Glenn Garthe spent much of his youth working on fishing tugs that went in and out of the Leland Harbor when Fishtown was a base for a vibrant commercial fishing industry.

THE TUG Helen S (right) is tied up at Fishtown in Leland nearly seven decades ago. The photo was taken in 1940 by Fred Dickinson.

One of those tugs is coming back to Fishtown to stay.

Garthe worked with his uncles, Leo Stallman and Hank Steffens Jr., on the wooden fish tug the Helen S. The tug was originally owned and operated by his grandfather, Hank Steffens Sr., and Stallman and Steffens worked with Hank Sr. for many years before they bought the boat, nets and shanty in Fishtown in the 1950s. Steffens Sr. stayed on shore after that, and smoking chubs at the shanty caught by the younger men .

Gwendolyn Egeler, one of Steffens Sr.’s daughters, said the fish tug was named for her sister, Helen. Egeler said her father had very specific rules about when girls were allowed to go on his fishing boat.

“He never took us girls out on the boat with him when he was fishing. Maybe to do something with the nets, but never when he was fishing,” she said.

Egeler had originally married Ray Garthe and they lived in Carlton, where they started their family. When Garthe died in 1958, she packed up the family and moved back to her roots in Leland. Later, she met and subsequently married Marvin Egeler.

Glenn Garthe said he’s very happy that a piece of his past has returned now that the Fishtown Preservation Society (FPS), working with the Maritime Heritage Alliance and the Leelanau Historical Society, has received the in-tact hull of the Helen S from Clark Cole of Traverse City. Cole’s father purchased the boat from Les Biederman 25 years ago. Biederman
had bought the wooden tug from Steffens Jr. and Stallman in 1959 and spent four years converting it into a pleasure craft.

GWENDOLYN EGELER and Glenn Garthe
display photos of the Helen S fishing tug,
which was a staple in the Leland Harbor
commercial fishing fleet for many years.

“Dad and I went down to where Les and Ann Biederman had stored the boat and moved it out to our storage barn on Hammond Road. We had intended to restore the boat together as a project, but things kept happening,” Clark Cole said.

At different times over the last few years, Cole had thought about taking the hull out of the barn and storing it outside. “But, something always came up and I’d forget about it for a while,” he said.

FPS officials became aware of the hull through Suzy Van Zee of Suttons Bay. Her son Chris works for Cole.

“Chris was getting something from the barn one day last year and saw the hull sitting there. He asked about it, then told his mom about it,” Cole said. She came to the barn, took some photos and showed them to historian Laura Quackenbush. Last spring, Quackenbush and Van Zee went out to Cole’s barn and confirmed it was the Helen S.
Cole gave FPS the hull since he wanted it out of his Hammond Road storage facility in East Bay Township. The Helen S now rests in a garage on the site of the Maritime Heritage Alliance’s facility in Greilickville.

“Our family’s first choice in something like this is to find someone who appreciates the item for what it is. I think it’s great that we are able to help bring back an important part of this area’s history,” Cole said.

“Historically for me, this is great. It will be interesting to see if they bring it back to its original condition,” Glenn Garthe said of the FPS’ efforts to possibly restore the boat.

A JULY 1961 photo shows Glenn Garthe
working the nets on the Helen S under the
watchful eye of his grandfather,
Hank Steffens Sr.

Amanda Holmes, administrative director for FPS, said the organization was able to secure a $25,000 grant from the Americana Foundation to transport the hull to its current location and start extensive research on the Helen S. If the foundation is able to raise enough funds and restore the fishing boat to its former glory, the Helen S would be the only wooden fish tug to have survived from Fishtown’s wooden boat past.

Cris Telgard, a FPS board trustee, said the last working wooden fish tug to operate out of Fishtown was The Goodwill. It stopped running out of Leland sometime in the late 1970s. “Now, it’s rotting in a boat yard down in Frankfort,” he said.

Holmes said the Helen S has another unique tie to Leland’s maritime past. In the July 16, 1964 Leelanau Enterprise, a front-page story about Les Biederman bringing the former Helen S into Leland Harbor states the fish tug was built in 1927 by John A. Johnson, a venerated wooden boat builder who built most of the wooden tugs used by fisherman in Leland and Northport.

“Acquiring the boat will enable us to vividly interpret a third era of Leland’s fishing heritage, the 1920s through the 1940s. The Joy dates from 1981, the Janice Sue from 1958, whereas the Helen S was built in 1927, the heyday of the wood boat,” Holmes wrote as part of the grant application to the Americana Foundation.

If the wood boat is fully restored FPS plans to stage the vessel in front of the Steffens-Stallman shanty that the preservation group also owns. When Beiderman purchased the boat in 1959, he had all of the original decking removed and the boat rebuilt from the deck up.

GLEN PETERSEN of Petersen Productions takes
video of the Helen S as it was being prepared to
be put in a Greilickville storage facility.

Garthe said the Helen S was originally an open deck fishing tug. Later, Hank Steffens Sr. added a fore and aft cabin.

“I remember Grandpa Steffens saying before he had the aft cabin, when he was setting the nets, ice use to form on his hands during the winter months. That tells you what kind of tough men those fishing guys were back then. They went out in all kinds of weather, all kinds of conditions, because if they didn’t, they didn’t make any money,” Garthe said.

Holmes is looking forward to speaking with local families associated with the Helen S. “Getting a chance to get their stories down on tape, to preserve the oral history of this boat, is very important,” she said.

For Egeler, seeing her father’s boat restored to its original standard will be gratifying. “I used to fish off the tug when I was a kid, when dad had it tied up to the dock at Fishtown. Fishtown was the place to hang out,” she said.