I am delighted to have a guest post this morning from Nancy Arthur Hoskins of Eugene, Oregon. The Arthur family lived on West Genesee, across the street from the Krebs, from 1933 to 1944. Nancy is writing about her childhood in Skaneateles, and here shares the story of “The Arthur’s Skaneateles Mail Boat — The Chips.”
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In the summer of 1942, my brother Edwin Arthur, called ‘Doc’ by his friends and ‘Sonny’ by his family, worked for the Stinsons on the mail boat run. The next year he bought his own boat in Watertown, N.Y. He had saved some money, and my father, Gilbert, helped him with the rest. The boat cost $500. It was a wooden canal boat—very narrow and thirty-six feet long.
Mr. Stinson helped Edwin obtain a pilot and engineer’s license and he was awarded the mail contract along with my mother, Dot (Ellen Dorothea). They ran the mailboat the summer of 1943. The run, up one side of the lake and down the other, was approximately forty miles, and ran five days a week from 10:00 to 4:30. At forty-five stops mail, groceries, and ice were delivered. A canopy for the pilot and postmistress, and bench seats for the passengers were added. The boat could carry fifteen passengers and was equipped with life jackets. My brother ran the boat. Mother took care of the mail, and took care of the passenger fares and their comfort.
All of my brothers and sisters remember stories about going around the lake on the mailboat. My brother recalls that there was no dock at one of the cabins, so a young man would swim out to retrieve the mail. My brother joined the Navy after the summer was over and served in the Pacific. In Singapore, he was surprised to run into the guy who swam out to get his mail. The two servicemen spent the night reminiscing about the halcyon days of summer in Skaneateles.
I was seven that summer and rode the mail boat almost every day. I will never forget the day that Mother tried to straddle the boat and a dock as the boat drifted away. Almost in slow motion Mother fell in the water!
Trying to keep an older boat engine running during the war years was a difficult task for a teenage pilot. On one mail run, after making an ingenious repair in the middle of the lake, we returned by moonlight. There were times when the mail had to be delivered by car — two cars actually! Mother would take one side of the lake and Sonny the other with me in the rumble seat. This meant going up and down every steep driveway to each summer home. Mother said it was, “Two if by land, one if by sea.”
Sundays were special for my family. We would take the boat to a different place on beautiful Skaneateles Lake to swim and picnic.
At the end of the summer of 1943 my brother joined the Navy and the boat was dry-docked for the duration at the end of the park next to the pier. The Chips was damaged and never ran again. Mailboats on the lake did not resume until after the war, but by then the Arthur family had moved to Washington state.
Film was difficult to obtain during the war and the only surviving photograph of the boat is the one above that my brother carried in his wallet while he served in the Navy.
— Nancy Arthur Hoskins
Skaneateles 