Looking Back: Yachts of the rich and famous have long visited Charlevoix

CHARLEVOIX — Ninth in a series related to the new exhibit, “The Maritime History of Charlevoix” at the Charlevoix Historical Society’s Museum at Harsha House, 103 State St.

Charlevoix has always been a destination for some of the largest private yachts that sail not only the Great Lakes but also the world’s oceans. The Seagram’s Corporation yacht was once a frequent visitor. In recent years Ivana Trump came to town aboard hers, the L’Oreal Corporation yacht appeared, an IBM vessel arrived, and some have come in with strict orders to their crews not to divulge their ownership to anyone (with registration in places like the Cayman Islands).

A few of these large boats have been known to park themselves on the East Park waterfront for the whole summer season and hardly move as they draw people like iron filings to a magnet from the park and Bridge Street. On their upper decks might be seen small sport or amphibian cars, even helicopters. All these vessels have accented and embellished what many of their captains consider to be the finest naturally protected harbor on the Great Lakes. 

Originally built for the Navy in 1926 but not commissioned because of an international agreement to limit the sizes of the world’s military fleets, the 185-foot steel vessel Mizpah came into the ownership of a Mrs. Cadwalder of Palm Beach, Florida who paid $525,000 and named it Savarona. She sold to another party, who in 1929 sold the boat for $375,000 to Eugene F. McDonald of Chicago, steel-willed head of the Zenith Radio Corporation of Chicago. McDonald named the vessel Mizpah (or “Watchtower,” from Genesis 31:49), which means “the Lord watches between me and thee, when we are absent from one another.” It was one of the largest luxury yachts on the Great Lakes, with gold-plated doorknobs and a crew of 27. McDonald did much electronic testing on the Mizpah, even taking it to Cocos Island off Costa Rica to test a rudimentary form of radar that was found to have potential, the scope and importance of its future use still unknown.

Charlevoix was the Mizpah’s home base for many summers. In 1932, McDonald brought several guests to town aboard the boat, one of them Gutzon Borglum, taking a break from carving the famed faces of Mount Rushmore.  But like almost all of its kind, it was taken for World War II duty in 1942 and served as Patrol Yacht-29, the USS Mizpah, on escort duty along the Atlantic Coast, during which time no ship it escorted was ever hit.

After the war, the Navy gave McDonald $175,000 for the boat, then sold it to a shipping company in Honduras for use as a banana transport vessel between Central America and Tampa, Florida. Damaged on a reef during a storm 20 years later, it was towed to Tampa, found to be too costly to repair, and what had been the beautiful Mizpah ended its life in 1968 as an artificial reef/maritime habitat in the Atlantic north of Palm Beach.

At the same time the Mizpah was here, another industrialist, Logan Thomson of Cincinnati and our Belvedere Club, head of the Champion paper company, was bringing in his series of yachts named Sylvia after his wife. The 133-foot Sylvia IV, launched 1926, even enjoyed its own huge custom-built boathouse on the south shore of Round Lake, currently transformed into the Harbour Club condominium structure. When Thomson decided to purchase the 192-foot Sylvia (named without the expected Roman numeral designation) in 1930, he offered the Sylvia IV plus boathouse to his Belvedere friend Ransom E. Olds. Olds was the founder of the Oldsmobile automobile company and a summer resident of Charlevoix for a quarter of a century. He called his new vessel the Reomar IV, the name formed after his initials and the first three letters of his subsidiary “mar”ine business.

Thomson continued to make Charlevoix the home port for his yacht, considered the most gorgeous vessel ever to part the waters of Charlevoix. But history unfortunately caught up with the two men, as it did with McDonald and many other yacht owners. Sensing what was about to happen in an increasingly troubled world, Thomson donated the Sylvia to the government for military service seven months before Pearl Harbor. It sailed out of Charlevoix in April of 1941, headed for refitting at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The Reomar IV followed suit in 1942.  Neither vessel was ever seen in Charlevoix again.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Looking Back: Yachts of the rich and famous have long visited Charlevoix