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About Ray
DeFir
My water activities
started in Oregon, after my family moved here from
Oklahoma in
1943 to work in the ship yards during World War
II. I was 13 years old. Our family
moved into the town of Vanport, Oregon which is
now the Portland International Raceway
and golf course area. By 1944, Vanport had the
second highest population in Oregon.
By 1944, my brother, Charles, and I had discovered
Smith Lake which was west of
Vanport. Reading a Popular Mechanics magazine, my
brother and I found plans for a
diving bell made out of an old water heater tank.
We built the diving bell out of the water
tank to which we attached an air hose and
automobile tire pump which we took to the
lake and took turns walking on the bottom of the
lake and pumping air to each other with
the tire pump.
After the diving bell experience, I was exploring
the river which is north of Smith Lake,
which on a chart is named the Oregon Slough.
Hayden Island is on the north side of the
Slough. I discovered a 38 man life boat partially
buried in the mud some distance from
the water. You could still read on the side of the
boat "38 Man Capacity" . It was metal
and still had the flat cross seats in it. After
locating it, and with friends from Vanport, we
dug out the mud, plugged the rusted out holes in
it with nuts and bolts and pieces of car
tire inntertube. We gathered up logs and
positioned them under the boat and rolled it to
the river. We paddled the boat up and down the
river for a few weeks until some people
in a moorage upriver pulled it out and sank it. I
guess they thought it was too dangerous
for us.
In 1946, in a war surplus yard, I found a P-38
airplane auxillary belly fuel tank that was
flattened on the bottom side when, evidently the
pilot landed with the wheels down. I
bought that belly tank, cut out the flat section,
put about a 10" keel on the bottom of it,
and I had an aluminum boat which I paddled around
in the slough.
Just west of Vanport was an earth and sand dike
that the railroad track was on. In 1948,
Vanport was flooded by the rising waters of Smith
Lake.
In 1952, I start working for Freight Liner. At
this time I started building my first inboard
boat. It was a 16' crackerbox design inboard
powered by a flat-head Ford V-8 engine
(296 c.i.). I built the engine from a stock Ford
V-8 flathead. After using this boat for about
a year on the Columbia River, I sold it and lost
track of it never knowing what had
become of it until 1988 when I was in Baxter Auto
Parts and a man standing next to me
asked if I was Ray DeFir. He identified himself as
the person who bought the Cracker
Box from me in 1953. He told me that he kept it a
few years and it was then sold and
later converted into an air boat.
What I considered a really fun event was also in
1952 when the river froze over between
Marine Drive and Government Island. We rolled a 6'
wire spool from Marine Drive to
Government Island knowing if the ice would support
the weight the of the spool, we
wouldn't go through ourselves. We made it to the
island and back.
A few years later, I met Bill Lauderback at
Freight Liner and who later manufactured
Lauderback Sea Ski's here in Portland. He started
a water ski school below the parking
lot of Waddles Restaurant on Hayden Island. I had
just learned water skiing and started
helping Bill at the ski school. We taught many
people to ski, including Russ Waddle
and other employees at the restaurant. At this
time, we became acquainted with people
who ran a Sea Plane Base just below the ski school
dock and I became the first person
to ski behind a plane. We gave them water ski
lessons and they towed us behind their
plane a few times. Bill and I also became the
first skiers to stand on a dock backwards
and take off backwards on one ski.
In 1956, I built my first mid-engine ski boat. It
was a 16' and powered by a Ford Flathead
(296 c.i.) that I also built. This was the boat
that pulled me to Astoria and back non-stop
and that pulled me in my 1,000
nonstop ski run in 1958. Counting practice and
ski runs, I
put 500 hours on the boat in the summer of 1958.
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