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HISTORY
Our Family’s Iceboat Mysteries
The discovery of 1906 picture postcard creates memories and questions.
Late in 2019, my cousin sent me two photos she had found in her albums. The images showed her father (my mother’s brother) and my father sailing a mysterious iceboat on Lake Massapoag in Sharon, MA.
These interested me as mementos of my family history, but also because they triggered a memory, which was that my father intended to build an iceboat in the mid-1950s.
He never got very far. He completed the front rudder, a metal blade on a wooden shoe, fiberglassed in the same green color he had used on his sailboat a few years earlier. Fiberglass was still somewhat new at that time for home projects, so he carefully told me all about it and how it worked.
He never mentioned any previous iceboating experience. I assumed that because our family sailed on Lake Massapoag in the summer, this would be for winter sailing, a prospect I was…
