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Oral History Interview with Brian Weeks
Audio from Oral History Interview conducted on August 4, 2004.
Transcript of Audio
Interviewer: First question is, when did you build your first boat, do you remember?
Brian: Myself? I built my first boat when I was 12. My dad, I was learning stuff when I was young and we always helped him around the house and then just about ready to start working here and somehow I just was interested in a paddle boat and I took the plans out of Popular Mechanics and dad and I customized the plans a little bit and that was the first boat I built, was a paddle boat about 10 feet long.
Interviewer: Is your first memory of the water, of being on the water?
Brian: Yeah, my first memory like from almost infancy is like going to the beach in the summertime. We used to use, we had a few different old boats and then eventually we started using one of our own skiffs that dad had built. The first boat, I forget what kind of boat, I remember it was called the Ali Baba, we used to take it to the beach every weekend in the summertime. So we all learned to be on the water and in the water at a young age.
Interviewer: Your dad, was he the person that last, he’s passed on to you-
Brian: My grandfather, Frank, started it. He had worked for the yard that was here and it’s in there, too, Martinis-Smith Boatyard, I think it was called, M.S. Smith Boatyard, and that was located on this piece of property we’re sitting on now pretty much from the fence line to the side of that shop. So it wasn’t really a large place but they just built boats and that was very typical back in the late 1800s that people weren’t really doing marinas but people were building boats on this river, some for recreation and some for shell fishing and things like that. But there were some pretty big boats on the river back then. And then grandpa retired around 1965 and his sons, which was Frank V., it wasn’t Jr., Frank V. was the oldest and Frank passed away in ’95, no, ’93, then my father who’s the youngest son passed away in ’95, he had a bad heart that he’d been battling with for quite a few years, actually, and Joe was the middle brother who is now 84 this year. He’s still alive and he retired about two years ago. So they took over the business and Frank was more very laid-back and wasn’t really heavily involved in all the things that were going on, where Dave and Joe did more of the driving of what was going to happen. They bulk-headed the place in 1965, made new docks, 1954 was when they started building 26’ sea skiffs and where my grandfather was exclusively pretty much a boat builder. Dave and Joe and Frank made the place more into a marina where we did boat repairs.