114 | BOATINGMAG.COM | MAY 2018OFF MY DOCKL
ombardi and Kiekhaefer. It would not be unusual to find a framed
photo of either icon in any tavern in Wisconsin’s Lake Winnebago
drainage. Each was a legend in his own time, each possessed an
outsize personality and, decades after both have passed to the
great beyond, each remains part of the region’s mythology.
For example, there must have been 5,000 altar boys who served Lombardi
at Catholic Mass and will tell you about it today over a beer. And at least that
many old men claim to have been impulsively fired by E.C. Kiekhaefer from
a job assembling Mercury outboards. Or they watched Kiekhaefer fire the
Pepsi delivery man.
And so, when I mentioned across the Lake View Inn bar my recent trip
to Lake X, the fabled Mercury test
facility in central Florida, I was not
surprised that someone piped right
up with a Kiekhaefer story.
“I once worked for the old man,”
recalled my good friend Chuck
Larson. “In fact, I was a test driver
at Lake X.”
There was much eye rolling and groaning up and down the bar.
“No really,” said Chuck. “I have pictures to prove it.”
Chuck’s Lake X story begins with an ad in The Fond du Lac Reporter.
“It was 1963 and I was 19 years old, and Mercury ran this ad in the paper
seeking young men to test boats, and it sounded like fun for the summer,”
said Chuck. “Six of us got hired, and we piled into my 1957 Pontiac and drove
to St. Cloud.”
Around-the-clock endurance testing was underway at Lake X.
“Being kids, we usually got later shifts. At night, I could see the eyes of
alligators glowing pink in the boat headlights. And it was so boring. If youhad a day shift, you’d take a book
along to read. I was running an
early four-cylinder sterndrive, and
it didn’t go too fast. Every once in a
while, Mr. Kiekhaefer, who they just
called the old man, would land in a
seaplane and check up on things.”
Ah, I thought, here comes the
part where Chuck gets fired by
Kiekhaefer, because that’s how these
stories always tend to end. But that’s
not what happened.
“After the night shifts, we had to
try and sleep during the day in house
trailers with no air conditioning,
which was like trying to sleep in an
oven,” said Chuck. “Then one day, as
a prank, one of the older guys caught
an armadillo, and he let it loose in the
trailer while I was trying to sleep. I
rolled over in the bunk and put my
hand down, and it landed right on the
armadillo. That was it for me.”
A few days later, I was at Chuck’s
place and asked to see the pho-
tographic evidence of his Lake X
employment. From a drawer in the
den he pulled out an old picture
postcard of an armadillo — Greet-
ings from Florida! Because Chuck’s
a Lutheran, he can’t tell those
Lombardi stories.“Being kids, we usually got later
shifts. At night, I could see theeyes of alligators glowing pink in
the boat headlights.”
I WORKED FOR
THE OLD MAN
Another close encounter with an outboard legendBOATING (ISSN 0006-5374) (USPS 504-810), May 2018, Volume 91, No. 5. ©2018. Boating is published nine times a year (January/February, March, April, May, June, July/August, September, October
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