Bub Norris: Powerboat Racing Pioneer

Jim Norris has heard the family stories about his late grandfather, Burt "Bub" Norris. Although he never met the man, he knew the boats, especially Atosis, a 23-foot racer with a 3.5-foot beam and a 20-hp Roberts engine.

Bub Norris built Atosis in his spare time while working as an electrical engineer at General Electric in Lynn, Massachusetts. The boat was lightweight cedar covered in canvas, with a mahogany transom, engine hatch, and framing near the steering wheel. It comfortably seated two. The engine was forward of the cockpit.

In 1907, she was lost for six months while being rail shipped to the Norris homestead in Monmouth, Maine. She later turned up in a Kansas rail yard; the following year she was racing the lakes. But Norris was unhappy with the 15-hp engine so he swapped it for a 20-hp and the boat, named by Norris' sisters after a mythological Native American serpent, gained a reputation as the boat to beat.

The legendary boatbuilder John Hacker ended her reign by designing a competitor with a planing hull — faster and more efficient than Atosis' displacement hull. "My grandfather ran up against one of those Hacker-Crafts and Atosis couldn't defeat it," Jim Norris recalls. "His answer was to build the Cobboseecontee Kid, and he wiped the Hacker-Craft out." By then, GE had transferred Norris to Schenectady, N.Y., where he raced on the Mohawk River. "Most powerboat racing in those days was done by the well-to-do who had boats built for them. My grandfather had the know-how to build his own," says Jim Norris, noting that the Cobboseecontee Kid was upgraded with a 60-hp Roberts aircraft engine to improve performance, but its owner was still dissatisfied until the iron pistons were replaced with aluminum to boost power.

Bub Norris died in 1938. Cobboseecontee Kid was sold and Atosis was stored in the family barn, where she remained until 1985 when grandson Burt "Skip" Norris trucked her to Jupiter, Florida. In January 2011, the Norris family donated Atosis to the Antique Boat Museum in Clayton, N.Y.

"Atosis has been stored most of her life," says museum curator Dan Miller. "She was completed in 1907, so she's 105 years old. That was the early days of powerboat racing. What makes her so important and exciting is that she's never been modified or repainted. The only damage occurred in the 1980s when a lead battery tipped over and acid burned the canvas." Of the legendary museum's 320 boats, Miller ranks Atosis among the top 10 and plans to make her a major exhibit.

"We were all raised on stories about our grandfather, and my brother and sister and I all raced powerboats. Maybe it was ancestor worship," says Jim Norris. "After he died the boat's location was kept a secret so nobody would mess with it at the Maine home. He was already gone before any of us were born, but if he were alive, I'm sure he'd want to know what all the fuss was about."