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I have been talking to my father a fair amount lately while he is waiting around for appointments in town. The canoe he built as a teenager came up and thanks to the web I can see the plans. 1956 Boys Life June edition. Orange Crate Canoe By Ben Hunt.
https://books.google.com/books?id=gd...dition&f=false
You gotta love Boys Life! I inherited a stack of them. So many neat projects like that over the years.
Ben Hunts carrier spaned several generations. I have added a visit to his cabin / museum to my bucket list.
I remember paddling one very similar to that when I was an early teenager. It may very well have been built from those plans. It felt like it was as heavy as lead, and the two of us in it were pretty small at the time. My best friend and I explored one of the creeks on the lake here that had just been flooded in it, but we never wanted to use it again. It also leaked, and we weren't the best of swimmers yet.
I lived for Boys Life back then, and ordered catalogs from everything advertised in the back of it. I took a correspondence course in Taxidermy when I was twelve, and my best friend, now one of the lead scientists on the JWST, and I built telescopes from mirror blanks sold by Edmund Scientific that I ordered a catalog from out of the back of Boys Life.
Dads canoe was fairly heavy but very sea-worthy. He and later the family used it a lot including some long voyages with long portages in Canada and river floats in the Ozark's. He re-canvased it several times. My first boat was a Dedham Kayak, built from plans ordered from the back pages of Boys Life. It was more like a true Greenland Kayak with no planking just a stretched skin. I found that too! As well as a telescope etc... the kayak offer is on page 68.
https://books.google.com/books?id=LB...page&q&f=false
I forgot how many absolutely crazy ads there were in it. I never sent off for any of the wild stuff. The ad for Northwestern School of Taxidermy is on page 60. That was the course I took. I still have all the tools, but lost interest in it when we started building telescope mirrors.
Several references regarding pollution and energy conservation in this issue. I remember some of our Scout leaders insisting that our troop take Ecology seriously. We did.
There are lots of sleek canoes and kayaks passing through our area this week including hand made wooden ones. The MR 340 canoe race started in KC this morning. B.I.L. is boat 1966
http://raceowl.com/MR3402022
comic from Boys Life
Attachment 482698
Yeah, concern for the environment is not new.
Missouri River Relief is a sponsor of the canoe race. They (we) are also concerned for the environment.