actually i did work at the boat works a couple of summers when i was in high school my job was to sweep the floor so here is an early brochure can everybody here be in the back ok this is a early brochure of the boat works they've been boat builders in white  for a long time there was a mr lieberman and eight hundred seventy three that was a professional boat builder but over the years if you get past one thousand nine hundred the two prominent bo builders were gus amundson and john johnson and john johnson operated his boat works operated for more than one hundred years so he became the preeminent boat builder and wait there so here we have a farm in norway johnno johnson was born in awful norway and eight hundred seventy five and his mother died when he was seven years old so his father didn't know what to do with the three kids self the three year old daughter went to an orphanage a twelve year old daughter went to a home where she did housework and sewing and john was f various locations like this like the farm similar to this when he was seven years old and one of the jobs he had in one of the farms was to go out and get a bucket of water from the stream to bring water to the house and one winter day he was getting water from a hole in the ice in the stream the ice gave way fell in was swept underneath the ice a franticly clawed his way back to the hole climbed out ran back to the farmhouse and the lady in the house said he johann what in the world happened to you get by the fire and get warmed up later that evening the farmer talked to him and said where is the bucket and johan said it must be under the ice in the farmer said well you'll have to be punished so age fifteen he's now back at heart and living with his father and he has a job on a coastal steamer delivering supplies to some of the seaside villages and norway is one of the fjords of norway and a lot of the villages are mainly supplied by boat so he had a job and a coastal steamer for a while versus father came in eight hundred seventy one and then a little bit later one brother one of the gus's brothers came and then another brother with his mother in finally an eight hundred twenty two eight hundred eighty two i think is the eight hundred eighty two gus and two of his sisters arrived and they lived in brooklyn new york for a while i don't know when they first got to wait there but gu went back to norway to hearten norway where john lived and married marie hansen in order to norway and then he came back to white bear and started his boat works an eight hundred eighty seven well marie and gus went back to norway several times and i think about eight hundred eighty nine gus and marie went to horton and where he met john johnson a fourteen year old guy and said i told john if you ever come to minnesota you can work for me and my boat works he did work one season on a small whaling shi so one eight hundred ninety three decides to travel to america is a steam ship called the thing vala and the top speed of this ship was about ten miles an hour and back in those days there was still some clipper ship sailing and a clipper ship with a good win could go seventeen miles an hour so one evening in the middle of the ocean the passengers on this ship looked up and they could see the beautiful white clipper ship overtaking them and then the sail by oh such a beautiful sight that they all cheered later on in november they arrived in new york where john had  to go through immigration they checked for communicable diseases and they'd ask questions like do you have finances to support your stay in america so he kept as part of his passage to america the ticket included a train ticket but that only one as far as chicago so he's en chicago any doesn't speak more than a few words of english and he told us that if you didn't know what you were doing if and you needed help you would just stand in the middle of the platform and you would yell out something in norwegian and if somebody  and then you could find out what you had to do why he was wandering around the track trade me yards in chicago and he found a railroad man who was a norwegian and then norway norwegian red man said hey you can ride in the caboose with me to saint paul so he got to st paul ok and he arrived in white buried in the height of the park that's right melees pavilion was and then down by goose lake where co all skis is was light scottish park resort and nicholas peterson had a boat rental about here and later on his wife ingeborg would have a restaurant here and i want to mention nicholas i think he was the first norwegian to settle in white bear lake he was here before eight hundred eighty and maybe he had some something to do with the other norwegians that came there was andrew peterson and then gus amundson and of course gus invited my grandfather later  on gus amas and had his house across the railroad tracks on lincoln lincoln or railroad avenue and a few years later when johnno johnson was able to rent a house he got he was right across the street from gus just show you a little bit about some of these resorts life cottage park was a wonderful resort to the hotel cottages billiard room sporting fields and a fine fleet of rental boats and they were manly and eight hundred ninety built this wonderful pavilion about one hundred fifty by five hundred feet it had three floors the top floors were apartments the main floor was for programs such as dances and plays and the bottom floor led alister to the lake for boat rental and steam boat rides in the foreground here is the lake shore road station so in those days maybe twenty five trains a day would stop and wait there and this train station was really convenient for  pavilion big auditorium could see two thousand people and they would have plays dances various programs hundred and my grandfather would have been twenty five but i didn't see him hundred ninety six this is a daughter of nicholas peterson and john married her at the home of gus amundson and the newspaper reporter and the w newspaper got it mixed up and said that mary peterson married john amis and but we know it was really my grandfather and nicholas  peterson had this boat rental in aboard later on had this nice lunchroom on the lake so here's the one of the steamers they had a lot of the steamboats and white bear and  y peterson's younger brother tom was the captain of this steamboat and in one thousand nine hundred nine the steamboat had an explosion and he was severely injured and a few months later he died here's a steamer white bear and the steamboats would go from alias to the end across the lake maybe making a stop by a cleric steed or someplace and maybe end up in wildwood twenty five cents for a round trip fifteen cents one way but the management does not take responsibility for your safety is a yacht club dock in one thousand nine hundred and of course the primary business of my grandfather was the build sail boats for is a nasa steamer and the best that i can figure out from my research is it uses knapp say as a fuel and also a nap site is the working fluid in the pistons like a steam instead of steam it's knapp's the vapor which sounds kind of dangerous to me here's the club they built a wonderful club house and one hundred twelve and if you notice a sailboat in the foreground there is a a spire that sticks up at an angle there that's called a gaffe so this is a gas rig sailboat and in the early days al rigs anymore except maybe some reproduction and stayed there for the summer well he's kind of a rock rowdy party guy giver and the people at the i kicked him out in august this building burned down in one nine hundred thirty seven so not not all of the boats were used strictly for racing the pleasure sailing was fun too and here we have a nice outing here the the ladies are arresting picture i don't know if you can see it but at the stern of the boat there's a hand coming up from the water and on the front of the boat somebody is holding an umbrella guard pearson's lunchroom remember i mentioned her name before that's john's mother in law and the restaurant was closed during the winter because the tourists are only here in the summer so he said i'd like to clear out all the tables and chairs and build a sailboat in here thirty eight foot sailboat and this is what he built we call this the first a class sail boat and earlier days the sail boats had kind of a v shape bottom and they would knife through the water but this design was a flat bottom with a rounded side so that when it tipped up the rounded part would be in the water like a canoe just gliding through the water or when it's flat it would just skim across the top of the water so it was much improved over the old designs he built this boat for a milton griggs and they were having a big competition between the this boat one built by amundson and another bill boat built by remain lee to see who could compete with the canadians they had a big regatta going up there in the competition where they this boat won all the race they had trial races between the three boats and this boat won all the races and heavy wins but other boats would win and light winds so a committee cho really important boat builder and was the important starting point in his career then a year later he married and adore my grandmother interesting to me is that when john was seven years old his mother died and then when milton was six or seven years old his mother died so it sort of repeated history there so anna had two sons ivor and my dad walter  here we have about nineteen zero to every god i think in wisconsin john johnson and gus amundson are posing for a picture with the regatta winner walter do pay from green lake wisconsin hundred ten during they the couple of months before january john had been reading in the newspapers about the wright brothers and all these early airplane people he decided to build his own a irplane and there's a newspaper picture which is better than this but for my slide i had an artist draw this his airplane that he designed looked like a giant dragon fly but without much of a tail and too long when wings about eight feet wide and thirty feet long a twenty horsepower two cycle engine is so he decided to launch this thing from the frozen lake in january well the this turned out to be the first successful flight in minnesota where a pilot was actually able to take off under the plane's own power they had been an earlier attempt to launch an airplane in my in minute tonka they went down a hill and went off kind of a ski jump and but this is the first to take office on power in minnesota the plane got up about twenty five feet and went about two hundred yards but then the engine died and so it kind of crash landed and broke the runners in the  so by the a year later he's made a smaller airplane and he's looking for an engine that would be lightweight so he could fly this thing and this isn't his backyard you know i said to the father grandfather lived across a railroad tracks on lincoln avenue there so this is backyard he couldn't find enough money to get a suitable engine but he wanted to fly it so he built a platform in the back end of a large motor boat on the lake put the airplane on the platform in a task the rope to it and then rent real fast with a motor boat and played out the rope like a kite and so this airplane is is flying a kite and the rope broke so then he is he's gliding having a really good time gliding around the lake and eventually settles down in the water and the story goes that the spectators were on the shore my grandmother is holding my one year old father in your arms and the man next to her her says that's the end of another damn fool but it wasn't he he had just settled down in the water and was savoring his flight in funny swam out in the meanwhile the motor boat had been watching the flight and they weren't paying attention where they were going to ran ashore the next thing you know he he was really interested in automobiles and join the st paul auto club here in white bear here here's a busy highway to white bear in one nine hundred twenty four and in the winter time the county did not have good snow removal equipment and it was the still got too deep they just gave up if you want to get the same paul you took the train or you could take a horse and sleigh and in fact a picture here in one hundred twenty two of how the mail was delivered in wait there while john did like the idea of not being able to use a car in the winter an thought ah time for another invention so he invented a rotary snowplow that had rotors on both sides that would throw the snow off the side and he is another one of his snowplows in washington state the first time they kept silk snoqualmie pass open during the winter well he tried to build this on his own but there was a company in minneapolis with dealing in caterpillar tractors i think and the businessman there got together with john and said ok we'll build these things in minneapolis and we'll pay you a royalty for every one that's built so that one nicely for several years but then john was getting more money through the royalties than they were making  profits for making these things so they bought out the patent and from the money from this snowplow invention he was able to enlarge his boat works modernize the equipment which gave him a big advantage probably gave him a big advantage over amundson because john had the money to to expand so the bottom picture shows a driveshaft on the ceiling there is a big gasoline engine that powered this drive shaft with leather leather belts coming down from the ceiling and these leather belts would power the various saws and other equipment well gus and john remain close friends over the years for example when john's wife died in one thousand nine hundred four gus was the pallbearer for that funeral and then there was a tragic accident where gus his wife and his sister were both killed at a streetcar stop in white bear automobile ran into them in one nine hundred twenty nine so john and his son milton were pallbearers for gus his wife a picture in front of the johnson boat works doesn't work to be to the left i love this picture because it shows the model both the street car and the little white building their previous bo livery the street car went along the lake right in front of the boat works and when they built the boat works in one thousand and thirteen and my dad was three years old his mother was afraid he never survived there was the main road from st paul right in front of the boat were speak are right in front of the boat works and of course the lake where he might fall in and drown but he survived there is a my dad's brother i ever built a model of the u s s constitution here's a painting and am made of the boat works this building was built in one thousand thirteen and up stairs are the apartment buildings are apartments on the left was the apartment for john and anna and the right john son milton and his family and the downstairs of course was the manufacturing ford my dad and jim brehm back here at the end now there's been a lot of other workers there too but these are some of them and they did their own drafting they did did everything that they did their machining and metal parts they did all their the wood work of course and they did their own blueprints for building sailboats so there's my dad buster at the one and so i ever is back here and my dad is up here and i think that some of the other crews are people from the boat work we talked about the thirty eight foot a race for able it's big storms all tipped over three of them break their mast and that's the end of a boat sailing for seventy two years and white  and there's the crew of the red raven my dad on the right ivory with his arms clara crossed so other types of boats they able to thirty eight feet so ok will make a thirty two foot that'll be easier to handle right well that's still a big boat so it was only popular to about  there was some version of a sea boat from one thousand nine hundred five and this twenty foot boat has remained popular over the years then i think the white bear resident mr lilley decided that there should be an export sixteen foot boat for youngsters to race so this is primarily for kids under we also need ice boats and these big i suppose could go pretty fast they've been clocked at one hundred miles an hour and back in one nine hundred thirty that was probably faster than some airplanes faster than a car is the fastest right around and my uncle pete milton loved fast ice both my dad like upward boats the and nineteen thirty three he won a lot of races in minnesota but one hundred thirty three went to the national championships and managed to finish third and of course highway sixty one is just a small highway  making wooden boats is very time consuming and there were a lot of people that tried to be boat builders and a lot of them went out of business because it was just higher do i make a   after later on they went to double planked boat and it didn't need that cotton any more so were have i ever and another worker bending or crib over a mold they take these all cribs about half an inch by three quarter inch strips that walk put him in a steam box there was a steam box back in the wall here and live wet steam with wood heat and soak these fol  traps until there is pliable it is almost like spaghetti and they could bend them over the molds and then nail them and place on the bottom the so here we see a mold that has all the oak ribs bent in place and this rock around one hundred seventy five they made their last wooden sailboat so that they took a lot of pictures and follow that up with a three a sense white cedar lengthwise so we got a double plank the planking is glued and screwed to the all cribs underneath and all of the screw holes are then putted and everything this is the man they usually mean they used white cedar for all this woodwork here's iron buster putting some planks on the deck of a  boat in the back there the boat deck is complete and they put canvas on the deck the way they did that was put a thick layer of wet paint all over the wooden deck and then stretched this canvas there is a machine shop where my dad did most of his work they would send out they made molds for castings they send out castings a st paul foundry brass and foundry and the castings would come back and my dad would then machine metal pulleys and other pieces of hardware so all of the metal hardware was finished in the machine shop here there is a regatta in one hundred thirty eight my dad is an w three he standing in the front putting up the hundred forty my grandfather was an honorary member of the wife very awesome and he's sitting on the left there next to his good friend lp ord and that my grandfather's fiftieth wedding anniversary his three sons starting from the left walter ivor and milton and of course john an there's a picture of sailboats at the boat works being launched for regatta in white bear a lot of you can see a lot of the boats were anchored out in the water in those days there tied up to a the fiberglass shop over here and my uncle ira's house here and of course john and anna had lived up stairs and heat and freedom up here hundred forty john decided he wanted some relaxation he built himself a big cruiser and he built it as big as he could but it had to be able to sit out the front door they actually had to take some of the molding off the sides to get it through so this thirty eight foot boat he put it on the mississippi a first the mississippi to new orleans across the gulf to florida where they stayed at st petersburg john and another couple lived down there during the winter but rather than try to pilot the boat back up the mississippi they put it on a big barge that had it transported back to st paul then he moved the cruiser to the st croix where it was for many years and this is a typical picture of my grandfather on the cruise he liked to build model sailboats and he built many models of the racing sailboats that were built at the boat works and also a model of a more standard a boat and put both of them they were both displayed at the smithsonian museum in washington just the building just got torn down this winter my brother stephen a whole bunch of white bear sailors they refinished this thing so we got this wouldn't able to from one thousand nine hundred sixty three competing with these fancy new fiberglass bo and through fletcher's efforts we now have what ten or eleven of these things racing on white bear since two thousand and four in the summer you'll see him again so anybody have any questions know all of this what i've been relating today is from my grandfather's stories we should have recorded him but we we didn't but my dad had a good memory know if they had any well i imagine it has some trouble sailing but most of the races ruined them out i mean i big and saw it wasn't too much of a problem  area you know coming out where those rocks are sticking out and the railroad track and my what i've heard is when there harvesting ice they would put ice and some kind of a car driven car and then yes the up and that big windstorm was at one hundred forty i think it was about that time forty one or something that big wind storm blew the roof off of the bulwarks and  my dad's grandmother was staying with them up in the apartment and my dad came up stairs to see what was going on and she was had rags and buckets and trying to mop up water and says i don't know what's wrong water keeps coming in and my dad says no we're going to let's go downstairs the rough rule off know oh yeah i forgot to say back in the sixty's they had maybe twelve to fourteen employees and they could build eighty to one hundred boats a year and it took about a wooden boat took about three weeks but when the fiberglass that only took about a week to build a sailboat so you can see the people making fiberglass boats had an opportunity to make more money in a scene reminiscent of years gone by that the boats have returned to race again on white bear lake it's their first appearance as a fleet since the one nine hundred thirty s but the design of the back even further to the turn of the century and a norwegian immigrant john by ninety six john was making both on his own with a design of his own but no experience in drawing plants he went to having created the sail boat for maximum speed shallow bottomed with the center board she was thirty eight feet long other sailors dubbed her a scout johnson got the last laugh though and one race after race scouse originally and took them to a naval architect or a naval contractor to see what they thought because i think there was a little sense of you know this is way out of whack is this too crazy because it was such a new idea of having a flat first class ayscough that johnson did is at the smithsonian in washington which is just really kind of a neat thing and i don't think a lot of people realize that he wasn't just a local hero it really has a major significance on a the thirty's on and organized the boat racing on white bear lake but the johnson boat continued to get orders from around the state and country for new boats john johnson's own sons and grandsons crafted the boats right up t holder backers here they're like ants as they prepare and lift this eight hundred pound bomb it shows if you have a crew of thirty if everything is very easy you see in a few days i'm going to wreck the cover fort and want to get the cover on there we'll start sanding diligently and putting in fixing the flippers on the  sailor he's here to help to deal with the repairs filling up the cracks so the boat will be watertight and then leak comes along and sam's off the excess party my job is to sand off all the excess party that can put on here only says here to share in the work and the stories yeah we grew up here on white bear lake and every saturday morning was a trip over to the boat works stop by usually for a half hour to an hour and watch him build a boat and get to wander through there and see all the steps of the  process might have even been in the shop when this one was being built in sixty three i would have been about five years old at that time it was quite a place beautiful smell of cedar  dunstable works this was in their opinion the fastest able that was ever construct this boat has are a remarkably successful sailing history a racing history and it was bought by john coles very unlikely sixty three he won two of the biggest championships in succeeding years then another owner also won that same championship they called the england in the early eighty's with with the same boat nearly twenty years after it was built so that's remarkable wouldn't that billing is made the same for almost two thousand years as you can see what i'm trying to do here is to get down to the inner skin and you can bought the boat i went to my grandchildren and said what we were going to call this boat and harry potter is a big thing in young children's lives these days and so we start talking about the various characters and the situations in harry potter and so we picked three names from harry potter for this reboot so we have griffen is sort of symbolized and it's really an older boat but with remarkable qualities the qualities of an eagle and a lion which is a griffin is it's got a an eagle for four section on the body with a lion stern section so it's enjoy five days or forty days something like that and so humid he gets too high runny sun set very well with high humidity soon and in low temperatures and it's been very cloudy so temps are going to be quite low  we decided to wait until conditions got a little bit better and they are better today so we're putting the first refinishing colored on this boat and this is  hundred sixty three johnson and skip johnson was across from me was actually part of the building crew you know when i look at this boat you know you know you kind of reflect back on all the different people and you know the kind of sometimes quirky traits they had but it was an extremely talented group so you know there's a real when we were building wood bolts that was the most you could identify with because it was such an art skip remembers working on his boat even remembers how many screws around it more last i know there's three thousand eight hundred somebody screws it yeah there are all hands you know that when you put these things in the all the planes are steamed you know prior to being put on the boat so you fit the plane the plank is sort of there and you go you know right down with a handful of screws and told me your hand you know in your hand you hand pound each screw in actually no i think about that that might have been when i started counting thought about restoring this boat i think actually both my you know my whole family would grandfather and they would think this is just great you know  john i think with quite a character of self and i think you'd be pretty darn happy to see the boats coming back and this particular boat i think he would be thrilled