Bill Rossberger has spent much of his life either on Lake Michigan or looking at it. He and his wife, Bonnie, live next door to me in a third-floor apartment across the street from Rogers Avenue Beach. The walls of their living room are covered with sailing prints, and there’s a telescope in the corner so he can see what’s passing by on the lake. A retired salesman for Inland Steel, which owned a large fleet of ore boats, Rossberger still likes to watch the “lakers” slide along the horizon. Sometimes he knocks on my door when there’s a beautiful orange moonrise and tells me to go to the window and have a look. “Every morning and every evening I look out at the lake,” he told me once. “It just gets into your spirit.”
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While he held that office Rossberger learned that his club had been founded aboard a schooner once owned by Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the early years of his relationship with Eleanor, Roosevelt sailed the boat, the Half-Moon, in the Bay of Fundy, dressed in a blazer and tie and cooking pancakes, sausages, and lobsters for his companions. He sold it in 1920, just before his unsuccessful campaign for vice president, and it eventually came into the hands of a man named Ralph Langley, who renamed it the Gaviota and sailed it to a third-place finish in the 1924 Chicago to Mackinac race.
When Rossberger heard that story 30 years ago he decided the boat must still be somewhere in Chicago, and in an attempt to find it he searched through newspaper clippings, bought books about FDR at secondhand stores, talked to fellow sailors. Two years ago he finally located Dr. Christian Lyngby Jr., the son of the boat’s last known owner.
Just after midnight the rope connecting the boat to its mooring can snapped in a strong wind. The Gaviota drifted to shore, where the waves smashed it against the rocks. When the harbormaster called at 1 AM, Lyngby’s father raced up from his home near 95th and Stony Island. It was too late. “He started up the boat’s engine just like a firecracker,” says Lyngby, “and she went about 15 to 20 feet and sank.”
“We’re in luck!” he shouted, peering into the water. “This is the stub of an old canal. See the wooden pilings under the water? This is the canal–this is the stub of the DuPont canal. The boat would be right here–under this building.”
A little reluctantly, Rossberger told him about Roosevelt’s boat. Rubin was only the fifth person on earth to learn the story–not even the Roosevelts knew what had become of their patriarch’s schooner.
