It’s an unseasonably warm November day. The slips at the 59th Street Harbor have been empty for two weeks; the artificial palm trees, plastic gear boxes and satellite dishes are all that remain of the boating season.
Cars whoosh by on Lake Shore Drive, their sound muffled by the greenery and the gentle breeze. The sun glints off the water and gulls cry overhead.
Maynard Welch, 70, surveys the harbor. He’s tall and athletic, with a stubble of white hair beneath his Chicago Harbors cap and a smile that extends clear up to his eyebrows.
This is his harbor. He has had his boat here since 1967, a few years after he came to Chicago from Louisiana to teach physical education and drivers education at Chicago Vocational High School. He has been harbor master for the past five years, though he was unofficial harbor master since the day he docked his boat here.
“This harbor was almost forgotten,” he recalls of those early days. “The harbor was so ugly.” But he paid his $75 fee for the summer — he called it “the high-rent district” — and started to fix the place up. During the day, he mowed the grass, whitewashed the trees and planted flowers. At night, he slept on his boat, attuned to changes in the weather. “The piers were unstable, so I had to get up at night and retie the boats. I was always ripping and running,” he says.
In a city where workers are sometimes paid to do nothing, Welch was working for no pay. “You’ve got your boat here and you’re going to let the grass grow up? You know what I’m saying?” he asks. “This was my home. I wanted it to look good.”
Gradually, people came to understand that he was the person who knew how to get things done around the harbor.
“People used to say, `That’s the harbor master there,'” pointing to him, not the man on the park district payroll. “But I loved it. It was a gift.”
This being Chicago, race was a factor from the start. “When I came in ’67, me and my buddy Dr. Holman [an African-American dentist] asked to join the Museum Shores Yacht Club,” he recalls. “They said, `Sure. We’ll let you join.’ So we paid our $12.75, but the next meeting, nobody showed up but the two of us. They never came back.”
That didn’t stop Welch. He restarted the club, which was exclusively black for many years. And he continued his upkeep of the harbor.
“I was able to keep it looking good. I didn’t want people to say, `This is a black harbor and it’s run down.’ I wanted people to say, `Boy, this harbor sure looks nice.'”
Welch grew up in Monroe, La., where he attended Catholic schools and learned to swim in the Ouachita River because blacks weren’t allowed in the public pools. He learned about boating on that same river in high school, from a co-worker at Dairy Queen.
“A white guy had an aluminum boat — a 16-foot boat with a nine-horsepower engine. He said, `Hey, Welch, let’s go to the river and mess around.’ So I went with him. We both went out, and I said, `Let me do it for myself,’ and of course, I wanted to go fast, which was wrong. There were all these houseboats on the river. I kicked up a wake. Boy, did they swear at me. I got myself off that river fast, and I said, `One day I’ll buy a boat as big as your boat.'”
He did. His first boat was a 28-foot powerboat, named Karen, after his daughter, who now works for the Chicago Police Department. Five years later he bought a 31-foot Chris-Craft, which he also named Karen. This is the boat he decorated and entered in numerous Venetian Night regattas during the 1980s.
Striving toward first place
In 1985, he turned Karen into a stagecoach, and took second place. The next year, he created “Viva la France,” a floating celebration with a champagne bottle, and man in a tux and a glass with steaming dry ice. Then in 1987, he painted a plywood skin for Karen and attached wings and a tail to create a space shuttle in honor of Mae Jemison (the name as published has been corrected here and in a subsequent reference in this text), the first African-American woman astronaut. That year he was the overall winner of the Venetian Night — the first African-American ever to receive that honor.
The club leases the building from the Chicago Park District. When Welch first came to the 59th Street Harbor, it was little more than a tool shed. Under Welch’s direction, the club sided the building, installed a hot-water tank, added showersand refurbished the interior.
“We have improved the place 100 percent,” he says. Welch also planted flowers all around the property. “Every year I do a little more,” he says. “Next year, I want to have flowers blooming in every color throughout the summer every year.”
In addition to tending to the harbor, Welch has spent time over the years teaching boater safety. “A lot of black boaters buy boats without any experience. Nine out of 10 haven’t taken any classes. We used to sit on the banks and watch the white boaters. Now we have the jobs so we can buy the boats — very economical boats — so they’re learning,” he says.
Welch has been harbor master only since 2000. That was the year he was invited to join Mayor Daley’s Harbor Task Force, which visited Wisconsin harbors to see what might be done to improve the ones in Chicago.
“On the way back, Scott Stevenson [vice president of Westrec Marinas, which runs the harbors for the park district], said, `Welch, I’d like to talk to you.’ He offered me the job,” Welch recalls. “I said, `No. I’m retired.’ But then I said, `I’ll do it if it’s just from April to October and I get to keep my little boat in the harbor free of charge.'”
“He had unofficially been watching over what goes on and helping clean up,” Stevenson recalls. “Several years ago I had moved various employees in and out of there and I thought, you know, the guy who could do this better than anybody else is Maynard. He’s a guy that really cares about that place and cares about the people there.”
The arrangement worked. Welch is on duty seven months of the year (though he sticks around for a while afterward). Lefty Harrison, who’s paid by the yacht club to help take care of the building, stays on through the winter. Other members wander in and out, long after the boats are gone, to visit with Welch, Lefty and each other. “We don’t have any damage because somebody’s here all the time,” Welch says, noting that 25 retired policemen have boats in this harbor, and 15 of them are members of the club.
`A beautiful secret’
Today there are 127 boaters in the harbor, 16 of them white. “They won’t tell others about it,” Welch says. “They say, `This is heaven!’ It’s a beautiful secret here.”
But it’s an open secret. The club does considerable outreach into the community, holding parties for local seniors, children and recovering addicts, and taking them out on the lake.
“To be able to have someone that can talk to the young people so that they can see there is a history here and that there are African-Americans that are doctors, policemen, firemen, lawyers, that have these [water]crafts — that helps young people to focus on and think of things they can achieve,” says Ald. Leslie Hairston. “And he dances really well. My seniors love him.”
The 2005 boating season is over. Welch is preparing to spend the winter skiing, starting with a trip to Banff, Canada, with the Chicago Ski Twisters, the second-oldest black ski club in the nation. Lefty will keep an eye on the harbor until Welch returns. The harbor will officially open again on April 17, Welch’s 39th season here.
“Not only does he know the history of the harbor — he is the history of the harbor, Hairston says. “I’m very fortunate to have him as part of my constituency.”
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ctc-tempo@tribune.com
