Chief Waramaug Is Feature for Les Cheneaux Boat Show's 30th Anniversary
By Amy Polk

An artist's depiction of Chief Waramaug, made for the 1907 New Milford, Connecticut Bicentennial. The powerful American Indian leader ruled over much of western Connecticut. (Image provided by Ted Grulikowski)

The name Chief Waramaug bears a significance to a region of Connecticut where the American Indian leader ruled over several tribes through the early 1700s. His reputation and legends about his life persist so that settlers who moved into the area afterward named Connecticut's second largest natural lake after him. The lake was among the former chief's favorite hunting and fishing grounds, and is where the Stuart Augustus Mead family vacationed and ran their boat, Chief Waramaug, for nearly 20 years.

The 22-foot, 1927 Chris Craft Cadet is one of the three feature boats at this year's Les Cheneaux Boat Show and Festival of Arts August 11, and has its own homecoming story significant to the small Connecticut community that surrounds the lake - a story that makes Chief Waramaug all the more valuable to owner Ted Grulikowski of Brighton.

Ted Grulikowski of Brighton drives the 22-foot, 1927 Chris Craft Cadet Chief Waramaug through the Les Cheneaux Islands. (Photographs courtesy of Ted Grulikowski)

In January 1927, Stuart Augustus Mead of Greenwich, Connecticut, attended the New York Motor Boat Show at the Grand Central Palace in New York City. There he met Christopher Columbus Smith, and purchased one of the newly introduced Chris Craft Cadets from Chris Smith and Sons Boat Company of Algonac. The company later became the now famous Chris Craft boat company.

Records show that Mr. Mead's Cadet, bearing the hull number 1028, was produced May 6, 1927, and fitted with a Scripps F6 Junior Gold Cup Engine and tools, straight front seat with removable center, full cover, and special flag as optional equipment. Mr. Mead named the boat Chief Waramaug in honor of the area's highly regarded Indian chief who died in 1735, and it was brought home to Lake Waramaug, where the Mead family owned a vacation home and boathouse. The home and boathouse still stand there today.

Ted Grulikowski stands in Hessel with the Chief before it underwent a two-year restoration process.

Chief Waramaug was outfitted with the Scripps Junior Gold Cup engine to help assure Mr. Mead would win races over the Chrysler and Kermath powered boats of the day. That engine remains in the boat today, and is still running. The engine model was produced from 1925 through 1930. During the production run, 361 Scripps F6 Junior Gold Cup engines were produced, and Chris Craft purchased 19 of them. Only four of these engines are still around. Chief Waramaug has the only Scripps F6 Junior Gold Cup engine known to be still running in a Chris Craft, Mr. Grulikowski said.

"When I got the boat, I knew I had an engine, but I didn't know how special an engine it was until someone saw the pictures and told me," he said.

Mr. Grulikowski has been a wooden boat enthusiast most of his life, and acquired his first wooden boat in 1990, a 20-foot Grand Craft Sport. He has since owned a 27-foot Grand Craft runabout, and the Chief Waramaug.

Growing up in southeast Michigan, the home of legendary boat companies like Chris Craft, Gar Wood, and Hacker Craft, "you just grew up knowing about these wooden boats that you always saw and admired," Mr. Grulikowski said. "They're works of art."

For him, Chief Waramaug was love at first sight, and he recognized something special in the boat.

"It had great lines," Mr. Grulikowski said. "The lines on the boat were just incredible."

He first saw the Chief in the back corner of a storage shed, where its weathered and worn-out hull had long lost its luster. Mr. Grulikowski was looking at the boat 60 years since it had last been used regularly. The Mead family used Chief Waramaug periodically from 1927 until the start of World War II. It was rarely used from then on, and when the Meads sold their cottage in 1979, the boat was also sold to a family in Michigan. Chief Waramaug was trucked to the Les Cheneaux Islands and placed in storage, where it remained for 21 years.

Mr. Grulikowski bought the boat in October 2000, and in 2001, Russ Arrand of the Cadillac Boat Shop in Cadillac started a full restoration that would continue for two years. George Shinn of Vintage Boat Services of Sumpterville, Florida, restored the original Scripps F6 Junior Gold Cup engine. Mr. Arrand retained 70% of the original wood and all of the original hardware. In fact, Mr. Grulikowski said, the boat was missing only two of its original parts: the gas cap and the stern pole.

"The good news about the boat is virtually everything was all there," he added. "Most of the time you find something missing, but that wasn't the case here."

While the boat was being restored, Mr. Grulikowski started researching the Chief's history. He knew nothing about the boat, but found a former caretaker of the Mead cottage who knew just about everything.

"Thanks to him, I was able to go on a research trip out to Connecticut," Mr. Grulikowski said.

When the restoration was complete, he took the boat back to Lake Waramaug for a reunion between the community and the boat. People came out to see the newly restored boat and to share their memories, he said. He was delighted by the response, and the boat's obvious importance to the community. John Mead, son of the boat's first owner, brought Mr. Grulikowski the missing stern pole. The gas cap, he told Mr. Grulikowski, is at the bottom of the lake. It has since been replaced by another cap from the same year.

"One man who came sent me a letter of thanks and talked about the boat, he said. "For him, the reunion and seeing the boat brought back so many memories."

"It was one of those cases in which the journey was almost more fun than the destination," he said of his own experiences researching the boat's history through countless interviews and phone calls. But it was worth it for the wealth of history he learned about the boat and its former home.

Only 18 1927 Chris Craft Cadets are registered in the national Antique and Classic Boat Society (ACBS) Directory. Since he started showing the boat, Mr. Grulikowski has collected 12 awards for Chief Waramaug, most recently the 2005 ACBS Antique Boat of the Year award at Lake-of-the-Ozarks, Missouri, and the 2005 Toronto ACBS Antique Boat of the Year award in Gravenhurst, Ontario.

Mr. Grulikowski and his wife, Barb, have four children and 10 grandchildren. They live in Brighton all year, and come to the Les Cheneaux Islands for a week each year to participate in the boat show. They have been coming to the show since 1989, and are part of a group of Antique and Classic Boat Society members who work at the show every year. The volunteers, scattered among local resorts between Cedarville and Hessel, work on boat show day to ensure the show runs smoothly by staffing various positions.

The boat show will open Saturday, August 11, at 10 a.m. A complete schedule of activities will be published in this newspaper the week of the show, or can be obtained at the Les Cheneaux Historical Museum in Cedarville, or by calling (906) 484-2821.