For 90-year-old Bud Parks, building model boats is more than just a hobby. “It’s been a lifesaver for me,” says Parks, a widower whose wife, Mackie, died in 2020.
For at least the past 25 years, Parks has been immersed in the craft of building wooden, radio-controlled boats. Some are up to 48 inches long and can shoot across the water at 60 mph.
He sometimes races his handmade boats at the Camping World pond in East Ridge, where the Chattanooga Model Boat club hosts competitions.
Parks has a workshop next to his apartment at the Morning Pointe Senior Living community in Hixson. When he noticed that a utility room was going essentially unused, he asked if he could build his boats there. The answer was “yes.” Now, the halls at the Morning Pointe location are lined with Parks’ elegant mahogany and maple boats. Most are scale models of actual 19th-century watercraft.
There’s a model of the “Typhoon,” a mahogany boat built for Edsel Ford in the late 1800s. There’s a replica of the “George Washington” tug boat launched in 1890 to work on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. And there’s even a stern wheel boat called the “Myrtle Corey,” which was a tug boat converted into a pleasure boat.