My memory of the motor is fuzzy. But if this 5-horsepower 1949 Johnson TD20 is in fact, the motor, I definitely remember it saving our asses. When I was 4 or 5 years old, my grandfather, Charles Ricks, ran an old, bare-bones wooden runabout. I have exactly one existing image of the boat—a grainy few seconds on Super 8 after a coastal Carolina fishing trip. She was about a 14-foot dual console with a bench forward and a mess of pulleys linking the 1960 Johnson 40 Sea-Horse to the helm. When granddad wasn’t wrenching on the finicky motor, the boat hauled ass. My uncle Cook and a buddy took her fishing one freezing night and it started sinking. The 40 lurched her onto a plane and kept them from drowning.
Granddad was a Soperton, Georgia postmaster, farmer, master mechanic and a jack of all trades, and he loved to fish. Though happily married, his best fishing buddy was an elderly widowed cotton gin matriarch and outdoorswoman named Sarah Fowler. Ms. Fowler called Granddad “Rowan.” She had a mile-wide drawl, sported weathered overalls and flannel almost everywhere she went and shucked so many lima beans that she could lift the weathered nail off her calloused thumb. That creeped me out, but man, I loved Sarah Fowler.
One Summer’s day, Granddad and Ms. Fowler loaded me in to seek bass and bream on the Oconee River. I recall Granddad picking up a little outboard from his brother Curtis. “What’s that for Granddaddy?” I asked. “It’s for just in case,” he replied. After launching at a moss-draped tributary, Granddad hung upstream to starboard—he always said run upstream, so if your engine failed, you could get home. I was one thrilled little kid when we caught a mess of bluegill to fry up. Nearing the tributary late in the day, the muddy river was running pretty fast. Sarah hollered “Rowan!” right before we smacked a submerged fallen tree. The boat lurched hard sideways, and the engine died. Both adults grabbed paddles, but couldn’t get “Rowan” fast enough to reach the cut.
A World War II veteran, Granddad was usually cool as a cucumber, but he was shook. Sarah threw out the anchor—which dragged on the muddy bottom. Granddad hung the little auxiliary motor we’d picked up from his brother off the side and tightened the thumb screws. Yanking the fuel fitting off the bigger motor, he pumped the bulb to fill the cowling tank. Then, I recall him pumping a button up top and yanking the pull cord a few times. The trusty old engine coughed, sputtered, then fired. Upstream progress was slow, but we’d be frying fish that night.
My uncle Richard called me a few weeks ago and told me he’d found an old outboard in the back of Granddad’s garage. When I laid eyes on it, the memories flooded back. Johnson sold thousands of these motors after World War II. The 40-pound, two-cylinder powerplant has an ingenious fuel tank/cowling that encircles the flywheel. For neutral, raise the prop out of the water with the tiller. For reverse, rotate it 180 degrees. The cowling is battered, but aside from a conspicuous hole in the tank, everything actually looks pretty good. The fuel primer pumps, the pull handle makes the pistons rotate and the propeller spins.
I’m pretty dang sure this is the very motor that long ago saved our asses. In honor of Granddad and Ms. Fowler, my son Fritz and I plan to try to get her running and test it on his old McKee Craft … for just in case.
This article originally appeared in the April 2025 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.
Read or listen to “How the Outboard Helped Win World War II” here ▶
