March 10, Le Gran Directeur of the Great State of Art Bee-Zel-Bob Matheny circumnavigated and exorcized the Great Salton Sea. Satan was his navigator and exorcizer. As you know, only the devil can exorcize borders and large basins of salt water.

While exploring the ancient remains of the lakeside community Salton Sea Beach, Bee-Zel-Bob chanced upon the archaeological remains of what may have been a 1947 Chris-Craft motor boat.

Maybe not.

That inspiring and revelationary sighting triggered a memory of things past: a souvenir related to Chris-Craft motor boats.

A real Chris-Craft.

Take a demo @: http://www.chriscraftboats.com/legend.aspx

SUMMER OF 1947

As you may recall, if you read my previous memories of things past (the last half of the "Truck Story"), after graduating from high school in 1947 I worked for my Uncle Mac at the Matheny Motor Truck Company in Parkersburg, West Virginia. After an undisclosed number of anonymous alcoholic beverages at the old downtown Elk's Club in Parkersburg, Mac suggested we drive to the dock and take a midnight ride on the Ohio River in his new Chris-Craft motor boat.

The boat looked something like this one.

It was a moonless, dark foreboding night with what looked like pitch black water. There were no river lamps and no other traffic. Mark Between Twain was absent. Mac let me have the wheel and the throttle and we took off racing up and down the middle of the vast waterway. At the time, there was an absence of lap and shoulder belts in automobiles, even the Tucker, a dealership my uncle had considered buying that summer on a trip to Chicago I had the good fortune to attend. Being a responsible Chris-Craft captain, Mac provided life preservers, which we had the sense to wear for the ride.

By some chance of good luck, the beautiful Chris-Craft motor boat missed colliding with any drift wood floating its way down the Ohio to meet the Mississippi River.