Mr. Spectre, the author of the "On the Waterfront" monthly article for many years in Wooden Boat magazine, has graciously allowed us to reprint this article, which originally appeared in the May/June 1988 issue of Wooden Boat. Although some of this information may appear dated, the historical significance is undiminished.

In 1951, Lyman Boat Works of Sandusky, Ohio, was running at peak efficiency - all machinery on line, all patterns and jigs perfected, all workers fully trained and fit of body and mind. The company, under the guidance of the founder’s on, W.E. “Bill” Lyman, was turning out an outboard-powered lapstrake wooden boat every 35 minutes of each workday, an inboard every seven hours.

Think about it. That’s approximately 75 boats a week, and nearly 4,000 a year! And they weren’t cheap little buckets, thrown together with a hope and a prayer, destined to fall apart after the first season of use. They were handsomely designed boats constructed of the finest materials-white oak for the frames and other structural members. Philippine mahogany for the decks and transoms, the highest-grade marine plywood for the lapstrake planking, and bronze for rivets, bolts, and screws.

The boats didn’t sit around Sandusky, either, gathering dust while waiting to be sold. They were immediately shipped to hundreds of dealers across the country, sold to boatmen around the world. They were among the most sought-after skiffs, runabouts, and cruisers in an age when scores of manufacturers were building quality wooden boats by the trainload.

Seven years later, if newspaper reports are to be believed, Lyman upped the ante and built 5,000 wooden boats in one year. At the time, the factory employed approximately 185 workers. That’s an average of slightly over 27 boats each per year. Who would believe that today, when a wooden boat shop that turns out 10 boats a year of any type is thought be cranking ‘em out at an heroic rate?

Lyman Boat Works, Sandusky, Ohio. When I was a kid, growing up in Massachusetts, we were reminded of the two on a daily basis. Anybody who had an appreciation for powerboats of any kind had a Lyman or wanted a Lyman, or knew someone who had a Lyman or was saving up his money to buy a Lyman. Rowboats, runabouts, striped-bass boats, fooling-around-alongshore boats -Lymans were in, and most everything else was out, and that was that. You’d get into a friend’s boat, and there it was on the builder’s plate-“Lyman, Sandusky, Ohio”- proof positive that your friend (or, most likely, your friend’s father) knew a good boat when he saw one. If, in those rare instances, it said Thompson or Century or one of those “off” brands, you wouldn’t say anything out loud, but you knew…This guy (or, most likely, this guy’s father) was a jughead.

Lymans were popular? I’d say so. A few miles from where I lived there was a small inlet west of Harwichport called Allens Harbor. In the 1950s there were no sailboats in that harbor, only powerboats, and every one of them-and I mean all of them-were Lymans. And the preponderant model, the boat nearly every adolescent Cape Cod boy desired more than Marilyn Monroe reclining on a red satin sheet, was the Lyman Islander. An honest-looking 18-footer with plenty of freeboard, it had a flared bow, a tumblehome stern, a low windshield, a walk-around engine box amidships, a fold-down canvas top, and, best of all, side steering. No sissified automobile-type steering wheel on this baby. You could stand there next to the engine box with a faraway look in your eyes and steer your way to Chatham or Hyannis or Martha’s Vineyard or Paradise.

Lymans were real boats, nothing at all like those cushioned and chromed dandymobiles held together with 75 layers of French-polished spar varnish. The seats were bare and the space under the foredeck was open, and the frames were right out there in the open where you could keep track of them. Most Lymans came from the factory with white topsides and varnished decks, transoms, and interiors, but on my section of the coast the people with a practical streak painted over the varnished surfaces with light gray marine enamel. Lymans were hardworking, hard-driving utilitarian watercraft there were at home on the sea and were worth every penny of their modest price.

Lyman Boat Works came to Sandusky, Ohio, in 1928, when Bill Lyman took over the management of the company from his father, Bernard E. Lyman. It was a time of seemingly unrestricted growth, the boom years before the colossal bust of ’29, and the outlook for boatbuilders-both the custom builders and the mass producers-couldn’t have been better. “We’ll ride this wave forever” was the guiding business principle of the age, and capital investment of the aggressive sort was seen as the smart way to go.

Two years later the economic climate was substantially different. Big boatbuilding companies were going out of business right and left; even the well-established giants were having major difficulties. But Bill Lyman was both an optimist and an innovator. He used the decade of the 1930s to hone the production skills of his company. The economy had to improve eventually, he knew, and when it did, Lyman Boat Works would be ready.

Lyman Boat Works began as a one-man shop in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1875. The one man, of course, was Bernard Lyman, a cabinetmaker by trade who had come to the United States from Berlin, Germany, as a young boy at the beginning of the Civil War. Though Lyman’s specialty was interior finish work and furniture crafting, he developed an interest in boats and boating. When he was 24 years old, in 1874, he built a small rowboat for himself, choosing lapstrake construction, which was not a common technique in Ohio in those days. The boat turned out to be ideal for fishing and recreational rowing, and people who saw it on the Cleveland waterfront were curious. Where would one get such a fine craft?

Lyman was an enterprising young man. On the basis of interest in the one boat he had built to date, he quit the cabinetmaking trade and opened a 20 x 20’ boatshop expressly for the construction of lapstrake-planked rowing skiffs. His customers from the start were rowing fishing enthusiasts, and the owners of boat liveries and amusement parks. It didn’t take long for his fine-lined pulling boats to become the standard for Cleveland and the outlying towns and for his shop to grow in both size and number of employees.

But Bernard Lyman wasn’t interested only in rowboats, His success breeding success, he branched out into sailing craft; by the 1890s his shop was one of the premier wooden boat shops in Cleveland. Like his rowboats, his sailboats were all to his own design-in fact, in the entire history of the Lyman shop, all boats, with the exception of one, were designed within the company-in the early years, each design worked up from a half model carved by Bernard.

Perhaps the most notable sailboat built by Lyman was the racing cutter NEVA, launched in 1891 for a syndicate of Cleveland yachtsmen. Looking much like N.G. Herreshoff’s revolutionary yacht GLORIANA, with the telltale cutaway forefoot, long bowsprit, tiny transom, and huge press of sail, NEVA at 65’ on deck, 12’ beam, and 11’ draft was among the largest sailboats built by Lyman. She was among the last, as well.

By 1896, Lyman was out of sailboats and into motorboats, which were becoming the hot mode of water transportation, especially on the inland lakes and rivers. He continued to build his now-famous lapstrake rowing skiffs, the staple of his trade; but, being an innovator, he preferred the excitement of being in on the ground floor of powercraft development. By the turn of the century, his shop was turning out gasoline power launches, the typical boat being a 36-footer with a fringed canopy and a 2-cycle, 6-hp one-lunger.

Meanwhile, his son Bill, born in 1883, had grown up underfoot in the shop, and had developed his own interest in boats and boatbuilding. Since he was eight years old, Bill had watched his father design and build boats, and when he grew up, he assured himself, he, too, would become a boatbuilder. Not if his mother had anything to say about it. Bill’s mother thought manual trades were fine for the first generation in America but not the second. “Work in an office and become a gentleman,” she encouraged her son, so he did.

A couple of years of low pay and boring work, however, were enough for Bill Lyman. In May of 1901 he gave up his white collar for a blue one and went to work in his father’s boatshop, never to leave wooden boatbuilding until he died half a century later. He started out the same way all boatbuilders started in those days, boss’s son or not, as an apprentice, trying his hand at every job in the shop. Painting, varnishing, planking, oar-and sparmaking, even sweeping the floor from day’s beginning to end, he gained a thorough knowledge of all aspects of the boatbuilder’s trade. Eventually, the press of the ever-increasing volume of the shop’s business would force him to spend more and more time with the bookkeeping, correspondence, and design work and less and less time on the shop floor, but forever he would be at heart a boatbuilder.

The Lyman shop in 1901 may have been experimenting with new types of boats and new types of construction, but from today’s perspective it was typically old-fashioned. All work was done by hand-the closest thing to a power tool was a foot-treadle jigsaw-and the work week was 60 hours long. The crew was of the old school, the craftsmen, many straight from the old country, coming to work in shirt, tie, and jacket, taking off only the latter for work and replacing it with a shop apron. The prevailing wage was 25 cents an hour, the price of a 13’ Lyman lapstrake skiff $24.50, the cost of materials for that skiff, including old-growth cypress from Louisiana, $7.00.

By 1914, the beginning of World War I in Europe, Lyman Boat Works had extensive experience with motorboats. Though smaller craft-launches, power skiffs, and rowing skiffs-remained the company’s stock in trade, increasing attention was paid to larger inboard power cruisers. Most of the latter were under 50’ in length, but a few were larger. The largest was 75’ with a 100-hp Standard engine. But the most important development, one that would have great significance for the future of the company, was the construction of a few experimental small boats designed specifically for the new outboard motors.

The first Lyman outboard boats were simply standard lapstrake skiffs with transoms modified to accept a clamp-on motor, but it didn’t take Bernard and Bill very long to recognize that the basic shape of the hull would have to be altered to get the most out of its power source. Sure, you could make a rowing skiff go through the water with an outboard motor, but if the after end of the skiff were to be widened and flattened, the boat would be better able to take the weight of the motor and the occupant, and would also run faster. The years 1914 to 1924 were, therefore, a period of experimentation for the Lymans, father and son, during which they developed an outboard boat design and construction philosophy that would take them to the next stage of their company’s evolution.

But while Bernard Lyman whittled away at his boat modes and from them built ever-more-sophisticated boats, the United States became drawn into the war. In 1917, when the U.S. finally entered World War I, most pleasure-boat production ended and wartime production began. Lyman Boat Works, a prime shop, was taken over by the government for the construction of concrete ships and barges, and the company, forced to reduce its output, had to move into temporary quarters. Ironically, for all the difficulties entailed in that move, only one concrete barge was completed by the government in Lyman’s shop before the Armistice of 1918.

The end of the war signaled boom time for pleasure-boat builders, and Lyman got right back into its old shop and right back into the thick of things. An increase in automobile production (in response to postwar demand), plus developing interest on the part of consumers for trailer boats, caused impressive strides to be made in the manufacture of outboard motors. Before the war, the typical motor had a single cylinder that produced limited horsepower and slow speeds; after the way, two-cylinder motors-the so-called “twins”-were introduced. Where the singles could wring about 6 mph out of an average non-racing hull, the twins could almost double that.

Bernard and Bill Lyman saw the future, and it was in outboards. They got out of custom boatbuilding and turned their attention to production work, specializing in straight rowboats and a hybrid design for fishermen which could take an outboard motor. Then, in 1924, they came out with their first fast outboard with no compromises, an 11-footer, 54” wide, that could go 18 mph with a Lockwood-Ash motor and 22 mph with a Johnson Big Twin. Racing boats, of course, could go much faster than that, but for a pleasure boat, such speeds were seen to be nothing short of spectacular. The notoriety of such an achievement changed Lyman from a regional boatbuilder to one with national potential. Not ones to let a good thing stand alone, the Lymans followed their 11-footer with new 13’ and 15’ models in less than a year.

Immediately, Lyman Boat Works was in serious business, building hundreds of boats a year and selling them through an ever larger network of dealers. Their biggest dealer, as it turned out, was a fellow named Bruno Beckhard down in Gulfport, Florida, who added to the desirability of his product by holding organized races specifically for Lyman outboard boats. Beckhard, a pure promoter, popularized the races by hiring Helen Henschel, a local sensation, to compete in the races. Even Bill Lyman came down to Florida from time to time to join in the fun.

With all this increase promotion and publicity and the success of sales thereof, Lyman Boat Works was outgrowing its shop in Cleveland. When his father retired in 1928, Bill moved the company to Sandusky, where he took over an old tractor factory down on the lakefront and bought a parcel of land next door for expansion. Why Sandusky? Good railroad access for shipping in raw materials and shipping out finished boats, proximity to Lake Ere for testing new designs, plenty of skilled labor in the area, and room to grow. All this would have been fine and good if the Great Depression hadn’t intervened, but as it did, Lyman wouldn’t really need those important advantages for 10 years or more.

The first boat to be built at the Sandusky plant-which is what it was; no longer could one refer to Lyman Boat Works as a boatshop-was a 15’ outboard that was reputed to do 40 mph when powered appropriately. By January 1929, an 11-footer had been added to the line, and, of course, the company was still building rowboats in a variety of sizes. The construction technique for all models was lapstrake planking on steam-bent frames, usually cypress on oak, which by now Lyman was famous for.

But the onslaught of the Depression the very next year ended the demand for outboard boats. Always a middle- and working-class type of boat, they were unaffordable at any price by people who were having difficulty earning enough money to buy food, fuel, and shelter. Pleasure boats were down at the bottom of the list of priorities.

Bill Lyman, however, wasn’t one for lying around waiting for a change in the economy. There still was a limited market for inboard-powered boats, so he turned his attention to those. In the mid-1930s he came out with a 17’ inboard, a production boat with a curiously boring name: the Lyman Utility Inboard. The first so-called utility every built-an open boat designed for multiple purposes-it was fast, stable at speed, and, designed with the choppy waters of Lake Erie in mind, seaworthy. Not decked over like normal speedboats, with an engine covered by an easy-opening box you could walk around, it was a revolutionary concept for the time and caught on immediately. The boat was so popular, in fact, that the once-odd name “utility” became fashionable enough that other boat manufacturers adopted it.

With the 17-footer a success, Lyman began producing other inboard models as well, including large custom power cruisers, the largest of the type being a 47-footer with twin screws. At one point in the late 1930s, the company offered 24 different models, big and small-not bad, for a company in an industry that was extremely hard hit by the Depression.

Things were going so well that Lyman built a brand-new plant on their empty lot next door. With 25% more area than the old plant, a separate office building, a basin for launching and testing boats, and space for building custom craft, it was an impressive facility, indeed. The main building, designed for a modified production line, was divided into three sections: one side for building outboard, the other for inboards, and the central portion for millwork. In 1937, the first year in the new plant, the company built between 500 and 600 boats of all types. Bill Lyman, announcing his plans to build 600-800 boats the next year, was quoted as saying the company had built so many boats since its founding that he wished he had set aside $1 for each one. Lymans could be found all over the country and the world-South Africa, England, Germany, Italy, even Indo-China.

But just as things really started to roll for Lyman, World War II reared its ugly head. By 1942 the building of pleasure boats in Sandusky had come to an end, and Lyman had entered the era of the Government Contract. No more lapstrake rowboats, no more inboard utilities, no more fast outboards, but lots and lots of special-purpose craft for the Navy and the Army Corps of Engineers: 33’ plane-rearming boats, 24’ plane personnel boats, 17’ line-handling boats, 8’ dinghies, M2 assault boats, and 36’ LCVPs. But it didn’t really matter to Lyman. Its share of the pleasure-boat market wasn’t threatened, for the simple reason that all of its competitors were engaged in a variation on the same thing: war production. The test would come after the war.

Indeed, it did, and Lyman passed the test and then some. When the Gis came home to pick up their lives where they had left off five years before, Lyman Boat Works had converted back to pleasure-boat building with a vengeance. The production line, further honed by the company’s wartime experience, was so refined that the number of boats to be built was only restricted by the number to be sold-and that number, given the demand of the ex-Gis, was large.

The work crew at Lyman’s was a little different this time around, however. Before the war, the old-style craftsmen predominated but after the war few of them were left. The remaining experts ere put to work on the jobs requiring the greatest amount of skill-building jigs and tooling-while the less-skilled, newer workers were put on the production line and trained to do one or two tasks very well. In effect, Lyman carried over wartime production techniques into peacetime.

This was the age of efficiency, and Lyman bought into it with great success. To keep things running smoothly, without complication, the management cut back on the number of different boat models to be build. Before the war as many as 24 models had been built in a single year. By 1949, Lyman was down to six: three outboard, one rowboat, one rowboat/outboard hybrid, and one 18’ inboard. Bill Lyman was quoted as saying that the only way to increase the number of models beyond that and remain efficient would be to enlarge the plant.

The other major change for the sake of efficiency was to substitute plywood planking for the natural lumber that had been used in the past. Inexpensive, easier to obtain and store, more forgiving, of uniform quality, marine plywood after the war was a far cry from the unreliable junk that was common before. But is superiority wasn’t accepted at face value. Before Bill Lyman would adopt its use, he had an experimental boat built and sunk in the lake to test the plywood for delamination.

The 1950s found Lyman Boat Works at the height of its prosperity. Despite the death of Bill Lyman, the driving force, at the beginning of the decade, the company was on such solid footing and the boats it produced were so popular, it seemed as if the god times would never end. In 1951, there were dealers in every state-225 in all-the 50,000-sq-ft plant was producing thousands of boats per year, and the work force approached 200 men. In 1958, the peak year, when production was said to have reached 5,000 boats, the factory used 1.5 million sq. ft of plywood and required 50 railcars of raw materials-oak for the frames, Philippine mahogany for the decks and transoms, bronze fastenings, hardware, paint, canvas, and more.

But it came to an end eventually, and we all know why. Beginning in the mid to late ‘50s, fiberglass came to replace wood in the manufacture of boats, especially in the segment of the market favored by Lyman-runabouts, utilities, and other small powered and rowing craft.

There was talk at Lyman that it should go with the flow, that the needs of the marketplace dictated that the wooden jigs and patterns must be replaced with fiberglass plugs and molds, but it was always resisted. The consequences were leveling off of sales and production in the early 1960s, and a precipitous decline at the end of the decade. Labor unrest was followed by layoffs, temporary plant closings, disagreement among management, the sale of the company, the resale of the company, a string of new owners, some of whom turned out to be the prototypical asset plunderers-the symptoms of a company whose time has come and gone. By the early 1970s, the famed Lyman wooden boat production line was closed. The company retooled for fiberglass and eventually failed at that-too little, too late to compete with the companies that had jumped on the fiberglass bandwagon years before. By the 1980s, Lyman was merely a blip on the horizon of boatbuilding, hardly a player in the game.

Sandusky, Ohio, is one of those places that you think you’re going to hate but which turn out to be a cut far above your most optimistic hope. On the shore of Lake Erie west of Cleveland and east of Toledo, it’s a small port on an inland sea; a New Long, Connecticut, without the salt, or an Everett, Washington, without the rise and all of the tide. The old port facilities at the foot of downtown are mostly empty or given over to excursion boats and yachts, but a huge railyard and coal terminal a mile or two to the westward is still loading monster lake freighters as fast as they can be warped alongside the dock. The center of town is clean neat and quiet-quite the opposite of the prototypical small Midwestern industrial city of our mind’s eye.

Down on First Street, which runs along the lake on the east side of town, is a row of tired-looking factory buildings, some empty, some only partially occupied. Among them lies the Lyman manufacturing plant, or what remains of it-a group of buildings that probably were state-of-the-art at one time but today seem like the county fairgrounds six months after the cattle judging was over. The Lyman company has just acquired a new owner, and will begin producing fiberglass boats again, but in recent years, it’s been a caretaker operation; storage, maintenance, that sore of thing. There was plenty of work, in fact, for the handful of remaining employees, among them two skilled craftsmen from the golden age of the production line.

There are thousands of Lyman boats still is use; and for their owners, especially those in the Midwest, the Lyman company is still the place to go for spare parts and repairs. The production line may be closed down, and most of the buildings may be used primarily for storage, but the jigs and patterns and machinery that allowed Lyman to produce two boats an hour in the golden age of the 1950s are still in serviceable condition. The place is what amounts to a monument to the mass production of wooden boats.