Kappy's Boats

I have this sign in my workshop today.

My Dad inherited the "caretaker of the right-of-way" role for the Franklin Tract at Sandy Pond. Roughly, it included all the properties from the Bayview to Tott's Pavilion (also known as the Poor Girl and later The Beacon) to County Route 15 to water's edge. The right of way was established to let all property owners gain access to the Pond at the end of Ontario Avenue.

Dad inherited this role from Scotty Hayward in the mid 60's. It used to be Scotty's Boats. Scotty was a great guy. He always had a stinky cigar in his mouth. I bought nightcrawlers from him for my boyhood fishing excursions. His wife May was a saint and baked some dynamite cookies.

Dad inherited 6 Starcraft and 1 Lonestar aluminum rental boats and from Scotty. I think he paid May for them anyway. I still have one of the Starcrafts now. He also got a dock and a boat lift. Dad expanded the facility with another very long dock built by Mr. Bardechewski the welder (Bardy) over on South Pond. I worked for Bardy one summer as a youth, welding ski lift assemblies for the Greek Peak ski facility. Dad rented dock space to summer residents. He also bought another used boat lift for our family boat, a 16 ft. MFG runabout with a 40hp Evinrude outboard.

I spent a lot of time pumping gas and maintaining /renting out the boats at the livery. We got $3 a day for a row boat and $10 a day if you wanted the motor on it with a half-tank of gas free. My folks gave me the Lonestar boat and a Johnson 4 1/2 hp outboard when I graduated from 8th grade. I rented that out a lot. $10 was a lot of money for a teen in 1968. I still have the Johnson motor too.

Kappy's Boats, August 1984. This a view from the end of the Long Dock...

One time as a teen I was mowing the lawn on the waterfront on a beautiful sunny summer morning. The docks were full of boats and many neighbors were on the docks and in the boats. I ran over a yellow-jacket (bees) nest in the ground and they swarmed out after me. I left the mower running and ran as fast as I could towards the water. I ran down the boat ramp and lunged out in a running dive, taking in a huge breath of air. I dove down and held my breath for just as long as I could, praying that the yellow-jackets would fly away.

Then I started to the muffled sounds of people screaming above water.

Oops. Sorry!

The angry yellow-jackets lost me so they started attacking everybody there. I came up fast, took another huge breath and dove down again. As I was up there I glimpsed people flaying their arms and swatting and screaming. I kept coming up for air and going back down several times until the attack was over. Several other people jumped in and did what I was doing. I don't know how many stings everybody else got but God shone on me that morning - none at all.

I don't think anybody knew they had been chasing me...

On calm days when the surface of the Pond was like a mirror, we used to have a BB-gun contest on the end of the Long Dock. The boy who could shoot straight up and have his BB come straight down closest to where we were standing was the winner. Bloop! That was fun.

I came in from duck hunting just after sunset on Halloween in 1979, and there was Dad, feverishly trying to finish off the freshly-poured reinforced concrete boat ramp all by himself. The water was abnormally low that fall, and Dad took the opportunity to construct the ramp. He needed help so I dropped my duck gear and grabbed a float and we floated that thing by the headlights of our cars until it was too set up to work and our arms were about to drop off.

It is a huge boat ramp.

While we worked we had a real good talk. Dad was concerned about my future. I hadn't done any thing of value since college. He didn't know that I had enlisted in the Navy the day before. I told him so and he stopped his work, choked a little, and cleared his throat. "I met a lot of good men who were Navy... OK let's finish this thing and have a beer". I think that was his way of telling me that he acknowledged me as a man that day.

Kappy and "Kappy's Boats" and are gone now, like a vapor in the wind, but that huge concrete boat ramp is still there today. It has survived the pounding waves and thick cold ice of Sandy Pond for the past 30 years. To me it's a wonderful monument to that time with Dad...

Brother Pete at the end of the Long Dock, 1982

Pulling out the family boat.

Kip and Daughter Stephy at the end of the Long Dock, August 1984.

Kappy's Boats was next to the Mayer Camp, which used to be part of the Jappyland dance Pavilion.

Mr. Perry Bartlett

This photo is from the “Sandy Pond Memories” book produced by Sandy Creek Town Historian Charlene Cole a few years ago. Thank you Charlene for graciously granting me permission to use photos from the books you and your crew put together.

The Sandy Pond Memories books inspired me to establish this web log.

If anyone would like any of their Sandy Pond memories, photos, etc. posted here just email them to me. skappesser@hotmail.com. Please put "Sandy Pond Memories" in the subject line of your email, thanks.

This site is intended to be a permanent record for our children and grandchildren…

OK back to the photo. This is Bartlett’s Bait Shop, also known as Bartlett's Marina. It was owned by Mr. Perry Bartlett, who was already an old man when I was a youngster during the ‘60s.

Mr. Bartlett had an ice-house built into the hill next to the road (County Route 15). Perhaps you can still see the remnants of the entrance to the underground ice-house across from Sandy Pond Marina's pizza parlor and boat ramp area today.

In this photo the entrance to the Mr. Bartlett's ice-house would be to the left and behind the photographer.
(Photo posted with permission of Charlene Cole, taken by Phyllis LeBeau.)

During the 60’s there were still a number of summer residents who were using the old-fashioned ice boxes instead of refrigerators, and they relied on Mr. Bartlett to periodically deliver the big blocks of ice. I remember my summer friend Michael Savage’s grandpa “Joker” Savage had an ice-box in his garage for his Piels beer. He said it needed a new block of ice once a week. I wouldn’t doubt that ice-box is still in that old garage…

During the winter Perry would monitor the thickness of the ice on the Pond until it was just the right dimension. Then he would spud out some starter holes for his big ice saw and start sawing the ice in long strips.

He had to carefully guide the saw on the cross-cuts in order to make good square blocks that would fit in a standard ice-box.

Then he would bring them in and stack them the ice house, opening the doors on the coldest winter days to get the ice as cold as possible. It would keep well into the late summer. I remember ice-block deliveries into late August. My Dad bought ice from Perry from time to time to cool down food and beverages for their clambakes and square dances in the driveway.

These guys are trying to figure out how the old-timers did it...

Ronny Whisnant used to hang out a lot with Perry in the big old workshop/bait shop, earning a few bucks tinkering on whatzits and thingamabobs. Ronny was a skilled jack-of-all-trades who worked as a handy-man for many residents and summer people. He used to plow the snow out of my Dad’s driveway with his old red and white ’46 Willy’s Jeep. There was a rumor that after he passed away his relatives found thousands of dollars of cash in his home - that he had a bathtub full of coins - pocket change saved for many years. Not sure if I believe it though.

Dad never made a habit of bragging and telling a lot of stories about his 25 year career as a State Trooper, but if you were peristent you could get one out of him eventually. This one about Mr. Bartlett is one of my favorites:

My Dad was a State Trooper from 1936 to 1961.
He heard stories from the older Troopers who enforced the Prohibition laws in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s.

One of the stories Dad relayed to us when we were kids was that Mr. Bartlett was under surveillance for a long time in those days because he was suspected of “Rum-Running” -transporting illegal Canadian liquor by boat into New York State.

It was alleged that Mr. Bartlett would wait until very late into the night and sneak a small sail boat with a black sail (an original "stealth boat" you could say) out of the Pond out onto Lake Ontario where he would either rendezvous with larger boat that had made it through the Coast Guard’s “Rum Line”, or come ashore at a pre-determined location where a load of liquor had been stashed earlier by the party who had transported it from Canada. Allegedly, Mr. Bartlett would take on the load of liquor and bring it in to for someone to pick up in a vehicle. For his clandestine activity he was allegedly well-paid.

Apparently this alleged information about Mr. Bartlett came from semi-trusted local sources but was legally hearsay. The authorities needed to catch Mr. Bartlett red-handed. Unfortunately the State Troopers simply did not have the resources in those days to watch Mr. Bartlett twenty four hours a day. The Troopers suspected that Mr. Bartlett would just bide his time and wait until they weren’t around, then slip out on his black sailboat to pick up the next load…

The State Troopers never caught him, and to the best of my knowledge Mr. Bartlett never confirmed or denied he was a "Rum-Runner".

Frolicking at Sandy Pond in 1932

My brother Kip brought a shoebox of old photos to scan while visiting us here in Maryland a while back.

Browsing through them I found this.

My Dad, Ed Kappesser is the guy on the far right. He was 17 years old when this was snapped...

Reverse Side

They are definately at the beach on the lake. I think the guy on the far left is Don Dix, Dad's good friend. (I talked about Don and his magnificent ice boats in the earlier posting about ice boating.)

Here's another story I heard more than once.

One time, about when they were about this age vacationing at Sandy Pond from North Syracuse, Dad and Don decided to swim across the Pond just after they both ate a whole blueberry pie at the Bayview.

Don was in the lead but became sick and out came his blueberry pie. He didn't say anything and kept swimming, not missing a stroke. Poor Dad swam right through it on top of the water and almost lost his blueberry pie too.

The old friends always thought that was a funny story and we heard it many times. I don't know why. We thought it was pretty gross.