In preparation for the opening of the 1940 season, Hewitt Strong and Elmer Smith added a major improvement to the S.S. Sho-Boat. Originally, the boat's co-captains placed the ship's wheel in front of the boat on its main level. This proved to be inconvenient. People wanted to stand at the bow of the boat in front of the window. This arrangement often gave the boat's pilots a great view of the legs they loved instead of the lake they loved.

Strong and Smith decided to build a new helm house on the upper level of the boat where nobody could block their vision of the lake. The new location worked very well. The men made other improvements the same year. They installed two rebuilt Buick engines and repainted the boat inside and out. When the weather warmed, they were ready for the fun to begin.

Utah Valley did not possess the reputation of being the entertainment capital of the West during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Most of the limited amusement in the area was provided by church, school, family, dance halls, movie theaters, pool halls and saloons.

The people of the valley thirsted for unique entertainment, and the S.S. Sho-Boat provided a novel means of gaining pleasure while sailing on Utah's largest freshwater lake. People flocked to the large flat-bottomed boat which also offered a variety of secondary amusements.

A juke box recently installed inside the boat's cabin provided dance music for those with itchy feet. Roland Strong remembers that The Beer Barrel Polka reigned as one of the boat's most popular songs.

Provo city banned all types of slot machines in 1934, but on "international waters" several "special groups" played two nickel slot machines housed on the Sho-Boat. Strong and Smith mounted the slots on revolving platforms inside metal cabinets with sliding doors that were kept closed and locked when the machines were not in use.

The slots provided entertainment for several years before the police somehow received word of their existence. The owners of the boat heard through the grapevine of an impending raid on the slots, and they ordered evasive action.

Larry Atkinson, the owner of the machines, clandestinely replaced the good slots with two of his old, worn out machines. When the police made the raid and confiscated the slots, they seemed satisfied, and Atkinson felt reasonably content. Thus, it could be said that the gambling era on the Sho-Boat came to a reasonably happy ending.

On many of the boat's afternoon tours, the Smith and Strong families often performed aquatic feats for the amusement of the passengers. Both of the owners and their children showed skill at riding the aquaplane. Essentially, an easy-to-make aquaplane was a board equipped with a rope harness and reins. When pulled across the lake with its human cargo aboard, it skimmed over the water like its more sophisticated city cousins, the waterskis.

Since someone needed to operate the Sho-Boat, Hewitt usually stayed with the ship, and Elmer did the skiing, drawn behind a faster boat. During his performance, Elmer skied on one leg or on his head. Occasionally, he put a chair on the aquaplane and skied on his head on the chair.

Elmer's daughter, Norma, often joined in the performance, with the two skiing together on the same aquaplane. Elmer faced forward while Norma faced backward and stood on her head. She arched her legs over Elmer's shoulders, tucked them under his arms, pulled herself up onto his shoulders and then elevated herself into a standing position. As a finale, Elmer would then stand on a chair.

Hewitt's boys, Hewitt Jr. and Roland, joined some of their friends and contributed to the entertainment in later years. They dived into the lake from the top of the boat, drifted to the rear of the craft, grabbed a rope attached to the stern and pulled themselves forward to the craft.

This stunt looked relatively easy, but it did demand a bit of bravery on the part of the boys. The boat's restrooms were located at the rear of the craft, and they emptied directly into the lake. Anyone traveling in the boat's wake ran the chance of encountering enemy submarines.

If the divers followed a set routine, they completed their stunt successfully. One of the most important rules was to make a shallow dive, because in many places Utah Lake is not very deep. Elmer's cousin, Jenis, wanted to join the fun and received specific instructions to dive shallow. He either forgot the warning or disregarded it.

Jenis made a deep dive and found himself stuck head first in the muddy bottom of the lake. In his panic, it seemed to take a long time to struggle free of the sticky mud and reach the surface.

When his head finally popped out of the water, the boat, which he feared had traveled beyond him, was still opposite the startled boy. He treated passengers to a comic sight -- a mud-covered head from which two wide-open, frightened eyes peered anxiously around until they spotted the boat nearby.

The hard work of the members of the two nautical families paid off. Even though they launched the Sho-Boat during the Great Depression and it could not operate on the lake for two years because of severe drought, the boat finally became successful financially. Many people even came down from Salt Lake City to take a ride on the pleasure craft.

Repeat cruises by church groups, women's clubs, civic clubs, fraternal organizations, college social units, public school groups and others kept the channel leading to success open. During the last eight years of its operation, the boat yielded its largest profit.

As a result of the boat's relative prosperity and its full schedule of chartered cruises, the owners became more selective about whom they allowed on the craft. They eventually discontinued most public cruises, and they no longer permitted public school groups to cruise on the Sho-Boat because the students became too wild and destructive. Some things never seem to change.

Even during Wold War II, the boat kept busy. People working so hard on the home front needed a way to relax and forget their worries and fears. In addition, Geneva Steel conducted parties on the boat.

The men split the profit with the women, and both families agree that the women made more money. They had no overhead other than what they paid wholesale for the items they sold out of the kitchen. The men paid for gasoline, oil, maintenance, repair and vandalism out of their share of the profits. Both the men and the women felt satisfied with the modest profit they earned.

In the mid 1940s, the partners decided to quit while they were ahead. Insurance costs kept rising, and the men were not sure how much longer the boat would remain seaworthy. They worried one big catastrophe might wipe out all of their life's savings. Both the men and the women got tired of the long hours of work it took to maintain and operate the boat. They made the joint decision to cease operations.

The Sho-Boat hosted one of the last of a long string of its parties on August 4, 1945. A Provo radio station, KOVO, rented the craft and held an outing for its board of directors and employees and their guests. Besides dancing, The Happy Chappies, a Springville group, provided a vocal and instrumental program. The featured group also conducted a musical quiz and awarded prizes to the winners. A chicken supper served buffet style aboard the boat added another highlight to the evening.

It is unlikely that any groups chartered the boat after 1945. However, in the spring of 1946, Strong and Smith sailed the Sho-Boat out of the Provo River and into the Provo Boat Harbor. They installed a timing clock on her deck, and the boat served as the official timing station for the first Memorial Day Boat Race held on Utah Lake since the beginning of American involvement in World War II. This likely became the ship's last official function.

Hewitt and Elmer devised a unique way to mothball the Sho-Boat. Elmer dug a large shallow depression on the south side of the Provo River in 1947, near where construction on the craft began 15 years earlier. The partners opened a channel from the river to the hole, filled the depression with water and floated the boat into the small pond.

The boat's owners then dammed the channel opening into the river, put blocks under the boat and pumped the water from the excavation. They briefly considered converting the craft into a restaurant, but they decided against this plan, leaving the boat to the mercy of vandals and Mother Nature.

It was not long before vandals struck. Repeatedly, they broke into the boat and stole things or caused damage. The owners patched up holes only to have them reopened. Thieves stole almost everything that could be detached from the boat. Eventually, the vessel's big elaborate wheel disappeared, as did the two anchors and even the dual Buick engines.

The Strong family managed to salvage the ship's bell and its siren, which came from an old fire engine. Hewitt received a pleasant surprise some years later when he received a phone call from a returned LDS missionary who offered to return both anchors in order to sooth his guilty conscience. The Strongs happily accepted the anchors with no questions asked.

When Utah Lake rose to near record levels in the early 1950s, water again surrounded the S.S. Sho-Boat, and once more she settled to the bottom as she had the day she was first launched. The cracks between the craft's dried flooring and siding let water in, but this time no one pumped the water out to refloat her.

The water inside the old pleasure boat's cabin did irreparable damage. Waves sent driftwood crashing against her sides, cracking her siding. The S.S. Sho-Boat would never sail again.

For several years, Captain Elmer Smith nurtured the dream of launching another large excursion boat on Utah Lake. He hired a structural engineer who worked at Geneva Steel to design a steel-bottomed boat 10 feet wider and 15 feet longer than the old one. He hoped to build a larger, grander S.S. Sho-Boat II.

The advent of the Korean War ended his dreams. When the conflict began, the demand for steel increased to such an extent that it became extremely difficult to purchase it in large quantities. Elmer could not secure enough steel to construct his dreamboat.

In about 1958, Elmer and his son-in-law, Boyd Wright, salvaged some of the wood from the Sho-Boat to help construct Elmer's new home and carport on the family farm in Edgemont near the mouth of Provo Canyon. The surplus lumber went into the construction of a workshop across the road from the new home. Elmer, ever ingenious, even used some of the wood to convert an old bread delivery truck into a mobile home.

Since Hewitt and Elmer dry-docked the S.S. Sho-Boat, no large excursion boat has sailed on Utah Lake, nor is it likely that one ever will. Insurance costs alone would make the expense of the project prohibitive, and today's speed and action-oriented generation would not likely be stimulated by an eight-mile-an-hour cruise over a turbid lake to an island with no theme park located on it.

Nevertheless, if prehistoric Lake Bonneville ever reappears and begins to fill Utah Valley with water, a certain house in Edgemont will likely turn over in the rising water and sail like a pleasure craft toward Rock Island.