Re: Has anyone heard of "Cruiser Inc boats"?
They don't build them like they used to:
Cruisers traces her origins to the summer of 1953 starting out as Cruisers, Inc. Her founders were six of the second generation Thompson family members. Ray, Glenn, Roy, Grant, Bob, and Ted Thompson, Jr.
established Cruisers as a result to fill a niche for larger
outboard cabin cruiser type boats.
The corporation Cruisers, Inc. was created with the full blessing and cooperation of Thompson Boat. The synergy between the two corporations is evidenced in the initial actual cabin cruiser made by the two firms. In the late months of 1953 Cruisers, Inc. built a nineteen-foot cabin cruiser. She was a clinker hull suitable of using the largest of twin outboards then available. The advertising flyer proudly stated she was ?Thompson Designed? and built to ?Thompson Quality? by Cruisers, Inc. and sold by Thompson. The cabin boat was built specifically to show at the New York Boat Show in January1954. Another one was purported to have been built for display at the Chicago Boat Show, several weeks later. The model was dropped from the product line and those two boats were the only ones of the type built. No one knows what happened to them.
From her inception in ?53 until the end of 1958 Cruisers and Thompson were working hand in hand. Another example of this cooperation was the 1955 Thompson Off Shore eighteen-footer. The exact same
picture was used in the 1955 Thompson catalog as was used by Cruisers the following year in their literature to illustrate their Vacationer model. Ownership of Cruisers changed hands effective January 02, 1959 when brothers Roy H. and G. Grant Thompson gained complete control. From that point forward the firms competed with one another.
As more and more builders introduced fiberglass boats, the markets for wooden watercraft were declining in the early 1960s. Cruisers was producing 3,000 boats annually in the early sixties. This dropped precipitously when only 800 were sold in the 1965 sales season. The only means to get back in the game was to make the leap from wood to reinforced fiber plastic technology.
