In Cedarville last month, Christopher John Smith of Holland, Michigan, reminisces about growing up in the Chris Craft boat building business and the years that led up to his 80th birthday. He is this year's Guest of Honor at the 30th Annual Les Cheneaux Antique Wooden Boat Show and Festival of Arts. "I can honestly say I've never received a paycheck from anyone but Chris Craft," mused Chris Smith while in Cedarville July 5, celebrating his 80th birthday.

It seems fitting the grandson of Christopher Columbus Smith, founder of what was once the world's largest boat production company, would choose the site of Chris Craft's first franchise to celebrate a lifetime in and out of boats. His birthday was July 4, when he rode an antique Chris Craft through the Les Cheneaux Independence Day parade in Cedarville, passing American flags out to children. The rest of his week was spent on the water, where the engine music of the area's many Chris Crafts melded with the sounds of other boats plying the channels.

He is this year's guest of honor at the Les Cheneaux Boat Show, repeating a role he played in 1983, and honoring this 30th anniversary show with his family heritage. A captivating and pleasant speaker, Mr. Smith delivers stories of his legendary past with obvious passion for the boats his family produced.

Chris Craft boat company got its start when a 13-year-old Christopher Columbus Smith and his older brother, Henry, built a wooden duck boat in 1874. The brothers were commercial duck hunters, and hunted the St. Clair River area, where they shot hundreds of ducks that they cleaned and packed in ice. About 40 miles from Detroit, the brothers were able to make a decent living supplying ducks to the growing hotel and restaurant industry in the metropolitan Detroit area. The boys also fished and trapped, and became locally renowned sportsmen and guides based in their hometown of Algonac. Chris Smith carved decoys, a skill that would later turn into carving boat models.

Algonac's location near the St. Clair flats gave the Smith boys easy access to the water, and the productive marshes, channels, and islands of the region. Boats were vital to the Smiths for getting game, and later for providing a guide service to bring urban sportsmen out to their hunting and fishing grounds.

"Algonac was a resort town with hotels, and people from Detroit came up by boat," Mr. Smith said of the brothers' transition into boat building. "They took people across to the islands by boat, and one day, one of their customers said, 'That's a nice boat! How about building me one?'"

It wasn't long before the Smith brothers began building boats for a living, eventually opening a boat livery in downtown Algonac to make good on a promise Chris Smith made to his wife to settle down and open a boat house and livery. The business developed a reputation for turning out good and fast boats, and Chris Smith went on to develop the company to capitalize on the nation's growing obsession with speed and pleasure boating. Henry Smith opted to leave the boat building business and continue working as a hunter and sportsman. Chris Smith and Sons Boat Company was founded in 1922, and boat production started to take off, multiplying from 24 boats in 1922 to 447 boats in 1927.

It was in 1927 that Christopher John Smith, grandson and namesake of the company's founder, was born. His father, Bernard, was working in the company's factory alongside his father, Chris, and brothers, Jay and Owen. Speed boats were part of the company's initial line, and they were soon joined by a line of luxurious cabin cruisers.

The youngest of six children born to Bernard and Dora Smith, Chris Smith said he literally grew up in Chris Craft's wooden boat factory on the water in Algonac.

"Once I convinced my mother I could swim, I was allowed to go work at the factory," Mr. Smith said. "Everyone there knew me by name, and it was a great way to grow up."

He grew up with a love of boats and being on the water, developing a natural interest in the way they worked. The boats of his childhood included his own first boat - an eight-foot Penn Yan dinghy, his mother's 1936 Chris Craft cruiser called Bernardora, and his father's 22-foot Chris Craft utility for fishing.

"My dad loved fishing," Mr. Smith noted. "My dad was a great duck hunter, too, and he leased property on Walpole Island on the Ontario side from the Indians for hunting."

The family also took cruises, and Bernard Smith loved cruising up to Georgian Bay and Little Current, also on the Ontario side of Lake Huron. Occasionally they cruised over the Les Cheneaux Islands, where they fished. Mr. Smith remembers seeing perch underwater around the docks.

Among his happy memories of the Algonac factory and spending time on boats, Mr. Smith recalls hard times, like coming home from boarding school at the beginning of World War II, when his parents announced the government was taking his mother's 48-foot cruiser for service in the war.

"The last thing I saw of that boat was them spray-painting the cruiser that olive green, Army color," he said. "We got to keep the 22- foot utility, however, and I was so happy about that because I was beginning to drive it."

Mr. Smith was graduated from high school in 1946, but was not drafted into World War II service because he could not pass the physical fitness test. He enrolled in a college summer program at Michigan State University, but college didn't hold his interest and he yearned for the boat factory. Around that time, he also met and married Melva Simons.

"Her parents were going to take her to Florida, and of course, that wasn't going to work at all," Mr. Smith said. "So we married in 1947, and that's another reason college didn't work out."

Mr. Smith decided against college, instead seeking enrollment in an apprentice program at the Algonac factory.

"Right from the start, I wanted to work with my hands in the factory," Mr. Smith said. "I think my dad was a bit disappointed, because he was having a dickens of a time finding managers within the family. I wasn't capable or interested enough to be a manager."

Bernard Smith consented to his son's apprenticeship, and during the next two years, Chris Smith performed every job in the factory, from counting screws, to unloading lumber, to testing out new boats. Mr. Smith said when he tested boats, "my favorite place was the gas pump, because I'd just fill it up and go."

"We only knew one speed: 'wide open, and don't slow down for waves,'" he joked.

"The family encouraged us kids to use the boats because they figured it was better for us to find out what things were going to break on a boat before we sold it," Mr. Smith said. "Sometimes a prototype didn't perform the way we wanted, and we wouldn't be able to sell or produce that boat. That was a hard thing to see, because they would have to bust up and destroy those boats."

Mr. Smith eventually joined the engineering department, and noted that "no one person designed Chris Craft boats," because it was a team effort. Mr. Smith made prototype models out of scale drawings of boats that were built in all the Chris Craft factories. For approximately 60 years in the 20th century, Chris Craft reportedly built more boats than any other company. By 1960 when the Smith family sold Chris Craft, the company had 11 factories all over the world.

Mr. Smith spent most of his working life at the Holland factory, and 38 years in the prototype department. He retired from Chris Craft in 1986 at the age of 59, when the company moved the prototype department from Michigan to Florida. Chris and Melva Smith would not move to Florida because they loved Michigan, so Mr. Smith quit the company instead. He later worked with Steve Northius at Grand Craft in Holland for awhile.

The Smiths have six children, Larry, Chris Ann, Susan, Joy, Mark, and Debbie; five grandchildren, and one great-grandson. Three of his children are aircraft pilots like himself, and one flies for American Airlines.

It wasn't until after his retirement that he became interested in antique boats. The first one he restored was a 27-foot, 1961 Chris Craft Sea Skiff, he called Odyssea, a lap-strake sided model his uncle, Owen, developed to compete with Lyman's boats at the time.

"I had fun with it," he happily said of the restoration work. "All my life, my job was following someone else's drawings, and when I refinished this boat, I did what I wanted when I wanted to do it, without a fisherman standing above with a fishing pole, waiting for the boat."

He later restored a 16-foot Chris Craft Rocket he called Odyssea II.

Aregular participant in the Les Cheneaux Antique Wooden Boat Show for about 15 years now, Mr. Smith often brings along his prized antique boats, Odyssea and Odyssea II to the show, where he can be seen cheerfully chatting with spectators or participating in the festivities.