detroit yacht club commodores

The Detroit Regional Yacht-Racing Association was established in 1912 as the Detroit River Yachting Association by the Commodores of the Detroit Boat Club and the Detroit Yacht Club, Commodore Harry Austin and Commodore Harry Kendall, respectively. Originally founded to be a clearing board to assist local clubs in resolving conflicts with their individual summer regatta calendars, the DRYA is now a Michigan Corporation and a registered Non-profit organization. Our incorporation articles summarize what we're all about, they read:

The purpose of the Association is to encourage and promote, in the United States and Canada, the general interest in boating, yachting and sail racing by amateur sailors (including junior and collegiate sailors) by all appropriate means, including (among others) the following:

Establishing high standards of skill for seamanship, boat handling and navigation of yachts

Encouraging the ownership of boats and yachts by individuals and member clubs and the development of suitable seaworthy yachts for racing and cruising

Encouraging and improving the quality of racing by developing and publishing standard sailing instructions, by assisting and supporting member clubs in coordinating the scheduling of races, regattas and related events, by serving in an advisory capacity to member clubs in the organization, conduct and scoring of races and regattas, by providing equipment for conducting races and qualified judges to hear and decide protests and appeals and by any and all other appropriate means

Improving communications among member clubs and individuals interested in racing and in general, to make known to the member clubs the desires of sailors eligible to race in their regattas

Promoting, developing, adopting and equitably administering rating and handicapping rules for racing and providing handicaps to members and others;

Maintaining membership in the United States Sailing Association as a "yacht racing association" and, from time to time, membership in other organizations with similar or related purposes

Acting as an intermediary between member clubs and individuals in their relations with civic and governmental bodies when the general interests and welfare of boating, yachting and sail racing are involved

Maintaining harmonious relations among its member clubs and individuals.

Detroit Yacht Club opens 100-year-old time capsule

Historic Detroit

Every building in detroit has a story — we're here to share it, detroit yacht club, by dan austin, historicdetroit.org.

The Detroit Yacht Club has had five homes since being formed shortly after the Civil War, but it is its current home that gives it the largest yacht club clubhouse in the United States.

There were earlier yacht clubs in the city, including the Peninsular Yacht Club, which was founded in 1858 or 1859 as the first yacht club in Detroit. That was followed by the International Yacht Club in 1867 or 1873 (sources disagree), which lasted until 1877. The pre-motor Motor City was in need of a new club to fill that gap.

The DYC was organized on May 30, 1878. Samuel Cowan was named commodore; C.W. Ives vice-commodore; O.W. Baker president; E.H. Telfer vice president; George Newberry secretary; and S.H. Ives treasurer. The officers decided to celebrate by holding a regatta on the Detroit River that July 4 (though the event was delayed by a day on account of weather).

"This club is composed of the best yachtmen in Detroit and vicinity, and is a happy combination of experience, as represented by the older members, and enthusiasm and energy as shown by the younger sailors," the Detroit Free Press wrote July 6, 1870, while covering that first regatta.

A small clubhouse and sailing shed were built at the foot of McDougall Street just south of Jefferson Avenue in the late 1870s.

That was replaced with a clubhouse on Belle Isle that was built for $10,000 in 1891. It was lost in a fire in 1904. That facility was replaced by another clubhouse that was built atop the old one.

But with Detroit's growing wealth came a growing membership in the DYC, and an even bigger facility was needed. The cornerstone for the present, villa-style clubhouse was held April 22, 1922. The building opened the following year and cost $1 million (about $12 million in today's dollars) to build. Its design was entrusted to George D. Mason, the same man who built the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island and the Masonic Temple , Gem Theatre and several churches in Detroit. Mason also is considered the mentor of legendary architect Albert Kahn.

By the year after the new clubhouse had opened, membership in the club had reached 3,000, and racing legend Gar Wood brought attention to the DYC by setting world speed records and by winning Gold Cups.

The DYC was hit hard by the Depression, but bounced back and underwent several expansions in the 1950s and '60s, including new docks that boosted the number of boat wells to more than 350.

Today, the DYC continues to thrive, and its clubhouse continues to impress.

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Commodores Club

Past Commodore

A person is eligible to apply for membership of South Easter Michigan’s Commodores Club after completing a full term of his/her Commodoreship at an affiliated DRYA club.

The Past Commodores Club of South Eastern Michigan is a group of Past Commodores from the DRYA clubs of the same are who seek to continue in social and philanthropic endeavors.

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The Little Detroit History Letter

The commodores of Evergreen Mausoleum

Accidental local nautical history.

In the spring of 1912, 18-year-old William John Mellors took a train from London to Southampton, England, where he boarded a ship bound for New York City to start his adult life.

“Now mother I hope you will not worry over me as I am sure I shall arrive in New York quite safe & then I shall get on,” he wrote in a postcard sent from on board the R.M.S. Titanic.

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Mellors, a second-class passenger, survived the wreck — through freak luck, it seems, to read his horrifying account of it . Blown from the deck by an apparent explosion, Mellors made it, somehow!, to a half-submerged lifeboat, whose passengers mostly froze or drowned before it was rescued.

Feet frostbitten, nerves shot, enough nightmarish trauma endured for a lifetime, Mellors recuperated in New York, his home for most of the next 16 years.

Then, in 1935, Mellors moved to Detroit — for a job at the anti-Communist magazine “The National Republic.” (There’s a rabbit hole we’ll have to travel down another day.) He would eventually become its editor. He lived with his family in Highland Park until his death in 1948.

A few years ago, I was contacted by a Titanic researcher based in England who was mapping Titanic-related history sites worldwide , including gravesites of survivors. How close was I to Evergreen Cemetery, he asked? Less than a mile away is the answer, and moreover, it turns out that I have a thing about mausoleums, and a gravesite scavenger hunt was just the push I needed to pop in to see the oldest public mausoleum in Detroit. 1

Evergreen Mausoleum opened its doors at the cemetery of the same name in 1921. Designed by architect Frank W. Hall, about which I know absolutely nothing, it cost $200,000 to construct (about $3 million today). A second wing of the mausoleum was built in 1929, and the whole project, with a total of 1,308 crypts, was formally dedicated in 1930. The sales pitch for spending eternity at Evergreen Mausoleum was typical of the era: an appeal to the dignity — purity, even — of above-ground repose, of climate control and state-of-the-art ventilation (always, much detail about ventilation technology), of “perfect desiccation” instead of dirt and worms.

Inside of Evergreen Mausoleum, it is cold, and the air smells like stone and Glade stick-ons. If you have bronchitis, the sound of your coughs will bounce off of every snow-white marble wall for like a full 20 seconds. There’s some half-assed statuary, gorgeous light fixtures, pretty stained glass, and red carpeting down the main corridor that in my humble opinion really needs to go.

Reviewing my notes from my visit yesterday I find an accidental nautical thread running through them. Architect George DeWitt Mason is interred at Evergreen: The “ dean of Detroit architects ,” he taught Albert Kahn and designed a lot of biggies and baddies in Michigan architectural history. Consider: the ( the ) Masonic Temple, the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, the log cabin at Palmer Park, the Gem Theatre and, a late personal obsession of mine (more to come on this soon), the demolished Detroit College of Law. But what’s so nautical about George Mason?

He was the architect of the Detroit Yacht Club, dedicated in 1923.

Speaking of the Detroit Yacht Club, and also deans, let’s talk about Commodore Arnold Augustus Schantz, the “dean of Great Lakes yachtsmen,” the Detroit Free Press called him in a front-page obituary upon his death in January 1934. Schantz was born in 1861 in Galion, Ohio, and was still a kid when he took a job as a grocery boy “working Saturdays for 25 cents per day.” He changed careers at 14 years old when he became the Mansfield, Ohio agent for the Cincinnati newspapers.

Schantz took “the first vacation of his life” when he was 19, traveling by boat from Cleveland to Mackinac Island, where he camped for a week. The trip turned him into “a devotee of the lakes,” the Free Press reported. When he got home, he wrote the Detroit & Cleveland Navigation Company to inquire about reserving a boat to bring a group of his friends back up to Mackinac. Somehow, he spun this into a job at D&C as a traveling agent and promoter for the passenger steamship line. Schantz became president of the company in 1919.

But Schantz was especially well-known as a yachtsman and a promoter of Detroit’s dominant power boat racing scene in the 1910s and ‘20s, becoming commodore of the Miss Detroit Gold Cup association in 1915, a position he held until his death. Schantz was also instrumental in the construction of the Detroit Yacht Club’s current clubhouse on Belle Isle, as chair of the club’s building committee in 1922.

Yachting may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Aaron and Helen DeRoy. Aaron and Helen were from Pittsburgh, where Aaron made a fortune as a Studebaker dealer (he was the first Jewish person to own a car dealership, according to the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan ). (Helen, the daughter of an oil baron, was already rich when they married.) In 1923, the DeRoys moved to Detroit, where Aaron continued to distribute automobiles through his company, the Aaron DeRoy Motor Co.

The DeRoys were major philanthropists, within and beyond Detroit’s Jewish community. You may have guessed this, since their names are on all kinds of things, including the Helen L. DeRoy Auditorium at Wayne State University and Aaron DeRoy Hall at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum. A $10,000 donation from the DeRoys purchased the first two giraffes at the Detroit Zoo.

But Aaron was also a commodore of the Detroit Yacht Club, as well as a devoted power boat racer and the owner of a yacht called “Yoreda” (A. DeRoy, backwards). He was on his way to yacht races in Miami in 1935 when he was killed in a car accident. Helen took over the dealership business, established a family foundation, and continued to generously support a bunch of cultural and community institutions, including the Jewish Community Center, Jewish summer camps, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and Wayne State. She died in 1977 at the age of 95.

The door of their private crypt at Evergreen is delightfully maritime!

That’s enough for one mausoleum visit, but you know there will be more! (Though I will try not to make the Little Detroit History Letter too mausoleum-intensive.)

share if you like boats!

A couple of links worth your time

Let’s not lose this ballroom y’all. Via Library of Congress.

Speaking even more of maritime history: I really hated to hear today that the Michigan DNR is considering demolishing the Belle Isle Boat House . Here are more details on what you can do if you also hate that idea . I wrote about the history of the building and what it would mean to lose it for Crain’s last year .

This is just smart: Aaron Mondry of The Dig asked Detroit architects to talk about their favorite buildings . Not a Penobscot among them!! (With due respect to the Penobscot, et al.)

Housekeeping: I don’t know if anyone cares at all when or how often I send this newsletter, but consider this your double issue for Oct. 15 & Oct. 22. This weekend I’m sending myself on an outstate cemetery assignment for you all to enjoy Oct. 29.

subscribe for that special outstate cemetery edition

OK, only sort of; it took me five years to do this, lol.

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Founded shortly after the Civil War, the Detroit Yacht Club (DYC), housed in the beautifully restored 1920s Mediterranean style villa, continues to be one of the largest yacht clubs in the United States.

The 1920s were golden days for the DYC. Gar Wood brought the club world class attention with his world speed records in a hydroplane and his Gold Cup victories. During the Great Depression, membership at the club severely dropped and some services were discontinued.

By 1946 the Club became debt free and the women of the club formed the first women’s sailing organization in the country and raced the Club’s catboats. During the 1950’s the Grill and River Vista were enlarged, movie equipment was installed in the ballroom so that theater quality films could be shown every Sunday evening and a little later, an outdoor Olympic size pool was added along with Front and West Docks to increase the number of boat wells to over 350.

Today the DYC offers a wide range of activities to ensure there is something for everyone.

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Detroit Yacht Club

Established 1868.

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Steeped in Tradition

THE DETROIT YACHT CLUB on Belle Isle has been a going concern since 1868. In all those years, very little has changed — and yet, very much has changed. Tradition thrives in the DYC, but the club has put a modern twist on what it offers.

“We love our traditions. We wouldn’t change them,” Commodore Patricia Thull O’Brien said. But DYC is actually several dozen clubs within the club, O’Brien said. It offers something for just about any interest.

The annual Officer’s Ball, held in January, is the No. 1 tradition. It’s a black-tie affair complete with trumpeters announcing guests, a receiving line and a several-course meal, followed by dancing to a live band.

One of the members’ favorite parts of the ball is the Grand March, where diners follow club officers into the ballroom and “march” around to music. The march was first used in the Waldorf Astoria in 1808, and it’s possible DYC is the only place still holding it year after year.

Other DYC traditions include the annual blessing of the fleet. Venetian Night usually is held in August, when boaters decorate their docks to a theme. There’s an annual fleet review, where boats parade past club officers for a salute. A Commodore’s Coffee is held after new officer elections. There’s a classic boat and car review each Father’s Day, too.

“Not only do we have traditions, we have a fabulous architectural history,” O’Brien said.

DYC began with a small clubhouse and boatshed in Detroit. Three buildings followed before the current 93,000-square-foot building was completed in 1923 at a cost of more than $1 million. Noted Detroit architect George Mason designed it in the Mediterranean Revival style, and it is the largest yacht club building in the U.S. Its upkeep is supported by a 501c3 foundation.

The 3,000-square-foot ballroom, one of the largest in Detroit, is more than three stories high. Its ceiling is crossed with painted beams, a typical Arts and Crafts movement detail. The Scarab Club in Detroit, a gathering spot for artists since 1907, has a similar feature. The yacht club’s solarium, called Peacock Alley, has a Pewabic tile floor and was designed after the lady’s lounge in Waldorf Astoria. The chandeliers are from the Dodge mansion, Rose Terrace.

“In the past, there were gentlemen’s areas that obviously now are coed. Women were an afterthought at the clubhouse,” O’Brien said. A women’s locker room was added later, and O’Brien is the second woman commodore.

Another commodore, Gar Wood, is renowned for the mahogany runabouts he built and for setting world speed records on water with his speedboats and early hydroplanes. He was commodore when the current clubhouse was built. The harbor now has 384 berths.

But tradition and a historic building aren’t enough to maintain membership in modern times. So, close attention is given to its member’s changing tastes. Today, live bands play in the Starlight Circle band shell on summer weekends. There are clubs for members who enjoy kayaking or golf. A rod and gun club caters to those who enjoy fishing and shooting. A libations society puts on dinners and tastings. There are clubs for those interested in bicycling, books, fine arts and gardening, among other things.

DYC’s summer camps for kids include sailing and swimming. And when it’s DYC’s turn to host the weekly swim meet, the ladies’ locker room is full of giggles, as team members get ready for the dinner dance that follows.

The DYC’s membership increased by about 20 percent in the past couple of years, to more than 700 families. The 149-year-old club continues to thrive in modern times.

Peggy Walsh-Sarnecki is a sailing enthusiast and retired Detroit Free Press reporter.

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Commodore Mike Helm Commodore2024 @byc.com  

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