Page Content (OCR)
112 the idea. Taking the children to live in a boat built by their parents was an idea that really thrilled me. We began the work with a hammer, a keg of nails, a handsaw and a 4 dream. We began work on a huge building, eighty feet long by twenty-five feet high, shingled sides, back and roof. We’re both good with our hands and the work was exciting for both of us. I worked on the project when I was not on a job or in the investigative mode with Jacques. Bob worked on the project whenever he wasn’t working on an art commission. He had the idea of building a boat, no, a yacht really, made of concrete. He’d learned that the U.S. had built ships of concrete during World War I. We could do that, he thought, and I agreed. We would build a concrete ship large enough to hold our family and ourselves as well as twenty other people. Tulsa has access to the sea through Tulsa’s Port of Catoosa. Boats, ships and barges come up to Tulsa via the Port of Catoosa locks and moved back down to the ocean, everyday. We would build the vessel, lowboy it to the port of Catoosa and launch it from there, we explained to our puzzled friends and family. A huge dream, an impossible dream really, for two people who had no money, no experience with boats, and very little help. We never hesitated for a moment. As soon as the huge shelter was finished, we began building the actual boat keel. Soon the boat rose from nothing to a huge vessel. We paid for the dream with whatever we had in our pockets at the moment, then waited until we had a few more cents to purchase whatever else we needed. People in the neighborhood called our project, “The Ark.” It took us thirteen years and about $350,000, not even counting the thousands of hours of physical labor Bob and I and a few friends and family, poured into the ship, but we eventually built in beautiful staterooms paneled with Barbara Bartholic as told to Peggy Fielding