Those present are Larry Tucker, Don Lesh and Sammy Tedder, interviewer. Interview was conducted on 9-9-08 at Mr. Tucker’s home, 192 Tower Road, Panacea, Florida. Interviewer’s words appear in italics. Names not certain to transcriber appear in [ ] brackets.

Sammy: Today is September the ninth, two thousand and eight, and we’re at the home of Mr. Larry Tucker, master boat builder, in Panacea, Florida. Present are Bill Lowrie, the director of the Big Bend Maritime Center; Don Lesh, myself, Sammy Tedder; and of course Larry Tucker.

Larry: My name is Larry Tucker and I’m the son of Edith and Jack Tucker from Panacea, Florida. I started in the boatbuilding; it’s been about fifty-five years ago now. I got it from my uncle, Uncle Henry Taylor, which was an old shipbuilder, and his father was a shipwright, and they came from McIntyre. They lived up there for many, many, many years. The old barge that they used to live on was right there on 319 and the Ochlockonee River. You use to could see it just on the west side of the bridge there. It stayed up for many, many years.

But they built boats, and they built barrels, and they built anything that it took to survive. What they could trade, they traded. And that’s how I got into it, was, Uncle Henry, he told me, he said, “Boy, if you’re gonna, if you want something or other, all you got to do is just take the time and build it.” So he took me around with him for many years. I was just five, six, seven years old, eight, and we’d walk all out here in the woods that’s here in the back of my house, and we’d run across some mainly red oak. We had red oak in this part of the country that was real, real pretty. And he’d look at that thing and say, “Well okay, bring me my ropes.”

So he’d lasso, get up in the tree or pull it down a little bit and then get another rope and tie it, and he’d bend it up into bend like he wanted it. That was my first boatbuilding. [laughs] I told him, I said, “Uncle Henry, yeah, isn’t it a little bit more than that? That’s not gonna float.” [laughter] But about a few years later after it had molded into shape, we’d take that piece out.

We was buildin’ a boat and that was for Will Hartsfield. And we was all commercial fishermen here, and they had a big fishery. And it was about a thirty foot boat. So one of the bow stems that we’d bent, we put it on the ground, and then Uncle Henry started using the foot adze on it, cutting the notches into it. After we got through with that, we brought it out of the woods. It was a whole lot lighter than it was the other way!

So we got that off, up there to the truck and brought it in, and then if there was anything else needed to be done to it, then we would steam it. It’d just steam into the perfect shape, they’d have a jig, we’d take this jig and put the bow stem down into it and just work it right on around into it, you could’ve made a figure eight if you wanted to make a figure eight out of it.

Don: It was that flexible.

Larry: Oh yeah. You had to do it when it was still green. And take those croker sacks and that boiling water, and you’d put it on that thing and just work it. So that was our fist step, we had to make that piece.

And the next step was, that was generally out of cypress, and we would lay a keel. All of the old boats back then had a keel. Even if it was eighteen, nineteen foot long, generally had a keel. So you would take and put that thing together and you’d put the keel to it, and then you would stand up that part, which would be just one little old piece stickin’ up there and it’d be tied off.

And then you’d put your rudder post in, and we’d set the rudder post, and then put on the stern, get the stern built into it, and lay kind of an outline out of timbers, lay it up, it would be the top part. Then we’d go down to the chime [chine?] line and put in a chime. And then you’d just start steamin’ all the timbers then, and just layin’ ‘em in, so it would be one timber from the keel all the way up. Unless it was a sawed-timbered boat. Now, if it was a sawed-timbered boat, then we would just lay up the bow stem, put it to the keel and from the keel to the stern post. Then you’d put up the stern, and make the stern just like it was goin’ to look, ‘cause it would be a finished product whenever you would get through with it. And then start puttin’ in your sister timbers. And then start bringin’ your timbers, they’d be all sawed-cut, up to a [chime] line and then up from your chime line, then you’d get out a flare of your hull.

Sammy: What would you connect with, use nails or pegs, or –

Larry: Well, back then they hadn’t used pegs for several years. At that time the only pegs would be to connect the bow stem to the stern post; that would be all pegged because you might have to run a saw down through it. But the rest of it would be bolts. Generally back then it would be out of brass. At that time you didn’t use all that many stainless, everything was [silica] and bronze and brass, that was just the stuff of boat builders. [Hole] Wilcox and Crittenden, we’d just buy those things by the barrel. I don’t know if it was cheaper. [laughs].

Sammy: Was that the brand name, Wilcox and Crittenden?

Larry: Yeah. Still is today, they still do a lot of that stuff. But we would go ahead, and then you’d start plankin’ your hull. We would do the sides first, and the bottom was always the last to go on. I asked my uncle one time, I said, “How come we do this?” He said, “Well,” he said, “It’s a whole lot easier to sweep it out this a-way than if you build it the other way.”

Sammy: He means up side down?

Larry: Oh no, it’d be right side up.

Sammy: But you’d still put the bottom in last.

Larry: Uh huh. And the last board was the garber board [garboard?]. The garber is the one that goes from the bottom of the boat against the keel. And that’s the onliest thing on there that will be caulked. You’ll have to caulk that. We prided ourselves on a boat with no caulking in it, but we would still have to do that garber board. That would be the onliest place on the boat. I have had to replace those things, some of them would be beat, they’d be an inch wide through there. You’d have to use oakum, have to beat the oakum in there to where it would stay. It would be a pain in the butt.

Then once you got the hull complete and the garber board was still out, that was the very last thing that went into a boat, we would take and put the deck on it, get the deck all built, and then if it was gonna have a cabin forward or central or aft, we’d put the cabin on, set the engine in it, and get all of the stuff that was going in the boat in there, and then we’d go back and put that garber board in, and slide it in the water.

Sammy: What kind of engines did you use to put in?

Larry: Most of them back then, because we didn’t have many diesel engines, most of them was old gasoline truck engines. We’d just take ‘em out of there and Uncle Leon Crum would more than likely have fixed up a transmission that you’d get forward and reverse out of it, that was about what we had here.

Sammy: So a big V-8 engine?

Larry: Yeah, most of  ‘em. We had some V-8’s and some six-cylinders. Then I can remember we could buy engines. We’d buy them old Chrysler Crowns, they’d be flat head inlines, sixes, updraft carburetors. Them things would freeze, [laughing] the longer you run ‘em the bigger it got!

Don: As far as, for example, deciding where the cabin goes, where the engine goes, it was just your instinct and knowledge that would tell you where –

Larry: Yeah, the balance, that’s right, and also where to put the fuel tanks.

Don: There wasn’t any blueprint.

Larry: No, no, we didn’t foller any blueprints. We wanted, they wanted, nine times out of ten this boat would be called a launch. So it would be, you’d have to have a great big old icebox on the back, and then you’d have a center cabin that was the actual cabin for, which would be over the top of the motor, and then you would have living quarters in the front part of it, because these guys, they’d go down shore, they’d go all the way down to Perry, or down through there to catch mullet, then they’d have to bring them all the way back up. They’d have sometimes three, four, five boats that they would pull, just from one single boat.

But everybody had to have all their stuff there – little old water tanks, you know I’d consider them little old water tanks. They’d be about a, nobody took a bath in fresh water back then. The onliest thing you wanted fresh water for was to make coffee or to cook with, to wash up, and that was it. We was usin’ them old steel water containers. Sometimes you could buy you a water tank, and sometimes you’d just have to put a water tank up on top, fill it full of water and then you would have cold water sometimes and warm water sometimes! [laughing]

Sammy: Solar.

Larry: That’s right, it would be solar power!

Sammy: How long were these boats, what were their dimensions?

Larry: Well, the one that I helped Uncle Henry build for Mr. Hartsfield, I think it was thirty foot. And that was considered a pretty good-sized boat back then, because it would have been ten or eleven foot wide, and been thirty foot long. Because back then you know, you didn’t have much in outboards, didn’t have all that big of an inventory of inboards. So probably a sixty or sixty-five horsepower inboard was all you was going to have to power that boat. And if anybody had an outboard then, it was going to be about a two or three horsepower back then. And it would have been about that big around, great big old thing.

Sammy: When you say “back then,” what era are you talking about?

Larry: Nineteen fifties. Yep, first of the fifties I remember when I started in the guide business that was in nineteen and fifty-five. I had built me a boat and it was an eighteen foot cypress boat, and we went all the way to Blountstown to get my lumber. And of course we didn’t have a truck, just had a car, and we smashed the top of the car down! [laughter] It was a [pot head 4-V?]. I got it to the house and set it up and built that boat, and the big horsepower motors then was, you could buy a ten horsepower in nineteen fifty-five. It was a CB outboard. I didn’t have enough money for the ten horsepower,, but I had enough for a seven and a half. So I had a seven and a half, and it would probably run about eight or nine knots.

I kept that boat for about three or four years, finally bought another motor. Lord, that thing would run then, it would rooster-tail! [laughing] I sold it and built another one, and that one was twenty-four foot long. Just about all of the guides here had went to a twenty-four foot boat because you could go offshore if you had a twenty-four foot boat. Every year the motors were getting bigger and bigger, but especially in the sixties. That was whenever the Chrysler Crowns and all of those engines started out, and people had a little bit of money to spend back then, so they would buy a marine engine.

Don: What horse would that be then?

Larry: They were eighty-fives. But as time moved on, we got out of, not out of the steamed timbers, because some of the boats still use steamed timbers today. But some of your big boats, those timbers you’ll have to soak them for three, four, five days in hot, boiling water, and the timbers’ll be four by tens.

And they’ll stick that thing through there and drive it down through the valley of the boat and attach it down to the keel. It’ll be all one board. But you’ll build a boat, those boats are built with basically the same design as all the rest.

The bow stem will be a cut bow stem, it will be a solid piece, probably about a twenty-four by twenty-four bow stem. And it’ll be twenty-two, twenty-four foot long. You’ll cut it and put it into the keel and the keel, it’s still a wooden keel, but it’s called a stack keel. They stack them one on top of the other and then use drift pins and they’ll be two inch straight rods that they’ll drill all the way through them and stick them all together, and then they’ll cut a notch in there for the garber.

The garber board is built a little bit different on a real big boat, because they’ll notch that and also notch the keel. But they’ll have an inside to the boat, they’ll leave air spaces, about an inch between each board. But they’ll come in and build that boat from the inside. They’ll put that one piece on, and then they’ll start putting on the outer boards on the big boats. There will just be a board every foot or so down. And then they’ll have a crane to work the top of it and get it lined up into that valley. And as they get ‘er down, they’ll tap ‘er and she’ll just keep on a-goin’. It’ll just curve right on around, it’s a sight to behold.

Sammy: And that’s red oak.

Larry: That’s red oak, yeah.

Sammy: You were talking about the tool that you used out in the woods. What was that tool again, that he used to trim it down?

Larry: Oh, the foot adze?

Sammy: Foot adze, okay. I never have seen one of those.

Larry: Mm hm. It looks like an axe that’s built sideways. You’ll get up there, and I mean, you’ll work on that rascal! I mean, you’ll have to cut it, and --

Sammy: So you shape it out there, so you don’t have to drag it back in.

Larry: You’ll lose about two thirds of the weight out in the woods and then you’ll have to tote the rest of it in. It’ll maintain about a third. But it’s an operation that --- [laughing].

I was gonna try to show my grandkids but I never had one that wanted to learn. The onliest one of my generation that wanted to learn, Dan Hayes, would be good for you to go to, because he worked with Uncle Henry. He can talk to you about some old boatbuilding. But it is an art that is going, because in a lot of these boats one board is built to actually lock the other board into place. So if you’re in a real bad sea in a boat it’ll twist and come back, it’ll yawl, and that’s what it’s made to do, is that that board, that board and not the nails. That board is built for that pressure, there is no way it could snap out. It’s just like a puzzle, how they snap into place? That’s the same way a board is. They’re cut, they’re wider on the inside than they’re wider on the outside. A lot of times if a board is ten inches wide on the outside, on the inside it’s probably going to be about ten and three eighths of an inch. And yet, if you have to replace it, it means that you’ve got be really delicate, you’ve got to know your cuttin’.

Sammy: It’s interlocked.

Larry:  Yup, it’s interlocked on the inside. And it is an art. The first one that I ever helped Uncle Henry do was on a big old shrimp boat. It was, I think, a seventy-three footer. It had been hit. This guy was going through a bridge and had pushed him over and he hit the guardrail on the entrance to the bridge. And it just happened to be that it was one of the bolts comin’ out that snagged that board and pulled, just tore the whole board out. We put that thing back in, and I could not believe it, really could not! It took us a day to cut the board, and it took almost a day to put it in. But I mean, it’s a precision cut from one end to the other end. And when you get halfway done, it doesn’t go in any easier! Because even on the end, it locks into it. So man, you’re doing some fine measurement when you’re doing that! There’s no such thing as “Hey, we’ll cut it as it goes.” You cut it before you go. And you make sure that there’s not a first snag on that board. You’ve got to have a board with no knot; you’ve got to have a board that has got a good grain to it.

Sammy: That would be cypress you’re using.

Larry: Yeah, big cypress. Because you’ve got to compress that board and drive ‘er right in there. But it’s a tough job. We started on it, and Uncle Henry said, “Well son, I don’t know what time we’re goin’ home today, ‘til we get that board in there.” I said, “What time do you think?” He said, “I’ve learned not to think, learned just to do it.” He said, “Every time I think, I get us in trouble.” [laughing] We generally used red cypress. To me it works a little bit easier, you can compress the board a little bit easier than with the white.

Don: How long did it actually take?

Larry: It took all day, all day long. At dark we were pickin’ up the tools. And it had went in there and the guy that owned the shrimp boat, he stayed right there with us. He had went in and measured it with us, you know, and he said, “I can tell you now it won’t work. You cain’t put that board back in there in one piece.” Somebody before had done the same thing, but what they did was, they cut the board half in two and put the board in, which they had already lost the actuality of what the boat was supposed to do. It was supposed to lock in and not be able to come out. When we got through, that old boy came up and he said, “I’ve seen a lot of miracles in this day,” he said, “But I’ve never seen a miracle like that, I believe I will go to church!” [laughter]

Sammy: You talk about your Uncle Henry, did you say?

Larry: Mm hm, Henry Taylor.

Sammy: Henry Taylor. And he’s who taught you the boatbuilding.

Larry: Right. He and Uncle Munroe [Monroe?], Uncle Munroe also done it, but Uncle Munroe, mainly he would repair ‘em. But Uncle Henry, he would make ‘em. I mean Uncle Henry, he would go up there and we could see trees that the rope had just rotted off, you know, and they were still humped over many years afterward.

Sammy: That he had tied over?

Larry: Yeah, he and I went through the woods and tied ‘em off. I would tell my son Steven [Stephen?], I said, “Son, there’s a lot of stuff out here that you’re gonna look at.” And I said, “You’re gonna wonder why, but there’s a reason behind each thing that you’re gonna see in these woods,” I said, “That’s how these people lived, that’s how your ancestors lived. They lived off of what they had, not off of what they wished they had. They made do. It was strictly made do.”

Sammy: Could you tell us a little bit more about your ancestors that, I don’t believe we have it on tape –

Larry: Well, the Tuckers, they came here, we know that they landed in Charleston, South Carolina. And then after they had landed, they came into Georgia. They were around Moultrie. There’s a big conglomerate of Tuckers in Moultrie, Georgia.

My grandfather, he went to the Okeefenokee Swamp, and there he was guiding hunting and fishing parties and that’s how my father got into it. Then he left from there and went to Calhoun County. There he was working in the turpentine woods and also into logging. They always had logged, and Daddy, he finally left and came from Calhoun County to Franklin County. He got in with, then they were called the Crum Boys. And that’s where he met my mother. She was a Taylor and Crum. But they fished, they hunted, they trapped, they did everything you could think of.

Now, they didn’t, as far as we’ve been able to go back was to Uncle [Ordnoc Sweets?] and grandfather. We don’t know anything other than they came from Alabama. They claim that he had married a Creek lady and had bunches of sons and daughters. But other than that, we don’t know anything on the Crum side or the Taylor side. The Taylor side is just, we’ve got about two generations and that’s about it! With the old folks, we’ve got about a hundred and fifteen years here in Wakulla County. We know that whenever they came here, they worked around McIntyre and lived on a houseboat around McIntyre. I know that Mama went to school at Sopchoppy. They would walk the old railroad trestle, get back across and go to school. They went with the Davises and the Thompsons and those prominent families there in McIntyre, they were – I tried to get some more data from them. Uncle Munroe, he knew quite a bit.

Sammy: McIntyre was a larger settlement.

Larry: Oh yes. At one time it had probably sixty or seventy large families. It was a big town.

Sammy: Where did they go to school?

Larry: In Sopchoppy. The old bus would pick them up and take them into Sopchoppy, but they had to walk. The ones that lived on the Franklin County side, they would go across the old trestle and would go and walk out there to the Thompsons’. The old road now is paved, but they would go down it, and many times it was just about impassable. They’d get out and push the old bus and make it to school!

I look back through the generations of just my family, and I see people that, it’s not like today. People that try to pick up their careers, and this is what they want to do with their life. Those people didn’t pick out anything. It was called Survival. There wasn’t any part of daily life back then that was easy.

Even just going to visit a friend back then, we had a lot of panther here back then. Mama told us many many stories and, you know, going over, and they’d have to get back before dark, and she said many times they’d have to tear most of the clothes off of their own back to get back to the house. Because the panthers, you know, they would stop and tear the old clothing up, and it was something. [laughs] She said one time they were coming back, they’d been picked up on the school bus and they was riding. It must have been Mr. Davis, all of them in an old truck. They said the panther jumped out of a tree and onto the top of the cab! He said he didn’t have a gun, didn’t have anything –

Sammy: So they would leave a piece of clothing to distract the panther…

Larry: He’d get distracted by that and they’d get a little bit more. They knew not to run! They said they would go a couple of hundred yards and they would tear off part of their clothes and throw it down, and whenever the panther would come by he’d sniff and roar and tear them all to pieces!

Sammy: You said something about the remnants of a barge. Is that your family’s?

Larry: Oh yes. That’s what they used to live on.

Sammy: Where is that?

Larry: That’s on the south end of three nineteen bridge and –

Sammy: I remember seeing that. Is it still there?

Larry: Yes, at low tide you can still see it. It’s all right there. Mama said that they lived there even after her and Daddy had got married because there wasn’t any houses much here. Either you lived in a lean-to or you stayed with somebody else.

Sammy: When did they move into the area?

Larry: That had to be about eighteen eighty-five. That was the last accounts of the Taylors that we had. But Uncle Henry and them, they ran the old boats that used to go up there and get the shells and carried the shells down to the Ochlockonee River and ninety-eight. They were working doing that.

Sammy: What kind of shells?

Larry: From the shell mounds up there in the river. They would take and put them around the piling to get a little bit better hold.

Sammy: So those were from the Indian mounds?

Larry: Yup, sure was. They dug ‘em all up.

Sammy: Are any of your boats still in use today?

Larry: Oh yeah. Quite a few of my boats, a lot of mine; none of them that was wooden boats, I don’t think any of them survived. But the fiberglass boats, there’s a lot of them that’s survived. I know about eight or ten in this area, and some in Louisiana and Texas that the commercial fishermen use over there.

Sammy: What was the transition to fiberglass like?

Larry:  Oh Lord, I tell you! Now that was a real transition! My brother in law and I, we was runnin’ parties out of Tradewinds Pier down at the mouth of the river, Mr. and Mrs. Allen had a place down there. And Mr. Allen, he called me up one day, I was down there working on my boat. He said, “Larry,” he said, “There’s some new stuff coming around,” he said, “I don’t think much of it, but you might know something about it.” I said, “What is it?” He said, “It’s called ‘fiberglass.’” I said, “Man, I’ve never heard of it. What does it do?”  He said, “They claim it’s strong as steel.” I said, “Well I don’t know anything about it, what’s it supposed to do?” He said, “They gonna make boats out of it.” “Well, somebody’s crazy, they ain’t gonna make boats out of nuthin’ like that!” [laughing] I said, “It’ll never work! Good old wooden boat’s the onliest thing that’s gonna last.” He said, “Well you need to take a look at this stuff.”

Back then it came in gallon cans. And we didn’t have any [rodin’?], all they sent was a piece of mattin’. They’d sent a piece of mattin’ and he’d just bought a kit. He said, “Let’s go down there and try it and see what it’ll do.” Well, at least they had enough sense not to pour all the hardener into the gallon can. [laughter] So they just mixed up a little cup, and I said, “Well, they say whatever you do, it’s gotta be dry.” Well, we used old blow torches back then, so blow-torched off an area where his boat was leaking and needed to be replanked.

And so I said, “Now what’s the next step?” He said, “Well, you’re supposed to lay down this stuff and work this fiberglass through it.” I said, “Okay.” I put probably a pint, and mixed it up real quick and smelled of it, and said, “I don’t know what this is supposed to be doin’, but it doesn’t seem to be doing anything.” So I stirred it up a little bit more, and all of a sudden I seen smoke signals comin’ up outta there. [laughter] I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “I don’t know.” “Hmmm. Is it supposed to get hot? Because it seems to be getting hot.” He said, “I don’t know, you know as much about it as I do.” So I stuck the brush down in it and it was too late. I said, “Well, lesson number one, we know what not to do with this!”

So that was my first time with fiberglass. I went ahead and fiberglassed his boat, and it looked, uh, terrible – [laughter] but it worked! It stopped the water from coming through. And then I started building boats.

At that time we didn’t know that you could build a mold and build just a solid core. So I would build a plywood boat first, because it was lighter than planks and a lot faster, a lot faster. Back then I could build a boat in two days out of plywood and then take it and fiberglass it, and boy, you could beat that boat – I could not believe how strong that stuff really was!

So we just kept going on, building them a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger, a little bit faster. That fiberglass, it just revolutionized the boatbuilding, it made all the difference in the world. And then I started building boats for other people with the fiberglass, ‘cause everybody wanted one after they saw one on the highway. And really, we had one that fell on the highway! I had built a boat for a guy at Alligator Point. And he forgot that you’ve got to take and leave all the stuff on the boat to the trailer. And he went down to put the boat in the water and was gonna launch it, when he noticed that someone had borrowed all of his gas. So he just pulled it out and was coming up to, at that time I believe it was Clayton’s store. And just as they were coming up on the bridge, there was a little dip. The boat came up and the trailer went on down the road. He didn’t even know that he had lost his boat until he tried to put gas in it! [laughter] And it didn’t hurt it!

Sammy: So the transition, when you started building with plywood, you just coated that with fiberglass?

Larry: Mm hm. And mattin’.

Sammy: Okay, and when was that?

Larry: That was probably the first fiberglass that I ever used was about nineteen and sixty-three, I guess.

Sammy: And then eventually you started doing the molds?

Larry: Yes. The company it was called WR Grace. The guy that owned the Wakulla News knew that I built boats, and he came down and said, “Larry, they’re gonna have a seminar on boatbuilding in Tallahassee tomorrow.” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “I can get you a ticket if you want to go.” He said, “I know that you do this, and I just found out about it today.” I said, “Sure!” So I went. And that’s when they opened up a boat plant there in Tallahassee that was called Lone Star Boat Company. It was at the old airport.

Sammy: Dale Mabry Field?

Larry: Mm hm. And I went and I listened to it and I was simply amazed. I was blown away. As a matter of fact they built a whole boat while we was there. From start to finish. And I said, “Gol-ly! Now if this isn’t something!”

And of course, we didn’t know how strong, even the manufacturers didn’t know what they had. Back then they were sixteen, seventeen foot boats, the Lone Stars were. And of course they were eight and nine ply. And of course you could’ve built a twenty four foot boat with eight or nine ply. But we didn’t know it. Everything was way overbuilt back then. We hoped it would last for ten years, but instead at ten years it still looked fine, structurally it was still fine, fifteen years it looks fine and it’s still very structural, twenty years it’s still fine and still looks structural! You know, a lot of those boats are still around. Some of those boats are.

So that’s how I got into it. But most all the boats I built were one-of-a-kind boats. A guy would come to me and say, “I need a boat, and this is what I want it to do.” And every boat that I built, I ran. I would know, for everything I had changed from one boat to another boat, I knew what it did to that hull. So I would go from one boat to another boat. Every boat was an entirely different boat. We’d take it offshore and we’d run it, we’d beat it! We done all kinds of things to ‘em! [laughing]

Sammy: They were tested.

Larry: Yeah, we tested it and then we put it on the trailer and it was his. I never made full payment until after the guy said, “That’s what I wanted.”

Sammy: So each one was an individually crafted boat for the person. It was made to order.

Larry: Mm hm. It was a made-to-order boat, if it was for a crab fisherman or if it was for a shrimp boat, or a boat to go catch snapper with, or whatever. Every boat was different, until I got into the single mold boats. Then those boats were, every boat was the same.

Sammy: So the ones prior to that, they would have been the plywood?

Larry: Yeah. They would have been the plywood only goin’ into it. I would build the hull and take the plywood back apart and use it someplace else. It would be a solid hull.

Sammy: It would be a solid fiberglass hull?

Larry: Solid fiberglass, yeah. But it was, I’ve had a long life in it. I worked there for fifty-two years and built boats. As a matter of fact, the last one I built, I’ve still got it. I called it the [Ex-Pro Line?]. That’s the end of ‘em, I’ll probably never build another one. I figured that that was a good name to end it all. My wife, she’s got now to where she protects me, don’t want me to hurt my knees, and you know, I’m just not built that way. If I want to do something, let’s do it! Like y’all! Life’s short enough without puttin’ limitations to it.

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