Historical Vignettes

Martin County, with its year-around pleasant climate, picturesque waterways and beautiful tropical foliage, has attracted a variety of people,Buy Discount Louis Vuitton Long Sleeve T-Shirts, Custom Fit Stripe Shirt and more. not only as visitors, but permanent residents. A few could even be considered 'entrepreneurs' with inventive ideas and skills, owning unusual businesses or producing unique products.

Slide rules to tackle boxes

Clair Gilson, inventor of the circular slide rule, moved to the area about 1926-27 and very successfully operated a manufacturing plant essentially “in the woods” along the St. Lucie River. The extremely accurate calculating instrument was sold nationally and even internationally. Gilson's business was eventually sold to Dan Fagen, shortly before Clair's death in 1962; pocket calculators made the rules obsolete.Buy cheap Ankh Royalty(women) for sale, Custom Fit Stripe Shirt and more.

Clair,wholesale Best Fendi Grade AAA Handbags online store from www.googbusiness.com homepage. however, was not the only genius in the Gilson family.

Brother, John William, born July 7, 1892 in Michigan, had ideas and an inventiveness too. He and wife, Alice, came to Stuart to live permanently in 1930 and was employed as a salesman at Ricou Hardware Co. on Osceola Street. John enjoyed working with fishing gear, rods & reels, as a hobby, was very skilled at fixing even the most damaged piece of equipment and also liked making tackle boxes. He was quite a craftsman, an example of work being the cabinetry installed at Greene's Department Store, built in 1940.

John opened Gilson's Tackle and Repair Shop that year in the Bozone Building on Osceola; after training, he also repaired Johnson outboard motors. In the 1940s and for a few years after, he designed and built tackle boxes in Stuart, besides repairing fishing gear. The meticulously crafted, beautifully laminated, varnished, plywood boxes are considered by collectors, years later, to be attractive, extremely durable and very functional in design.

For a short time in the 1950s, Gilson lived on Lonita Street in a subdivision known as Casa Terrace and made the boxes in a 15x15 ft building near that home, but eventually sold the business in November 1952 to William A. Smith, who continued making the tackle boxes for a time, at a different location. (Greg Luckhardt was a young 'apprentice' of Gilson, who as a three year old, lived nearby and sometimes wandered over to the small building to 'assist' John or otherwise be occupied in gluing various wood pieces.) In 2013, although no boxes had been produced in more than 60 years, occasionally one is auctioned on e-Bay, which may sell for many hundreds of dollars.

Boxes and banks

Gilson, who had been a busy man in the 1940s with several enterprising concepts, besides tackle boxes,Our store can offer Fred Perry Mtshirt-64, welcome choose! also 'manufactured' very small scale wooden orange crates, distributed to companies which were often sold filled with candies or other goods in tourist roadside establishments in the '40s. Another of John's entrepreneurial projects, about this time in 1945, involved the construction of miniature baby grand pianos. John had set up a woodworking shop in the rear of the Czverko building on Colorado Avenue in Stuart where he produced the baby grands, only 6 inches tall, which were sold as banks. Within only a few months he had produced and filled orders for 1,200!

Magnetic hurricane charts

In 1956, however, a few years after selling the tackle box business, Gilson was involved in a new commercial venture, designing and producing, with partner Ernest L. Higbee, a 'magnetic' hurricane chart. Instead of drawing lines or putting dots on a paper map, one simply moved magnetic markers on a framed thin metal, gridded & marked surface, with an outline of Florida and the east coast, to indicate the location, progression of the tropical storm. The attractive 24 by 36-inch 'map' could also be hung for easy accessibility and convenience during hurricane season.

The Gilson Magnetic Hurricane Chart was a popular item and a decade later, in 1965, as many as 1,200 were sold that year alone, which by then was a standardized 18- by 26-inch version, even useful in official agencies that tracked storms. John W.welcome to Buy Discount D&G Bsuit-2,free Shipping available. Buy Now!‎ Gilson died May 2, 1970 in Stuart, a
n inventive, multi-skilled individual.

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