Starting in Cleveland, the company eventually moved to Sandusky, where it grew on a reputation of using the best materials-white-oak keels and frames, white-cedar planking (plywood planking came later), nonferrous fastenings-while employing craftsmen who didn’t mind slowing the production line down a bit to get a fit or finish just right. With such a prime piece of real estate at hand, the brothers Bernard and Herman Lyman began a small boatbuilding business in the 1870s. The birthplace of all Lymans was Sandusky, Ohio, a small city on the shores of Lake Erie noted for its recreational uses of that ideal location. “Not surprisingly, we started finding more Lymans available in the Midwest,” says Witty. With a no-frills functional layout, the runabout is easy to handle and to care for. And the rest aren’t worth having at any price.” Taggart and Witty soon found this counsel painfully accurate-so they cast their nets ever wider. The ones worth having are so overpriced you can’t afford them. Taggart quotes a veteran Lyman restorer as saying, “Don’t even bother looking in the Northeast. Living in Maine, they began their search and quickly ran into a problem. “Plus I wanted a boat that chuckles,” says Witty, describing the trademark sound of small wavelets bouncing off the hull of a lapstrake boat. But Lyman lapstrakes were what Witty and Taggart were most familiar with. “It didn’t really have to be a Lyman,” Taggart says, noting Penn Yan as just one other example of a company that produced clinker-built outboard runabouts with a rock-solid combination of plywood and caulking. Several runabout brands from the ’50s combined lapstrake, or “clinker,” construction techniques with marine plywood and highly durable caulking concoctions, resulting in reliably watertight boats. “I was particularly interested in a clinker-built boat, one small enough for an outboard,” Taggart recalls. So that’s where Jonathan Taggart and Anne Witty started some 10 years ago when they began looking for a salvageable Lyman runabout for use in their waters of Georgetown, Maine. And, as is the case with the 1950s cars of big fender fins, hood scoops, and lots of American-made steel, Lymans are still worth having for both their iconic status and for what they can still do in the environment for which they were designed. Moreover, because they were all so common, nobody paid much attention to any of them, and-with the Lymans as one exception-nobody is much interested in bringing them back into modern use.įortunately, though, some people do care about the classic lines and good basic construction of the Lyman Boat Works’ line of powerboats, which included everything from small, zippy runabouts to family cruisers up to 35′ or so. Tastes and styles changed, and that was pretty much that. Thousands of consumer products were sold, used, admired, and then, eventually, cast aside. Much like Nesbitt sodas and Odell Hair Trainer products, Lyman powerboats were everywhere in the 1950s.
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