Boat for Sale – Secret Found Out

Because I’ve been researching my family for over 30 years, I have most of the names and dates added to my charts. So, now I focus my attention on discovering more stories about my ancestors.

Years ago, newspapers were the social media of choice. The printed pages provided news as well as neighborhood connections.

This clipping prompted my Dad to tell me a very different story than the one I expected.

Boat for Sale

Otto Norenberg took out this ad in a Minneapolis newspaper¹For Sale. Minneapolis (MN) Tribune. April 7, 1940. Classified Want Ads section, page 2, column 2. to sell one of his boats.

Recently, Dad and I sat on the shore of Wolf Lake in northern Minnesota. He reminisced about his father that 20-foot, mahogany cruiser.²Interview. Kenneth Norenberg and Karrie Blees, recorded October 4, 2021. Beltrami County MN. Transcribed by Karrie Blees, April 18, 2023. When Dad was a youngster, that particular boat was beached at Birch Villa Resort for at least one season.

Otto decided he couldn’t use the boat as an outboard. According to my Dad, there wasn’t an outboard motor big enough to power the craft.

As Dad and I sat in the glow of the evening, he told me:

The guy that bought it [the boat] was Greg Gruel from Wolf Lake Resort up on this northern bay, on the west side [pointing]. We got to be good friends with the Gruels because they had kids our age. They were the age of my folks. Geez, we used to trade Sunday dinners with them and make homemade ice cream and stuff like that. It was a good deal.

Secret Found Out

Dad continued:

Come to find out that this Mrs. [Jeanette] Gruel had a relationship with the Cyrs over at Red Lake Falls. She’s the one that broke the news to my mother that her mother [Susan Roy] was an illegitimate pregnancy. It drove my mother up the wall.

And all of a sudden [makes popping sound], there was no more relationship with the Gruels.

I’ll never forget this: Greg Gruel drove that boat from his place all the way around in and through/across [Lake] Andrusia and out/down Cass Lake. This is some years later after the war [WWII]. These two men [Otto and Gruel] were talking. Greg was sitting in his boat that he had bought from Dad. He had taken it out and reworked it. He put a little, fairly short, cabin on it, and he put an indoor engine in it. And that was his resort boat. He had driven it all the way over.

And those two guys were talking. I was only picking up part of the conversation because I didn’t know anything about that stuff. But when I think back on it, I think Greg wanted to take a trip over there all by himself to talk to Otto to find out if there was anything they could do to patch up relationships or something. Because I remember seeing my dad shaking his head saying something like, “I don’t know Greg. I just don’t know.”

I do remember that Greg got up and said, “We’ll see you later.” He got in his boat and took off.

But the boat was front-heavy. He was driving like a madman right straight between Star Island and the mainland and around there, down Allen’s Bay and out there and up [Lake] Andrusia and back home.

The boat was spraying, from the front, the widest spray I’d ever seen on a boat like that. Usually these boats, they get to a certain speed and they plane up. It doesn’t take all that much if the hull is properly aligned and properly weighted. Because the KenRob didn’t have that big of an engine, but it would plane beautifully. But, boy, his boat was plowing through there. I’ve never forgotten that.

We never saw the Gruels again.

To our modern sensibilities, all babies are precious. But in my grandmother’s time, to have a child outside of marriage was not talked about, was taboo, was scandalous.

Jeanette Marie Cyr Gruel and Mary Mae Lydick Norenberg may have been blood-related.

Mae Lydick Norenberg in the KenRob

SOURCES

• 1
  For Sale. Minneapolis (MN) Tribune. April 7, 1940. Classified Want Ads section, page 2, column 2.
• 2
  Interview. Kenneth Norenberg and Karrie Blees, recorded October 4, 2021. Beltrami County MN. Transcribed by Karrie Blees, April 18, 2023.