IT WAS THE Sunday of Labour Day weekend in 1958, a late-summer’s day, still and overcast. My mother, her five brothers, and their mother piled into the family’s wood-panelled Ford station wagon. Slung low, it crunched down the gravel driveway of their cottage on Lake Muskoka and turned north onto Highway 11 towards Huntsville, Ont.
My mother, ten years old at the time, remembers the excitement. For the first time, she was going to watch her father race. To her, he was a beloved dad, the one who improvised jazz on the piano, told spellbinding stories, and could make nickels disappear in a sleight of hand. But on that day, she was going to see him as Will Braden, one of Canada’s fastest boat racers, doing that legendary thing: flying over the water in one of his hydroplane boats.
When the family arrived at Memorial Park in Huntsville, they joined several thousand spectators gathering around Fairy Lake. A triangular two-mile course was marked with buoys, and “the pits”—where the boats were lowered into the water with cranes, and where mechanics, owners, and drivers tinkered and conferred—were abuzz with manly activity.
Hydroplane racing was a big spectator sport in those years. Tens of thousands of people gathered at places like the CNE in Toronto, the Bay of Quinte at Picton, or the Detroit waterfront to watch the boats rip across long stretches of water. Engines roaring and propellers kicking up rooster tails like a bundle of fire hoses, the races were both thrilling and terrifying.
The sport was a test of physics. Unlike the boats that came
