A Floater From the Fifties

I tried my best to create a Big Piney River museum and Nature Center near my hometown of Houston Missouri. But it was not to be and now I have to empty it in hopes that someone else can take over and use that building, there in a beautiful, wooded setting a mile south of town, for something useful and lasting. It could have been something great with all the Big Piney artifacts I have from 100 to 60 years ago. I planned all kind of exhibits and a Big Piney aquarium filled with river creatures. I thought God wanted me to do it but I know that sometimes I have tackled things I thought God wanted me to accomplish when it wasn’t His idea at all, but just a product of my own misguided enthusiasm.

It was all something I had done before with great success, in the 1970’s when I was Chief Naturalist for Arkansas, working on those nature center projects in State Parks. Trouble is, when I started thinking about a Big Piney Nature Center I was in my sixties. In Arkansas I did all that back then I was only 20-some. I didn’t realize, ten years ago how quickly I would start approaching 80, and I was stupid enough to believe I was still going to be feeling young enough to make it all work despite health problems that would come my way due to my age.

So here I am with a pair of old antique johnboats that I have to do something with. In the 1980’s I built a wooden johnboat 15-feet long that is a duplicate of theones my dad and granddad built for the Piney and Gasconade rivers between 1920 and 1970. For many years that boat I built was on display at the Jim Gaston White River Museum. Now it is a good old antique, with the paint wearing off and the wood deteriorating. It will be great for a display in a museum or old country store or perhaps one of the Ozark river resorts.

The best part is, I will give it away to someone who wants to come and take it. I also will give away two display cabinets, one that is 8 feet long and made from Ozark walnut. Both need glass tops but I couldn’t get that done. A lady at the local glass company said they were too busy to mess with it. Again, I will give all of this away plus some other items too numerous to mention. I can provide pictures of the old wooden boat and display cabinets.

Many springs ago I was hunting turkeys at a ladies ranch in the Ozarks when she showed me an old aluminum johnboat her late husband had bought that was made for the old-time Missouri Conservation Commission in 1950. I noticed that the serial number was 0001 so I started investigating and found that it was made in Richmond MO by a fellow named Appleby. Mr. Appleby had come to my grandfather’s home on the Big Piney to watch him make wooden johnboats. He then decided to try to make one out of aluminum that was much longer, for the MCC to use on the Current and the Gasconade Rivers.

I was so fascinated by it that I bought it and the custom-made trailer and the little 3-horse Mercury motor that was on it. It is on display now at that Big Piney nature center I built, but will be removed shortly. I paddled it down two or three Ozark rivers that would accommodate its 20-foot length. It is just like the old White River johnboats from the days of Jim Owen and Charlie Barnes, the men from Branson who made Ozar

k float fishing famous in the early years of the last century.

Appleby went on to establish an aluminum boat company named the Richline-Appleby Company at Lebanon, Mo. He had a daughter named Diana Lowe, who took over the boat company after she was married. Her son Derrick created a branch of the Lowe Company called Generation Three Boats. I have a custom-made hard-topped camping-pontoon boat that Derrick put together for me in 1988, and a Lowe Paddle-Jon river boat made in 1969, which nearly duplicates my grandfathers wooden boats. In the ‘70s and ‘80s I used a half dozen aluminum Lowe lake-boats and got to know Diana and Derrick. Just last week I visited the Marine Center in Joplin Missouri (which I believe is the best boat company in the Ozarks) and there were a bunch of new Lowe boats of all sizes. May the company last forever!

See the first boat Mr. Appleby made in 1950, my camping boat and some of the other Lowe boats I owned years back on my internet site … larrydablemontoutdoors.