Truckin' on the Western Branch

Smokey Glover Smokey Glover, Director of Operations, East Coast, at Willard Marine, Inc., grew up on the creek he lives near now. He has been a racing boat test driver and crew chief. I was named Smokey by my dad, William “Sully” Glover, and mother, Martha. I graduated from Churchland High in 1974 and remember that our biggest adventures occurred on the water. For 25 cents a day you could swim in the Suburban Country Club pool—we’d arrive by boat. Then came the Churchland Swim and Racquet and the Marlin Club. We did obstacle courses on the creeks. When the original Carrie B sightseeing boat came up the Western Branch, we would race our boats around it, doing figure eights. One day the Coast Guard almost caught us but they got hung up on a sandbar for an hour. I grew up on Brookside Lane where the Hagwoods had a two-acre former farm field. We played ball, learned to ride dirt bikes, and learned to drive a VW on that field. Westwood was built in the 1940s and 1950s, and Hatton Point was developed from 1962.

We’re a big little town—the biggest small town around—lots of community caring, dinners, cards, prayers when you’re down and we still have the old ties. Connectiveness in a community is a plus.

Smokey Glover. Image by Sheally

The Lauterbachs The Halls and Glover were close friends of the Lauterbachs—Henry Lauterbach, legendary in powerboat race circles as a driver and a builder, and his son, Larry Lauterbach, a prominent driver and boat builder on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Henry Lauterbach was a champion hydroplane driver in the 1950s, winning five national titles in three years. He realized that he could not continue to race and win without losing customers who were often competing against him. He focused on building, creating more than 200 handcrafted speedboats that skimmed the water with a wa-wa sound as distinctive as a Harley-Davidson’s roar. Lauterbach boats dominated the race circuit for decades and are regarded as works of art as well as top-of-the-line competitors. Every day until his death at 87 in 2008, Henry Lauterbach, a man of precision and habit, ate breakfast at 5:30 a.m. in his Hatton Point home, then drove his pickup to the shop he had had in Suffolk since 1989. There, he crafted custom hydroplanes, and restored others, including many of his own builds, for some of the sport’s premier drivers.

The Lauterbach sound has not faded. Larry Lauterbach continues his father’s boat building tradition.

“All I ever wanted to do was build and drive race boats,” he said. “I had the best teacher in the world.”

Larry Lauterbach started driving as a teenager and remembered graduating from high school in 1965 on crutches, thanks to a boat accident. He is a 10-time APBA National Champion, winning more than 350 races in a four-decade career. He set five Union of International Motorboating World Records including the APBA’s fastest Limited heat ever—a record that still stands.

Henry Lauterbach. Image by Sheally

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