Art of the Club

Enjoy the view

By Larry Stephenson, M.D.

Mounted just inside the entrance to the Main Dining Room are eight half-hulls of speedboats, four on each side, belonging to Club members whose names appear on the plaques. Additionally, on the east side, is a halfhull model of Miss America X (ten), one of the most famous race boats of her time. In 1932, thousands of spectators lined the shore of Lake St. Clair to cheer on this American contender for the coveted Harmsworth Cup. Piloted by her builder/owner Gar Wood, Miss America X battled British contender Miss England to a thrilling victory. See the GPYC Centennial book for more about the race and a photo of Gar Wood partying with GPYC Commodore Hayward Murphy in the Main Dining Room during pre-race festivities. Also at the entry, on the west side, is an acrylic painting entitled “Miss Pepsi by the Whittier”, depicting the iconic hydroplane race boat roaring past the Whittier Building to win the Gold Cup Race. This painting was commissioned to local maritime artist Jim Clary by the owners of the boat, the Dossin family, who had named her after their family business, the Pepsi Cola Bottling Company of Michigan. Over many years the GPYC membership roster has included several Dossin family members and is presently represented by member Doug Dossin. The painting is on loan from the Detroit Historical Museum collection. Moving further along the west wall is an oil-on-canvas entitled “Sunrise Over the Club”, painted by prominent Polish artist Jan Polowski during a one-year sabbatical he did in the U.S. This beautiful depiction of the Clubhouse was commissioned by Past Commodore John Boll and his wife Marlene and graciously donated to the Club. Just above this painting is a platform where a large model of a wooden sailboat is displayed. It is a scale model of 39-foot sailboat Spook, built in 1909 and co-owned for many years by Past Commodore Jim Daoust. The model is a pond sailor, which means it was built to actually be sailed on small bodies of water. The Daoust family donated the model to honor the late Commodore. The entry to the Commodores Room is flanked by a print and a painting. The print on the left is of another Jim Clary painting, Stewart J. Cort. Launched in 1972, the Cort was the first of the 13 Great Lakes thousand-foot freighters to be built and is the only one with its pilot house at the front, as found in the older lake freighters. The painting to the right, by prominent local maritime artist Paul C. La Marre, is SS William Clay Ford. This freighter is best known for leaving the shelter of White Fish Bay, with Captain Don Erickson at the helm, braving hurricane force winds with waves up to 35 feet high on Lake Superior, to search for the Edmund Fitzgerald. Following her decommission, the pilot house was removed and now resides at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum on Belle Isle. There is one painting on the south wall of the MDR, painted sometime in the 1970s by former GPYC member Paul Gillam, now deceased, showing the south side of the Clubhouse and the south harbor. Painting was merely a hobby for Gillam; he was chief designer for the Pontiac division of General Motors and head of GM’S Advance Design Studios. Photographs of every GPYC commodore from the Club’s founding in 1914 to present are displayed on the south and west walls of the Commodores Room. On a table at the far north end of the room is a scale model of the wellknown sidewheeler Tashmoo. Built in Detroit and launched in 1899, Tashmoo

transported passengers and cargo daily between downtown Detroit and Port Huron, with multiple stops along the St. Clair River, until 1936. The model was built by former GPYC member Robert Raisch, who was a retired US Marine Corps Brigadier General and recipient of two Distinguished Flying Crosses for his service as a fighter jet pilot in the Korean War. General Raisch built models as a hobby and donated this model to the GPYC in 2019.

In the Binnacle is a wooden model of Past Commodore Edsel Ford’s triple cockpit, high speed commuter Typhoon. The original 39-foot boat was designed by George Crouch at Dodge Boat Works in Newport News, RI, and built by master yacht builder Henry Nevins at City Island, NY. The model of Typhoon is very precise in detail, with hatch covers that open to expose the V-12 engine. The original boat was kept at the Ford estate in Grosse Pointe Shores and was shipped to Florida for winter use.

Two years ago, GPYC manager Aaron Wagner discovered what he considered to be a very special chart of Lake St. Clair. It was produced by Nautical Chart Wall, a company that specializes in enlarging standard NOAA charts and incorporating great detail into them. This particular chart has the exact location of the GPYC marked with our burgee. Aaron had an image of the chart installed on the wall behind his desk and particularly enjoys using it as a backdrop for Zoom meetings. There is also an oil-on-canvas painting on the north wall of the office depicting a two-masted schooner. The detail in this painting by R. Lane is such that the tiny crew members can be seen to be adjusting the sails on the boat.