A few days ago, a mother and her adult son came into Ralph Frese’s shop on the Northwest Side with just the sort of thing he said he doesn’t want to deal with anymore: a faded, beaten-up, red canvas-covered wooden canoe they hoped he could restore to like-new condition.
At 81 years old, his hair and beard now white, Frese, who is tall and still rangy and robust, wants to retire. For the last two years he has been trying to sell the businesses housed at his legendary Northwest Side store, Chicagoland Canoe Base. He has stopped building his acclaimed fiberglass canoes and restocks his retail store “just enough to have the essentials on hand.”
Still, his phone rings all day long, as it has since the 1950s, with callers wanting to price canoes to buy or rent or asking advice on how, when and where to paddle. They report river polluters, or they want Frese to restore their treasured old canoes.
“I showed them all the work that would have to be done and how expensive that would be,” said Frese, as if to blame the canoe owners for his decision to restore it, setting it alongside two other old canoes on which he and an assistant are working.
He already had removed the canvas from the hull, exposing the underlying red cedar planking, and pulled the mahogany trim from the gunwale, a hint of the canoe’s lofty pedigree. His huge hands, thick from six decades of wielding sledgehammers, chisels, awls and other manual tools, gently traced the classic curves of the old canoe.
Restoring it will mean removing seats and thwarts to strip the interior of old varnish and decades of grit, and replacing weakened planking and wooden ribs with new ones he will custom cut, steam and shape himself.
“This may be a Rushton,” he said, indicating it might have been built 100 years or more ago by John Henry Rushton. As old wooden canoes go, a Rushton has status like a vintage luxury Duesenberg automobile.
“She has almost the same silhouette as the one over there,” he said, nodding to another project, “and we know that one is a Rushton.”
Frese is a blacksmith with the soul of a poet. In 1940, when he was 14 and living near the tiny blacksmith shop his German immigrant father ran at 4019 N. Narragansett Ave., he bought a canvas kayak for $15. Ever since, except for a stint in the Army, he has been paddling Chicago-area rivers, extolling the virtues of riverbank wildernesses running through the city and suburbs.
“You can be on the river and all the city noise and hubbub of traffic is gone,” he said. “You’re in a world where perching cormorants are spreading their wings to dry, beaver are swimming under you, ducks alongside you and wildflowers bloom on the riverbank. Every waterway around here has its own story, each has a bit of unique plant life, fish life or scenery.”
After the Army, Frese studied engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology for two years before he decided to apprentice under his father and become a blacksmith.
“It was my opportunity to become creative in the way I wanted to be creative,” he said.
Father and son had a good reputation fixing and sharpening chisels and equipment for stonemasons and carvers, and they expanded until they purchased the five lots that are home still to Frese’s small complex of businesses.
The call of the river wilderness remained a constant for Frese, even though he was mostly alone with his enthusiasm in the 1950s, when urban waterways were suffering. People and industry freely dumped trash and waste into streams, and the wild, wooded riverbanks that remained were easy targets for industrial and residential development.
“I learned that, if you truly want to enjoy something, you have to share it with others,” he said, reasoning that the more people he could attract to the rivers, the more pressure there would be to protect the waterway environment.
Becoming a Boy Scout leader, Frese soon put boys and parents into canoes on local rivers. He designed molds and kits to let boys build their own fiberglass canoes, an idea that spread to other troops.
To provide a little extra fun, in 1958 Frese organized the Des Plaines River Marathon. The first year attracted 25 canoes, but now it attracts a thousand or more annually.
“I had the race start in Libertyville, deep in Lake County, which in those days wasn’t doing a thing to protect or clean up the Des Plaines,” he said, “and let it end deep in Cook County, where for decades much of the river had been straddled and protected by the Forest Preserve District lands.
“That way people could see what a resource the river was and what potential it had.”
He began organizing similar annual events on rivers and streams all over the state, including a hugely popular New Year’s Day paddle along the Chicago River’s North Branch and yearly events up and down the Fox River.
“He is a unique individual who has been able to bring thousands of people into the great outdoors through his own enthusiasm,” said Sigrid Pilgrim, an Evanston canoe hobbyist.
Pilgrim had never been in a canoe until 1970, when she and her husband and kids walked into Frese’s. He soon sold them a canoe and advised them how to get started, igniting her passion for the sport and, as with so many other customers, inspiring her into activism to protect area rivers.
The Lake County Forest Preserve District now controls and protects 80 percent of the Des Plaines River inside the county. Great sections of the Fox River and other area streams now enjoy some sort of county, state or federal protection. Even the Chicago River is “going wild” again, after decades of campaigns to stop polluters and clean it up.
“It’s good to look back and realize things some of the things you worked at a long time ago have grown into something fruitful,” said Frese, “though a lot, lot more still needs to be done.”
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As canoeing took over his life, it gradually took over his business, too.
“I was always getting calls from Boy Scout troops and other paddlers, wondering if I could fix a canoe or replace a part or find a new one suited to their needs,” he said, so he began selling canoe supplies.
He went on to refine a hull design adopted from a friend’s canoe that would become the handsome, swift, wood-trimmed fiberglass Canadienne, a craft he began selling at his shop until he could no longer keep up with the demand, leasing manufacturing rights to it for many years to a big company.
Frese perfected a way of replicating the look of birchbark and began building remarkably accurate “birchbark” canoes, hand-splitting cedar planks and ribbing for authenticity.
These canoes are exquisite and costly, with a 34-foot-long voyageur cargo canoe going for more than $20,000. Hollywood studios have bought them, as has PBS, for use in period films. Living history museums, the National Park Service and summer youth camps have bought them, and they became the stalwart craft of voyageur re-enactment groups everywhere.
Now Frese has divided his business interests into four entities — the retail shop, the canoemaking business and know-how, the blacksmith shop, and the five city lots they all sit on — in hopes of selling them so he can retire.
“There’s not one person, probably, who is going to want or could afford to buy all four entities,” he said, acknowledging difficulties in selling exotic niche businesses.
“I get developer calls all the time for the property, so that’s easy,” he said. “How do you sell a blacksmith shop in this day and age?”
Freser seems anxious that somebody pick up his custom canoemaking operation so that his method isn’t forgotten, insisting it would be at least a lucrative sideline business for somebody.
The retail store and its inventory of new canoes and kayaks, paddles and related gear, along with rivets, grommets, metal fastenings and other parts found nowhere else for defunct canoe manufacturers, would likely have to move, he said.
Not for sale are scores of old canoes Frese has amassed from cultures all over the world, which he wants to restore to museum quality. He is a founding member of the Chicago Maritime Society, a group raising money to build a maritime history museum.
In his retirement, he also plans to write about canoes.
“The maritime history of every culture in the world began with canoes,” he said. “All other transportation grew from that. They have a key place in the history of every civilization. It’s still the only means of transport that takes you through nature without leaving a path or your footprint behind.”
Unless, of course, you are Ralph Frese.
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