[SEL] Special Treat for Portland

[Keith Kinney]

In 1898 two brothers opened a gas engine factory in Evansville, Indiana, 
the Clarke Gas Engine Company.   They made mostly marine engines until the 
mid-1930.  It is estimated that they only made about 300 engines.  With 
Evansville being my hometown, I have a special interest in the Clarke Gas 
Engines and have 5 of them in our collection.

In doing research about the history of the company I found the son of one 
of the founders still living, Berry Clarke.  He currently lives in Fort 
Wayne, Indiana which is about an hour north of Portland.  I contacted him 
several years ago and during a visit with him got a lot of good information 
about the company.  He had a 4 HP Clarke engine that we just finished 
restoring for him.  With the engine now complete I called to see if he 
would be interested in coming to Portland to pick up the engine.  His 
comment was something like this... "Since I'm 82 years old and you have 
done all the work to restore the engine, and since you have such a nice web 
page about the Clarke engines, why don't you just keep it".  He even mailed 
me an original Schebler carburetor left over from the Clarke factory.  As 
you can imagine I was thrilled.  To date we've only been able to locate 
about a dozen or so Clarke engines.

Here's where the special treat for Portland comes in. He indicated that 
he'd like to visit Evansville sometime and see the engine.  I told him we 
could do better than that and  I have invited him to come to the Portland 
show to see the engine.  He is excited to do so and I have also invited him 
to be our guest at the Thursday evening dinner at the Back 40 
Junction.  (Dave, put me down for about 6 for the dinner.)

There are not many people remaining who grew up and worked around the 
factories that built the engines we collect. This will be an excellent 
opportunity to get to meet and talk to someone who lived that 
experience.  Please make a point to introduce yourselves and fill free to 
ask him any questions you might have about life around an early 1900's gas 
engine factory.

To learn more about the company and engines here is a link to my web page 
about them:
http://www.herculesengines.com/clarke/index.htm

Thanks.
Keith