The Merry Bobber: Bob Hilke builds a memory, By FAYE WHITBECK, Staff Writer

To him, the sights, sounds and smells of Rainy Lake are as natural as breathing.
Raised on its banks, he still lives on the same patch of shoreline claimed by his forebears who were Rainy Lake pioneers.
Bob Hilke is as familiar as anyone with Rainy Lake’s ancient rocks and carved skylines. He’s navigated its indigo waters since he was a child; explored it — island to island — with Earnest Oberholtzer; and captained cruises through it for 40 years.
But the silhouette of evergreens that garnishes the bay outside his home near Crystal Beach is indelible in Hilke’s mind. It is there that the Hilke family paddled a little white rowboat from daylight to dusk through every summer of his childhood.
Just a simple, small boat, it was constructed in “lapstrake” or “clinker” style, an old-world craft believed to have originated in Scandinavia. The Vikings “clinched” (bent) the ends of iron nails to join a boat’s thin overlapped planking.
The boat was purchased secondhand, by Hilke’s father, Ferdinand “Fritz” Hilke, from Judge Brown who lived across the bay. “It always leaked,” said Hilke. “And it was always a bit of an uphill battle to keep it up. Still, we all rowed it, even mother.” Hilke said the family’s only boat was paddled out from shore every single day, sometimes as far away as Jackfish Bay. His mother rowed it to Ranier once.
When Hilke left for college in 1955, his brother Ron was still using the boat. But by the time Hilke graduated, it no longer floated outside the Hilke home. Hilke and his wife Mary left Rainy Lake in 1960 for Portland, Ore., where Hilke would begin teaching industrial arts. But he held on to the rowboat’s image. “I knew I wanted to build one like it some day,” he said.
When the couple returned from Portland in 1963, the rowboat “was rotting in the woods.” So Hilke and some friends hung the carcass in his shop, with Hilke’s indeterminate promise to revisit it in the future.
The boat waited there, trustingly, until a year ago last spring.

Rebuilding a boat
In the spring of 2007, Roger Knutson of Finlayson, Minn., who had seen the boat hanging in Hilke’s garage, was eager to help him restore it. Knutson is Mary Hilke’s brother, and is retired from the prison system near Sandstone. He is also a talented designer of fine furniture who owns a great woodworking shop, according to Hilke. Knutson loaded up the relic and took it back to his shop in Finlayson.
The remnants of the boat were “pretty much flat” but all the seats remained. “We tied it together and pulled it up until the seats fit,” said Hilke. “Pieces were missing, but there was enough there to figure it out.”
The first part of building a boat (upside down) is to build a strongback, which serves to form the backbone. The strongback must be level; any inaccuracies at this stage will be present in the boat itself.
“We took the good side all apart plank by plank, and used them as patterns. Otherwise, we’d have to use lofting (the process of drawing the lines of a boat full-size, to get the shapes needed for building) which we didn’t want to get into.”
The men carefully measured and traced each piece onto kraft board and mounted those shapes on the strongback which had been anchored into the ground outdoors. It was the placement of these patterns that actually recreated the boat’s contour.
While Knutson was away in France, two of his friends stopped by while Hilke worked in his brother-in-law’s shop. Retirees Lee Dybvig and John Pambronne also got involved in the project. One of them had visited Rainy Lake as a teen. But to everyone’s discovery, he had also harbored a teenage summer crush on Hilke’s own sister, Helen, while staying at nearby Kozy Kove Kamp. He had amazingly been in the little row boat back then.
There were now four men contributing to the project. Ultimately, four boats will be built — each man to have his own boat made from a single large pine tree in Sandstone. Hilke remembers the friend saying: “I know just the tree!”
The planks for the boat were “quarter-sawed” which means the pine log was first cut into four quarters and then choice planks cut from each quarter on a straight grain. “The curve of the row boat’s planks are cut, not bent,” Hilke emphasized.
The men made leather and wooden clamps to secure the lapstraking. Hilke decided to include glue between his planks over lapstraking which depends entirely on wood’s swelling. Each plank would require repetitive riveting with copper nails and roves.
The first journey of the “Merry Bobber” was by land, trailered back to Rainy Lake in October and hoisted by block and tackle for handling. With the help of his wife Mary, Roland Hamley, George Hnatiuk, Ward Merrill, and Jon Knutson who also provided a steamer; quarter-sawed ash ribs were installed in the boat’s interior.
“Its amazing how completely limber the steamed ribs were,” said Hilke. “You could almost tie them in a knot.” Fitted into the floor of the boat, the ribs were gently positioned with a rubber mallet and then clamped. “But they were set in 10 minutes!” said Hilke. Each rib would also be riveted.
Gunnels, screwed along the top through the ribs, would make the boat strong. “Now you really have a boat,” said Hilke. The original steel oar locks which are painted bright red to match the stripe, are mounted on the white-planked boat. The locks are secured to wooden platforms and each is attached with brass 3/4-circle nuts, an adjustable system designed by Hilke. Newly crafted oars of western fir adorn the boat, but he still has the originals which were coated in glossy red.
The name Merry Bobber is derived from the couple’s first names. During their first summer after marriage, Mary painted that same name on a pair of Ray Anderson crafted water skis while staying at the Oberholtzer Island.
Hilke could have purchased plans. He probably could have ordered a kit.
But he wanted this humble boat to be exactly like the one of his childhood days.
And the Merry Bobber not only looks the same, but within the curve of its sides and the soft winds that flow over its bow — a little boat’s soul will live on.

About Bob Hilke
“I had really loving parents and grandparents,” said Hilke.
Born Dec. 9, 1936 , the oldest child of Fritz and Dorothy Hilke, his paternal grandparents were Adolf and Matilda Hilke who were some of the area’s first commercial fishermen. Hilke jokes that the name Adolf was being passed down and probably would have been his too, but Hitler came along.
Hilke’s maternal great grandfather was C.B. Kinney, who came to the area with E.W. Backus and was instrumental in laying out the International Falls town site. Many local property deeds carry the Kinney name, according to Hilke. It was he who originally owned the Hilke lake properties. Hilke’s brother Ron, now of Ohio, also spends summers at the homestead next to Bob and Mary.
With a life centered on Rainy Lake and a background in teaching industrial arts, building a boat came instinctively for Hilke. Glancing around their home, the couple points out the kitchen cabinets, tables, shelves and other furniture he also built.
Hilke feels fortunate for those he views as mentors in his life.
One of them was a shop teacher he worshiped, he said, whose name is Clint Carlson. “He’s really the one that inspired me to be a shop teacher rather than a dentist.” Another was a “wonderful gentleman and a fine metals and motors teacher” named Leo Jung.
The Portland school district provided Hilke with an excellent reference after three years. He was initially hired at Falls High School as a long-term substitute for social studies teacher John Veranth. Hilke spent his career there teaching shop metals. He designed and welded both the signs that currently mark the fronts of Falls High School and West End Elementary.
Hilke said he also learned a lot from entrepreneur and patent holder, George Finstad, in Ranier.
But a man central in Hilke’s formative years was the noble preservationist Earnest Oberholtzer, who was a long-time friend of his progenitors. Arriving in the area with what was thought to be a terminal heart condition, “Ober” created a legacy with his environmental visions and undertakings.
Ober relied heavily on his friends when he came in from his Rainy Lake island and sometimes used their cottages and cabins. He was always part of the Hilke family. In fact, a rare photograph shows Hilke as a baby, being cradled by the legend who was known to feel awkward around small children. But Ober’s spirited storytelling of adventures in Washington D.C. to his remote sojourns in the waterways of the north kept the young Hilke spellbound.
Around the year of the great flood in 1950, teenager Hilke traveled all over the lake with Ober “in a 16-foot aluminum boat with a five-horse motor towing a canoe.” Hilke said Ober, who was educated in landscape architecture, was ahead of his time in his understanding of zoning. “He was a preservationist, but he wasn’t against making paper. He did object to the grandiose damming plans (of Backus) and destroying the overall beauty of the area. Ober had the kind of vision and background that helped him see the whole region, he added.
“Ober wasn’t a craftsman but he had great talent in design,” Hilke went on, referring to how Oberholtzer had carpenters like Emil Johnson building little structures into his island dwelling. And Ober made each addition look like it belonged right there.”
Hilke said Ober thought of the area in terms of a state park, and was surprised that it was chosen to be a national park because it had already been logged.
Hilke remained Oberholtzer’s friend throughout his final days with dementia and until his death.

Watching the horizon
A large sign reading “Rainy Lake Cruises” still hangs on the Hilke’s garage, perhaps a label for the 40 years he spent offering guided tours to the locals and tourists. He’s likely been a licensed captain the longest of any in the area, and navigated the highest tonnage.
His first tours accommodated 17 passengers aboard the “Betsy Anna,” which was named after the couple’s daughter. They also have two sons, Bob Jr. and Dan. Hilke then captained the “Kooch II” boat from Camp Kooch-i-ching for two summers. Following, while he was still teaching, the Hilkes ordered “The Pride of Rainy Lake” built to their specifications and accommodating 49 passengers. “The Pride” would provide sightseeing and dinner tours for 12 years, some of them captained by Norbert Goulet and others.
But when business slowed, Hilke sold the boat and it headed for Lake Michigan. After that, Hilke ran some pontoon tours for the park service, but said his “heart wasn’t in it anymore.”
His plan is to row the Merry Bobber to Kettle Falls this summer — probably from his home over to Ober’s for the night, and then on to the Brule Narrows. He canoed it in one day in 2001 with grandson John. “My grandfather did it too,” he noted.
It could be said that Hilke has paddled full circle, returning to his own backyard where it all began. It’s engaging to imagine what memories reflect when those oars strike through the swirling kaleidoscope of Rainy’s waters — stirring up the remembered joys of a young boy out for the day in a little white rowboat.

The “Merry Bobber”
13-ft Lapstrake Rowboat
44-inch Beam
Planking joints are glued and riveted (copper nails with roves)
Wood used:
• Planking — Quarter sawed, 3/8-inch thick, white pine
• Ribs — Quarter sawed ash, locally from Leo Karsnia
•Keel and gunnels, bow stem — White oak
• Transom, forward deck and seats — Honduras mahogany
• Oars — Western fir

A sealant was mixed for the unpainted areas of the boat that should prevent the need for constant revarnishing. The mixture was one part Marine Spar varnish, one part linseed oil, and two parts thinner; brushed on first coat, but four more coats “ragged on.”