Here’s a tale not heard lately… and includes one of our favorite topics, Neil McCray’s Erie County Airport.  

Neil sold it to the Kudlak brothers after World War II and they kept it going until 1956, then sold it to Harvey Walter and Paul Joslin who kept it mowed; the hangars remained but slowly deteriorated.  They sold it to the Monarch Properties Corporation of Erie and Ernest Testo used it for many years to house his steam engine collection, but in 1971 and 1972, the one remaining hangar was empty and someone put it to an interesting use… He built a sailboat in it.

Douglas Frye was the boat builder.  He explained to an Erie Morning News reporter in October 1972, why he felt the need to build a boat – because he was “annoyed at having water splashed on him from other maneuvering watercrafts.”  The boat he built was 36 feet long, 12 feet wide and 10 feet high.  It drew six feet of water and was driven by a 25-horsepower diesel motor.  It took 18 months in all to build during 1971 and ’72.  

Douglas recently sent photos of his effort, saying that he lived in the hangar during the building period. It was the only one still standing at that point.

“The adventuresome spirit of the airport and Neil McCray continued,” he wrote.  After the boat was finished, “my girlfriend and I cruised in that boat down the Eastern Coast of America to Florida and then back up to Hampton Roads, Virginia, where we settled down and got married.”

Douglas was pictured by the reporter while working on his boat.  It evokes thoughts of a youthful adventure as well as the scene of the end of an era for Fairview… the old McCray field. And to think, it was once used for ship building !

 

     By the way, the boat was named  —    “Wandering Wench.”

 

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