Feature of the Month

How I became a “Motorhead”, by Dave Wilson

I grew up on the Rock River at Dixon, IL. When I was about ten years old, my dad got his first boat which was a 12' Wagemaker Wolverine with a Mercury KG7 Hurricane. That got me started!

When I was old enough to get a boat of my own, I put up my newspaper route fortune and bought a 14' Penn Yan and my dad helped me buy a Mercury KE7 Lightning. (He said the KG9 I wanted was just too much for a 13 year old. (nuts) I graduated to a 12”’ Cadillac molded-ply runabout with a Mark 20, then a Mark 25, and finally a Mark 55. Then, it was on to a 14' Yellow Jacket with a Mark 58. I spent the summers during high school bailing hay for gas money so I could spend the rest of the summer on the Rock River in my Yellow Jacket or on water skis. A bunch of like-minded boat nuts my age got together and water-skied most every day during the summer. We called our “club” the Rock River Proptwisters. My average gas usage was 400 gallons per season!

Then on to school, the Navy and then a family and career! During these years, I worked for Mercury Marine as a Zone Sales Manager in Northern Minnesota for a couple of years. With a family and moving around a lot, I didn't spend any time developing an outboard collection, but if only I knew then what I know now. With Mercury, I came across hundreds of engines that could have become a classic antique collection! I did have a 14' Yellow Jacket during that time which I rebuilt into an early style bass boat and powered it with a Merc 350 I found for $25. I kept this rig for over thirty years, and still have the engine.

About eight or nine years ago, I found a Mercury Hurricane for $50. I thought that it would be fun to have this engine for old time's sake. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for. Of course, I had to have a boat to put it on, and that started what has become for me a great hobby. I now have over forty engines, mostly Mercurys. I also decided that nothing compares to a good wood boat, so I found a 12 foot wood fishing boat that I have restored and can run several of my smaller and mid-sized Mercurys on. Currently, my favorite engines for this boat are a KE7, KF7, KG7, KH7, and a Mark 20.

I am now in the process of restoring another barn-find wood boat. It is a 12' molded plywood runabout that sat in a barn for 35 years, and looked it. I am not sure of the make of this boat, but think it is probably a Yellow Jacket hull which was built by the Angler Boat Company in New York, and sold by Montgomery Wards as a Sea King. This is the boat I will be running my recently found Mercury KG9 on, as well as a Mark 30, Mark 55, and a Mark 58A. The boat took several months to get down to bare wood, as the finish on the decks and inside was really a mess and it had a really bad paint job on the bottom which took one and a half gallons of paint remover. I hope to show you the results of my toils this summer on a lake near you!!

Jerry Miers, Ron Vaughan Sr., Dean Hurder and I got together three years ago because we saw the need for a local chapter of the AOMCI. The Motorheads of Illinois is a result of that meeting and has been a lot of fun for me in finding engines and boats, and friends who are helping me learn how to actually work on my engines. What a great group of guys!