The Wooden Boat Association of North Texas a club of about 60 active members who restore, preserve, display and (most importantly) enjoy antique and classic wooden boats. Since Yellow Jackets (and their successors, Stinger Boats) are native to North Texas, we feel that it is important for us to make an effort to include Yellow Jacket and Stinger owners in our membership, and to support and encourage them to restore, display and enjoy their boats. We have met a few Yellow Jacket owners during our displays at the Texas State Fair and other area boat shows. Are you a Yellow Jacket or Stinger owner or enthusiast?

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The Wooden Boat Association has been around since the 1980s and is proud of its motto, "the hands-on wooden boat club". We meet monthly in North Dallas. We have shop facilities with shared power equipment near Allen, TX, and many of our members are quite accomplished in woodworking and mechanics. We have an annual "Ride 'n Show" weekend event in late August in conjunction with the Southwest Chapter of the Antique and Classic Boat Society. This event features a barbecue, a boat show attended by the public, and a Sunday morning run across Lake Lewisville in our boats. We also participate in numerous other shows in North Texas, and send a delegation to the internationally known "Keels and Wheels" show in Clear Lake in May.

Watch a KXII News Story on Yellow Jacket Boats!

See four Yellow Jackets on Display at the Dallas Boat Show!

Watch a video of former Yellow Jacket employee Gene Ramey reminisce about operations and people of the Yellow Jacket Boat company in the '50s.

Watch footage of the Webers' 1956 Yellow Jacket Riviera in the water!

Recently two of our members visited Denison to learn more about Yellow Jacket Boats. Read their full account below.

Lunch with "The French Street Gang"
by David Kanally

"I'm not sure what kind of shape this boat is in," I shouted over the whine of the tires and the roar of the wind on the soft top of my Jeep Wrangler as we barreled north from Dallas to Denison, Texas on US 75. Lew White was in the passenger seat trying to hold up his end of the conversation over the road noise. Lew was along for the ride at my invitation. We had spent some quality time together in 2007 restoring my 1934 wooden sailboat, and are both members of the Wooden Boat Association of North Texas. Truth be known, I also wanted his expertise in assessing the work required to bring the boat we were going to see back to useable condition. A 78-year-old shipwright, Lew is an accomplished woodworker and knows more about building and fixing wooden boats than I ever will. He did his apprenticeship in Portland, England building the hardy line of Tod boats in the 1940s, and until his retirement, had been involved in building boats on both sides of the pond for fifty years or better.
We were on our way to see Chuck Pool, long-time Denison businessman and recently, the owner of a 1950-vintage Yellow Jacket 14-foot molded plywood boat, built right there in Denison. Chuck had called us for advice on restoration, hoping we could bring to bear the experience of our wooden boat club on the restoration of his Yellow Jacket.

Toward the end of our one-hour drive, we reached the Eisenhower Parkway exit (President Eisenhower was born in Denison), and before we knew it we were in the heart of downtown, turning right onto Main Street and then right again, into the parking lot of Main Street Lumber, Chuck Pool's place of business. Within minutes we were in the wood-paneled offices at the rear of the store, waiting for Chuck to finish a phone call. Sixty-something Chuck emerged and greeted us with warmth, humor, and a drawl that told us Chuck was a lot more south than north, and a lot more west than east.

We toured the hardware and lumber store, which also contains show areas for the custom doors and frames done by his millwork business. Chuck is proud of the workmanship of his craftsmen and the creativity of his marketing guy. "When a customer gets a proposal from us, he can already see the quality." Chuck says.

If business is down these days, it's no fault of Chuck or his younger brother Robert, his 50/50 partner in all their business activities. Commodity values of lumber are half what they were a year or so prior, and the housing market fell early and hard in the recession of 2008-2009.
"It took me a while to figure out that I like working for myself the best." says Chuck. "I was an executive in the oil and gas business in Oklahoma and Texas for many years. My dad had lumber yards in Denison and Houston while we were growing up. Today, my brother and I are partners in the family business. It has its ups and downs. I may have had a bad day. I may have had a bad couple of days. But I don't think I ever had a bad week."

We climbed into Chuck's SUV and drove through town back toward Chuck's place. The drive took us past the Denison High School, "Home of the Fighting Yellow Jackets" (Aha! thought I, that's where the boats got their name.) We also passed the Methodist Church where the Pool brothers went to Sunday School and their folks contributed time and talent and gifts helping to build a faith that keeps the bad times brief.

We drove along streets lined with small clapboard houses built in a simpler, humbler time, and then on to a modern subdivision of expansive brick homes along Waterloo Lake, once the town's water supply, but now a pretty little lake to build nice houses around.

We pulled into Chuck's driveway. He opened the garage door revealing a 14-foot Yellow Jacket boat sitting on a '50s vintage Yarbrough Highlander trailer with an old Scott-Atwater 35hp outboard motor laid on its side on the garage floor. The boat had become the repository of detached parts, life jackets and even a bag or two of potting soil and garage paraphernalia--typical of a man whose busy schedule, ambition and curiosity keep a long to-do list out in front of him. We tossed the junk out of the boat and had a look. It was an early model; the seats were mounted rigidly to the deck, without the trademark "Flote 'n Ride" spring suspension of later models. The decking was in reasonable shape, with only a couple bites taken out of the edge of the 1/4" mahogany plywood. The stain was very dark and the varnish was reticulated, so a total stripping and staining was a must (and some plywood replacement to really do it right). The hull was in pretty good shape, but would need a fresh coat of paint. The rear seat had been reversed, facing the stern for fishing. That would need to be turned back around for the boat to return to its original configuration. But as wooden boat restorations go, this would be very doable. Lew would prepare a checklist of restoration steps. Chuck would find someone, preferably locally, to take on the job.

Chuck then invited us into his "memories room" where a large poster and photos of his dad's exploits aboard a WWII bomber hang, alongside autographed pictures of Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, and also photos of Chuck's family. Roy Rogers was a partner in Yellow Jacket Boats, and became the firm's spokesperson and endorsing celebrity. (More about him later).
Chuck punched a few numbers into his cell phone and just like that, a lunch at the Cotton Patch Cafe was organized. Brother Robert and friend Keith Hubbard would join us "in about 20 minutes." (We soon learned that Chuck lives in the moment and 20 minutes can easily become 45 when there's a good story to be told.)

Lunch did come to pass eventually. We took a swing past Main Street Lumber to pick up Robert. Keith was already patiently waiting at the Cotton Patch. It was around this lunch table that Lew and I learned we were in the presence of the "French Street Gang"...these guys had grown up together in the '50s on French Avenue, the same street where the McDerbys lived. Mac McDerby was the founder of the Yellow Jacket Boat Company, and Mac's son Clifton was one of the gang.
"The streets in that part of town are pretty hilly" recalls Chuck. "We used to roll down them in red wagons, and I even built a green racer." To these kids, Mac McDerby was "Uncle Mac" who in addition to founding and running Yellow Jacket Boat Company, served as their pitcher for whiffle ball games. "Roy Rogers would come to town and we'd all go over to Uncle Mac's house and Roy would tell us stories." adds Chuck. "We all got his autograph, too. He always signed his name and Trigger's."

Robert adds, "Uncle Mac had built a rotating hideaway bar that was a gun cabinet on one side and a bar on the other. It wasn't too common to have a bar in your home in those days, so depending on who was visiting, it could be a bar or turned around to be a gun cabinet. If you turned it half way around, you could reach into some bookshelves inside. We used to love that thing."

The conversation soon got around to how Mac McDerby and Yellow Jacket Boats came to Denison in the first place. Mac worked for the Higgins boat company during the war, training troops in the use of Landing Craft Infantry (LCI) for the D-Day invasion. He got the idea for the cold-molded wooden boats that would one day be Yellow Jackets from his days at Higgins. At some point during his Higgins career, Mac was navigating up the Red River promoting the sale of War Bonds. He reached Denison, and while attending a dance there, met Kitty Conatser, to whom he became engaged and then married. The early name of his company was the McDerby-Conatser Boat Company, which began building Yellow Jacket Boats in 1949.

(The conversation about the history of Yellow Jacket went on, but the story has been more fully documented in the book, "The Real Runabouts IV", by Bob Speltz, and on the web at http://www.martyonline.com/james_riley/.)

The remainder of the lunch was spent spinning yarns of various colors and lengths.

Keith remembers seeing Mac testing Yellow Jackets using twin motors at Burns Run near the Denison Dam which forms Lake Texoma. Boat racing was a common passion for Mac McDerby and Roy Rogers. There was once a boat race from Newport Beach, CA to Catalina Island. It was foggy, and as the pack roared toward the island, with Mac in the lead, they became completely socked in. The Coast Guard was dispatched to bring the racers back to shore. They rounded up all the other boats and drivers, including Roy Rogers, but Mac was still out there somewhere. The fruitless search continued late, until the Coast Guard was ready to call it off. But Roy Rogers made a few calls to the authorities, and the Coast Guard continued the search until Mac was found. Mac never forgot how Roy helped save his life that day.

At some point in his youth, Clifton McDerby decided he wanted a small-scale Yellow Jacket, so he and his dad built one six or seven feet in length. They built this boat in a room on the second floor of a building behind the furniture store in downtown Denison. When they were finished, they realized that the boat was too big to fit through the door to bring downstairs, so they had to knock out part of the wall to get the boat out.

By the late '50s, major boat manufacturers were making the transition to fiberglass as the hull material of choice. Yellow Jacket Boats made the same move, but the effort was short-lived. Mac never lost his ability to dream, however, according to Chuck. "Even in his last years, Mac would say to me that if I could get him the wood, he would build the boats." Mac was well into his 90s when he passed away in 2004.

Before Lew and I left Denison, Chuck borrowed a few minutes from his next appointment to share a couple other remarkable moments in the town's history. It was in Denison that the then-musicians, The Marx Brothers, transformed their act to comedy and became film legends. Denison is also home to the first ice cream soda and the first free public school. And happily for Lew and for me, Denison is home to the one and only French Street Gang, keepers of the legacy of their parents, their heroes and their hometown.