It was the unconventional styling that attracted Bryan Fenwick of
Bolingbrook, Illinois, to the Falls Flyer. While he wasn't exactly looking for a boat at the time,
Fenwick stumbled across a 1956 Falls Flyer while storing his 1955 Buick in a friend's garage. In
fact, he originally bought the boat for the trailer that it rode on. His plans were to build a
platform on the trailer and use it to carry auto parts to swap meets.
'I got the boat home,' says Fenwick, 'and the more I looked at it, the more I liked it. It
had that twin cockpit look to it, kind of like an old airplane.'
Larson described the first outboard Falls Flyer, introduced in 1939, as 'the only outboard
of its type built anywhere.' The company's slogan throughout the '40s became 'The Most Beautiful
Modernly Streamlined Boats in America.' The Flyer was built with cedar strip planking using white
oak ribs in 12- and 14-foot lengths. In 1940, a line of inboard Falls Flyers was introduced, and
was so unconventional that the Flyer design was patented. The next year, the 12-foot outboard model
was dropped, and a 16-foot model was offered in its place. By the '50s, when the Flyer was coming
into its own, it was touted as 'America's Most Distinctive Outboard Motor Boat.'
'I brought mine up to the second Falls Flyer Homecoming in 1992 in Little Falls, Minnesota,
and it was in less-than-finished condition,' Fenwick continues. 'In fact, it was looking pretty
rough. I knew after seeing all of the other boats in various stages of restoration, I had to
restore the Flyer.'
So Fenwick called Larson Boats, and was pleased to learn that the company was still in
business. Larson helped him get in touch with Ross Pfund, who was restoring a Falls Flyer of his
own. 'And the rest,' he says, 'is history.'
Feeling no sense of urgency, Fenwick approached the project with a flexible timeframe. 'I
worked on the boat over the next seven years, but not consistently,' he says. 'I sometimes went for
months without touching it. When I got really serious, it took close to a year to finish up. I did
everything myself, with the exception of sewing the interior.'
Fenwick says he did his best to keep track of the time he spent working on the boat. By the
time he finished, the log showed a total of about 450 hours. 'I imagine that there were maybe 50 or
so miscellaneous hours that I didn't log, so I must have put more like 500 hours into it overall,'
Fenwick says.
The Falls Flyer continued unchanged in the lineup until 1958, when Larson introduced its
next generation of boats. Complete with fins and tail lights, the styling was once again unique in
the market. But when Brunswick acquired Larson Boats in 1960, that meant a change to building more
conventional-looking, high-volume boats, such as the All-American. And thus 1960 was the Falls
Flyer's last year.
Fenwick's 1956 Falls Flyer typifies the best of the classic boat genre: great styling
enhanced by a beautiful do-it-yourself restoration and exemplified by a not-afraid-to-use-it
attitude.
'For me, the joy is in using it,' says Fenwick. 'Last year I took it to shows all over the
country, and the people went nuts over it. I was giving rides everywhere I went, and the people
loved it. It's so great to hear the comments people make as they get out of the boat and turn
around for another look. There's nothing like it.'