|
Looks like 1964. Got this off the web some place...
"HISTORY
Rick Lee has been building boats about as long as he can remember. He and his father built his first, an eight-footer with a 10-hp outboard, in 1959, when he was 9 years old. He went on to set a world record, win a national championship and put himself through college racing speed boats.
Lee graduated as a P.E. teacher, but someone told him he should follow what he loved to do. Naturally, he found his way into the boat business. He started selling boats and after a couple of years went out on a limb and opened a boat company. He began building high-performance jet boats, day cruisers and race boats and in 1976 he acquired the trade name Centurion from a Salt Lake City company with a heritage dating back to 1964. He grew the company building high-performance ski boats. Back then, nobody knew what an inboard was west of Tennessee. They were ugly, so no one wanted to know what they were. I got interested in them because I discovered that PCM had sold 1,500 motors in 78 or 79. Lee investigated how they could be selling so many engines and consequently discovered the significance of the tournament boat market. In 1979, he built a 2.5-acre factory in Merced, California, and turned the company's high-performance, high-tech boat- building skills toward making ski boats. He built the first Ski Centurion, and it was the first significant direct-drive ski boat produced on the West Coast. This boat brought the high-performance styling of the California speed boats to the water ski market."
|
Linear Mode
