The
Challenge
The
Challenge was a Great Lakes schooner.
It had a couple of cabins on deck and a row boat that hung off the
back. In 1969 he entered the boat
in the WRAM model contest and it won first place in the model boat
category. He entered it again in 1970
and 1971. He won first place in the
model boat category each of those two times. It didn’t sail as well as he would
have liked so the boat mostly sat in the living room and later on it decorated
the headboard of my parent’s bed.
He wanted to sell it to make room for more boats. Because he had deviated from the
original plans, he thought the boat wasn’t worth much. My mother paid to have an appraiser from
the South Street Seaport Museum visit and appraise all of the different
boats. After listing a variety of
problems with the boat’s construction, the man appraised it for six
thousand dollars which was a lot of money in 1974. For some reason my father promptly sold
it for one-tenth of that. So far I
only have this one picture of it that my sister found. She thinks she might find a few more.
