Where it all began

[Bill Basler]

I have been working on the new club web site a bit this evening. One thing that we are making progress on is the architecture for the club library, which will be an online repository of historic documents, including photos, literature, factory documents, etc. This will be a very exciting development. It will take hundreds of hours worth of work to bring this "live" and additional thousands of hours to fully populate. It will never be "done" and my hope is that this will be the single most important benefit of club membership. Stay tuned.

We have started by scanning every page of every back issue of The Brass Bell. This has been completed as you are reading this. There is several thousand pages of content in these back issues. The scanned pages have been saved as high-resolution PDFs and they have been OCRed, creating an "underlaying" text file that is searchable. More to come on this fairly soon.

As I was scanning these issues, several important documents came to my attention. I have seen this particular document before through my personal interaction with Wilson. I thought many of you would like to see the same. If you are interested in a bit of our club history, please speak up. I'll gladly fill you in on what I know, and I am sure we can get Wilson to offer up the details.

For example, how many of you know that Wilson Wright, our Executive Director fell into his Club role very much by accident? We can gladly share this dark secret! Just ask.

At any rate, read through the document below. If you click on the expanded view, you can read it at screen res.

[Al Benton]

OK, maybe it's from living in the "Show Me" state, but I'm curious. How did Wilson become involved?

My guess is his services were requested to oversee the original by-laws or constitution, or that someone hired him to sue the newly formed club.

[Bill Basler]

Our organization started out as a small, company sponsored group in 1973. As the prior letter indicates, the Club was the brainchild of A.W. MacKerer, with Ernie Tucker serving as the original secretary.

The first Brass Bell (the newsletter that was referred to in the above letter) was four pages, black ink on brown paper and was mailed to approximately 100 known Chris-Craft enthusiasts. As I recall the story from Wilson, this first management team was very short lived, and secretarial duties were almost immediately transferred to Howard Hallas.

Mr. Hallas was a former speech writer for then Chairman of American Motor Company, George Romney. Hallas was married to a lady who grew up with the Smith family and was handling the Club secretarial duties in his retirement years. As the story continues, when Mr. Hallas fell into poor health, he sent the Brass Bell production files (in those days, called "camera-ready" art) to Chris-Craft, in hopes that they would carry on with the production of The Brass Bell. Newly appointed company executives supposedly showed little interest in runnng the Club, and the Brass Bell was destined to be mothballed. Howard Hallas, served the Club for ten years until 1983.

Wilson Wright assumed the responsibility for the administration of the organization in 1983. ***Wilson, I need you to add your two cents worth here as to how you knew Hallas.***

I'll leave this humerous part of the story to Wilson, but let's just say, he ended up running a club for about 23 years longer than he had intended to!

During the Wilson Wright years, the organization grew from just a few members to about 2,500 members, most of whom live in the United States.

Today we are approaching 2,900 members, with a rapidly growing continent from Canada and overseas.

Wilson?