Media From The Past

I rebuilt our entire section on old media from the past.

This section also includes a NEW area of the website featuring newspaper articles from Dayton and St Pete. Many thanks to Phil Kunz. He made it a point to buy/collect newspapers from when he was at these races.

Race Boat Programs

I have an appreciation for boat racing that is turned into artwork and Race Programs had many fine examples of this work. I took all the Race Program covers we had (almost 300 of them) and put them into a flip book. The covers are arranged within the book in chronological order from oldest to newest.

George Walther’s Country Boy

Phil Kunz is doing 3 stories on the boats that campaigned under the COUNTRY BOY name.
The first CB story is on George Walther and his sons. The other stories will be the Wiener family’s Country Boy and the Siracusa family’s Country Boy.
The Walther’s boats campaigned under the name COUNTRY BOY and wow, did they have a lot of hydros. The boat racing bug started with Dad (George) as a young lad in the outboard class and then he moved up to the limited inboard classes. Eventually his son’s Skip and Salt took over driving as they became old enough to drive and the family did well. The Walther’s family last moved up to the unlimited class and ran a few of the big boats. The Unlimited hydros were not running under the CB name (as you could sell the boat’s naming rights to help support the cause). A real neat story and we think you will be amazed at the number of Country Boy hulls that they campaigned.

ANDIAMO – the boats raced by Tony Lamontia

B class Stock National Champion – 1953
Albany to New York – a 136 mile marathon race Tony ran – 1949
Tony running his Rich Hallett hull in the early 60s in Charleston, West Virginia.
Tony and his Ron Jones S-185 ANDIAMO – Kankakee, Illinois 1983.

Tony Lamontia raced from 1949 through the late 1980s. All his boats were named ANDIAMO. The Ron Jones built hydro (above) was the last boat he raced and his son Mark purchased it and it has been fully restored and now campaigns on the vintage circuit. Mark put together a wonderful webpage documenting his father’s racing days.

Sunshine Baby

We entirely rebuilt Ray Gassner’s Sunshine Baby webpage. Fascinating history on the 4 hydros Ray campaigned under the Sunshine Baby name. Ray started his racing career off running a Ventnor, then a Hallett, followed by a Lauterbach (F-57), and finishing up with SB IV H-57 (another Lauterbach). He was very successful with many great wins throughout the Sunshine Baby history. Many thanks again to 2 folks: Brent McLean who started this webpage years ago and for digging more artifacts out and helping again with photo captions and Phil Kunz for giving us more great pics (like this pic showing the H-57 supercharged Hemi above). Check it out.