Chris-Craft Industries
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Chris-Craft Industries is a privately held American manufacturer of civilian powerboats based in Sarasota, Florida. The company was founded in the late 19th century by Christopher Columbus Smith and became famous for its mahogany hulled powerboats of the 1920s through the 1950s.
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[edit] History
Smith built his first wooden boat in 1874 when he was 13 years old. He soon began to build more boats and joined his brother Henry in 1881 to begin producing boats full time. In 1910, the brothers joined with other partners to form the Smith Ryan Boat & Engine Company. The company name was changed to Chris-Craft in 1924.
The Detroit area company became well known for their sleek racing boats in the 1910s and 1920s. Chris-Craft sold high end powerboats to wealthy patrons such as Henry Ford and William Randolph Hearst. In the late 1920s, Chris-Craft extended its market into the middle class when it became one of the first mass producers of civilian pleasure boats. The company began assembly line production at their Algonac, Michigan plant dramatically lowering production costs. Until then, most powerboats had been built by hand.
In 1927 the company introduced the Cadet, an affordable 22' runabout. At the time, the domain of speed boats was largely confined to the wealthy. Its innovative advertising campaign promised a piece of "the good life" to the growing American middle class. The fact that the company sold its boats on installment made them among the first powerboats available to the general population.
The Great Depression robbed many Americans of discretionary income and Chris-Craft sales suffered. The company introduced a line of low priced powerboats to stay solvent. By 1935, a 15.5' Utility boat could be bought for as little as US$406. During World War II, the company produced small patrol boats and launches for the U.S. Navy.
After the war, Chris Craft introduced an all new lineup of civilian pleasure boats just in time for the massive American consumer expansion of the 1950s. That decade marked the height of company prestige and the brand name Chris-Craft became virtually synonymous with pleasure boating. The company offered 159 different models and was the sales leader in many categories of small civilian powerboats.
The company sold high end boats to famous customers and Hollywood stars such as Dean Martin, Katharine Hepburn, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley. Their boats were often made from the finest mahogany and were considered to be among the best available. They were also easy to operate, a must for their "weekend sailor" owners. In some circles, owning a Chris-Craft was considered de rigueur. Even their lower priced boats were considered to be of high quality, often featuring such luxury items as a liberal use of mahogany, teak, and brass.
In 1957, Chris-Craft Corporation added a metal boats division, designated the Roamer Steel Boats Division (RSBD) - founded upon its purchase of the Roamer Boat Company, now known as Chris Craft Roamers.
The company continued to be independent until it was acquired by Shields & Company and National Automotive Fibers in 1960. They renamed the company Chris-Craft Industries, Incorporated.
In 1964, Chris-Craft launched the all fiberglass Chris-Craft Commander. This dramatic new design was unveiled at the New York City National Boat show - perched at the top of the escalator on a giant, castered cradle. This first Commander was a 38' express hardtop with a 13' beam. The line of Commanders soon grew to include sizes ranging from 19' to 60' - all 'styled in fiberglass.' The greatest legacy of the Chris-Craft Commander is the [Chris-Craft Commander Club]http://www.commanderclub.com/, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation, study and appreciation of the classic fiberglass cruisers built by this world-renowned company in the 1960's and 1970's.
Perhaps in homage to Chris-Craft's rich history — and in acknowledgment that traditional wood boat building methods were quickly yielding to fiberglass construction - Chris-Craft employees established the Chris-Craft Antique Boat Club http://www.chris-craft.org/ in 1970. As the longest-standing boat marque club in the U.S., the Chris-Craft Antique Boat Club has grown to over 3,500 members worldwide with members in over 35 countries. The mission of the Chris-Craft Antique Boat Club is much the same today as it was back in 1970:
The Chris-Craft Antique Boat Club is dedicated to research, documentation, and preservation of all classic Chris-Craft boats. As the longest-standing marque club in the world, our purpose is to exchange information, build camaraderie among members, and provide education about classic Chris-Crafts.
The establishment of the Chris-Craft Antique Boat Club foreshadowed by a number of years the end of the wooden boat era.
Between the 1960s and 1980s, Chris-Craft lost market share as competitors with more innovative designs and less expensive manufacturing techniques such as fiberglass hulls came on the scene. Chris-Craft ended production of its last mahogany hulled boat, the 57' Constellation, in 1971.
The company's ownership changed several times during the next several decades until it was purchased by partners Stephen Julius and Stephen Heese in 2001.
[edit] Chris-Craft today
The company currently offers fourteen models ranging from 20' to 43' with MSRPs starting at around US$42,000. The management plans to continue to expand the model range in the future.
The Chris-Craft name and distinctive look of its mahogany hull has become such American icons the boat has been used in numerous films and television shows. The boat was featured in the films House Boat, Donavan's Reef, Back to School, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Godfather II, On Golden Pond, The Dirty Dozen, Striking Distance and on the television series The Sopranos. A Chris-Craft also made an appearance in the film Pearl Harbor, but experts note that the film, set in 1941, anachronistically featured a 1950s era Capri. Of current models, the Corsair 25 was seen in Mission: Impossible III and the Launch 25 will be seen in Fool's Gold in Spring 2008.
[edit] Chris-Craft/United Television
In the late 1950s, a predecessor to today's Chris-Craft Industries, the NAFI Corporation (a company partially controlled by singer/actor Bing Crosby), expanded its business portfolio with television broadcasting. NAFI purchased its first TV station, KCOP in Los Angeles, in 1957. Two years later KPTV in Portland, Oregon, was acquired. Chris-Craft Industries (which resulted from the merger between NAFI and Chris-Craft Boats) owned only these two stations for nearly a quarter-century (they were joined by a Fort Worth station for eleven years and a Minneapolis station for eight years) before merging them with three stations owned by United Television in 1981 (see chart below). United Television then became a subsidiary of Chris-Craft Industries, and the group (which also went by the name BHC Communications) became one of the country's leading operators of independent television stations.
In the early 1990s, Chris-Craft Television formed an alternative programming consortium, Prime Time Entertainment Network, with other station groups and Warner Bros. Domestic Television that was planned to expand into the fifth television network but fizzled into a syndication brand.
In January 1995, Chris-Craft/United affiliated all of its stations, except KTVX in Salt Lake City, Utah and KMOL-TV in San Antonio, Texas (which had long-term affiliation contracts with ABC and NBC, respectively), with the newly-launched United Paramount Network, which it co-owned (50 percent) with Viacom. (KMOL later aired UPN programming as a secondary affiliation from 1998 to 2000.) Chris-Craft however, suffered large financial losses attributed to UPN, and in 2000, Viacom bought out Chris-Craft's share of the network. Shortly thereafter, Chris-Craft announced that it was getting out of broadcasting. Many industry observers thought Viacom would end up getting the stations, but Viacom's bid lost out to News Corporation's Fox Television Stations, resulting in a sale which closed in 2001.
[edit] Former Chris-Craft/United television stations
| Current DMA# | Market | Station | Years Owned | Current Affiliation |
| 1. | Secaucus, N.J.-New York City | WWOR-TV 9 | 1993-2001 | My Network TV affiliate owned by Fox |
| 2. | Los Angeles | KCOP 13 | 1957-2001 | My Network TV affiliate owned by Fox |
| 5. | Fort Worth-Dallas | KTVT 11 | 1960-1971 | CBS owned-and-operated (O&O) |
| 6. | San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose | KBHK-TV 44 (now KBCW) |
1982-2001 | CW affiliate owned by CBS Corporation |
| 12. | Phoenix | KUTP 45 1 | 1985-2001 | My Network TV affiliate owned by Fox |
| 15. | Minneapolis-St. Paul | WTCN-TV 11 (now KARE) |
1964-1972 | NBC affiliate owned by Gannett Company |
| KMSP-TV 9 ² | 1981-2001 | Fox owned-and-operated (O&O) | ||
| 19. | Orlando - Daytona Beach | WRBW 65 | 1998-2001 | My Network TV affiliate owned by Fox |
| 23. | Portland, Oregon | KPTV 12 | 1959-2001 | Fox affiliate owned by Meredith Corporation |
| 24. | Baltimore | WUTB 24 | 1998-2001 | My Network TV affiliate owned by Fox |
| 35. | Salt Lake City | KTVX 4 ²³ | 1981-2001 | ABC affiliate owned by Newport Television (Sale pending to High Plains Broadcasting) |
| 37. | San Antonio | KMOL-TV 4 ²4 (now WOAI-TV) |
1981-2001 | NBC affiliate owned by Newport Television (Sale pending to High Plains Broadcasting) |
Footnotes:
- 1 KUTP is the only station built and signed-on by Chris-Craft/United.
- ² KMSP-TV, KTVX, and KMOL-TV were owned by United Television prior to its merger with Chris-Craft in 1981.
- ³ KTVX is the only station that never affiliated with UPN in the timeframe Chris-Craft owned stations in the mid-to-late 1990's.
- 4 KMOL, a primary NBC affiliate, had a secondary affiliation to UPN in 1998-2000 when another station dropped it.
