boat. The boat caused such a stir, he says, "that I knew there had to be a specialty market." In the '60s and '70s he restored and repaired boats and built a few new ones, before going into the boat-building business full time.

As rich as most of his customers have to be--and as famous as some of them probably are (Murphy and Sebranek won't give out names)--Murphy doesn't speak of them with quite the reverence you might expect. The 1986 Tax Reform Act did his business no good, he says, because it cut back on tax shelters and therefore crimped the style of some of his likeliest customers: "new money trying to look like old money." Buying a boat for show, he suggests wryly, has a lot in common with buying a grand piano that no one ever plays: "When they buy a boat, it doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to put it in the water."

Like other dedicated craftsmen, Murphy has to live with the truth that the people who can best appreciate the boats he makes are not always the people who can afford to buy them. But sometimes money and appreciation do come together, in unusual ways.

Murphy speaks of a "very powerful man" who bought one of the smaller boats and then "called up one day and said he was coming up to buy a bigger one. I kind of asked him why, and he said, 'When I get in this boat, people talk to me, and they don't want anything.'" That executive could pull into a marina and, for once, find himself approached by people who wanted only to express their admiration for the beautiful object he had chosen to own.