[CarltonHendricks]

Many people would look at this trophy cup won by the Betty II and dismiss it as a nice little trophy…but what’s the big deal…However it’s important to understand 1909 is quite early for powerboat racing…I’ve read it stated about 1911 is when the Hydroplane dynamic came on the scene…That is…boaters began to understand boats could go a lot faster when engines got powerful enough to lift the bow so the boat went over the water not thru it…I would speculate the Betty II may have been on the cusp of the introduction of the hydroplane…But it wasn’t just the Delaware River Club still trying to figure it out…the whole world was going thru that learning curve in 1909…

But back to the trophy…I was very happy to find it…..it’s the earliest powerboat race trophy I own…I went to research it and got a real surprise when I noticed the adjoining article that I had never seen before was about the Ilys…which I have a bronze statue of…So it was a double whammy research payoff…The Ilys bronze is another never seen…It’s the only bronze statue of a yacht I’ve ever seen from that early…and American to boot…There is a whole whole lot about the Ilys I don’t have time to go into…it’s been a while since I did the research but I remember I did talk on the phone to a retired attorney who was part of the Whitaker family…He told me his family had at one time owned the Athletics Baseball Club…and if I recall the Whitaker family owned the largest fabric mill in Philadelphia back in the day…don’t quote me but it was something like that…