Members, families, and neighbors turned out to work over the shoreline, the boat yard, and the fence line, hauling over 5 yards of trash to the dumpster before the grills came out. Photos from the day are in the gallery.
See the photosA run through the club archive and the Library of Congress, oldest first. Library of Congress items open the full newspaper page in a new tab; the club’s own scans open here on the page.
The national motorboating journal recorded the young club: the Eastern Power Boat Club of Washington was organized on October 3, 1910 at a meeting of twenty “motorboat bugs,” taking its name from the many motorboats kept on the Anacostia at the southeast edge of the city. The members elected W. A. Mills commodore, with L. J. Johnston and Monty Williams among the first officers.
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The club set out to put motorboat racing on the Anacostia, planning a summer series of lap races run from the clubhouse on the north shore and watched from the boathouses along the bank. Commodore William E. Martin and the members organized the races that would open the season.
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An end-of-season scene: the launches of the Eastern Power Boat Club and the Corinthian Yacht Club, decked with bunting, heading down the river for their annual oyster roasts. The club’s fleet ran to River View, the procession led by the launch flying the flag of Commodore William Wagner.
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The club’s plans for the end of the season: the annual oyster roast at a Potomac resort and a closing series of races on the Anacostia. Member John Battenfield, the report notes, was building a 26-foot hydroplane with a 125-horsepower engine, hoping to set a record for local craft. The Battenfield name would run through the club’s racing story for decades.
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A preview of the big Potomac regatta that turns into a love letter to the original Gray Bat. Fifteen years earlier, the writer recalls, Battenfield’s first Gray Bat “threw” the biggest rollers on the river, and every kid at the swimming holes along the Eastern Branch, Rutman’s beach, the Coal Chute, Ant beach, Glass beach, the Gas House Wharves, would beat it for deep water to “ride” the boat’s wake.
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A race report on the second annual joint Capital and Corinthian regatta, run on the Potomac at Washington in August 1925 and sanctioned by the American Power Boat Association. In the Speed Boat Handicap, the club’s Jolly Roger finished second behind the Miles River entry, a glimpse of the club’s boats racing the wider Chesapeake circuit.
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A profile of La Minuet, a small V-bottom sedan cruiser built by members Fred Burwick and C. B. Rittenour and the newest boat in the club’s fleet. Thought by its owners to be the first cruiser on the Potomac powered by a Ford engine, it slept four in its cabin and, its skipper boasted, had never once needed cranking.
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Spring fitting-out on the Eastern Power Boat Railway, with the club’s fleet hauled out for painting and overhaul. The roster reads like a portrait of the membership: My Own, La Minuet, Glory, Mary Jane, and Commodore J. E. Battenfield’s Gray Bat among the boats and their owners.
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The club elected J. E. Battenfield Sr. commodore for the coming year and set its annual oyster roast for Piscataway Creek. The officer roster carries the same family through the club’s affairs: William Battenfield as financial secretary and J. E. Battenfield Jr. as electrician, the Battenfields whose name recurs in the club’s story from the 1910s into the 1970s.
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A sports-page preview of a power boat regatta on the Potomac, open only to D.C. owners, run beneath portraits of its three guiding commodores. A heavy entry list was expected, the boats of Commodore Battenfield’s Eastern Power Boat Club among them, by then a fixture of Washington racing.
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A 30th-anniversary profile, the eighth in a Sunday Star series on Washington’s aquatic clubs. It tells how the club grew out of a “hook, line and sinker gang” of anglers who fished the waters by the Navy Yard, then formed a club and turned to power boating. It traces the moves too, including floating the clubhouse to Anacostia Park on pontoons during the World War. By 1933 the club counted 68 members and a fleet of about 40, with J. E. Battenfield in his twelfth year as commodore.
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On the same yachting page, a tribute to Commodore J. E. Battenfield, a pioneer of Potomac power boat racing. His legendary Gray Bat was once recognized as the fastest craft on the Atlantic Coast, though, as he recalled, “the best speed I could get was only 24 miles an hour.” The photographs set the racing speedboats of 1933 against the boats of his day.
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A boating-page feature carrying a rare photograph of the club’s first building, members lined up on the dock and “Power Boat Club” lettered across the boathouse. The caption dates it two years after the 1910 organization, at the foot of Eleventh Street Southeast. The story recaps the moves to Anacostia Park and the present site as the club installed officers for its twenty-eighth season.
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A wartime obituary for James Barry O’Rourke, 44, a member of the Eastern Power Boat Club and the Coast Guard. He is very likely the Barry O’Rourke who served as the club’s recording secretary, listed among its officers in the 1933 anniversary feature above.
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The obituary of Commodore John E. Battenfield, 84, the club’s racing patriarch, whose Gray Bat had ruled local waters. By its account he was the first Washington resident to pilot a power boat on the Potomac, starting around 1900 with a 16-foot boat called the Traveler, and he had won some thirty trophies before giving up racing in 1926. It runs with his portrait.
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George A. Burroughs, a Washington lawyer, went missing after his cabin cruiser the Daisy Mae began to founder in the Anacostia near the South Capitol Street Bridge. His companion swam to shore and walked half a mile to the club, where the boat had been berthed, to alert police.
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A spring boating preview that charts the Washington area’s clubs and marinas as the pleasure-boat fleet kept growing. The map runs from the city down the Potomac to the Chesapeake, with the Eastern Power Boat Club marked among its neighbors on the Anacostia, the Capital and Corinthian yacht clubs, the Washington Yacht Club, and the Old Dominion Boat Club. The notes record the club raising its bulkhead and adding backfill that season.
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The death notice for Bruce L. Wallen, 52, a retired government accountant active in the Eastern Power Boat Club. He owned his own power boat, served as an official for the Capital Power Boat Association, and was an assistant to the chairman of the President’s Cup regatta on the Potomac, a window into the club’s racing world at the start of the 1960s.
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The obituary of William Frederick Battenfield, 89, a decorator for the Architect of the Capitol and a pioneer of power boat racing, who served for many years as financial secretary of the Eastern Power Boat Club.
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A van being rebuilt in the club yard at 1300 Water St. SE blew up when a propane tank ignited, wrecking the van and damaging a nearby station wagon and the clubhouse. No one was hurt. The club’s fleet captain said the blast knocked out windows on the north side of the building.
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A feature on the blue-collar boat clubs of the Anacostia, with the club front and center, proud to defy the blue-blood yacht club image. Monthly fees at the club ran about $30, roughly a tenth the cost of a slip at the tonier clubs.
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Long after its founders’ day, EPBC surfaced in an unlikely place: the congressional record of the expulsion of Representative James A. Traficant Jr. The file includes correspondence about a 37-foot Egg Harbor named SUZ, docked at the club, whose title stood in the congressman’s own name. The boat had been bought and repaired by the owner of an aviation-technology company, who admitted it was a bribe for Traficant’s help winning federal certification of the firm’s aircraft landing-light system, with the boat dressed up as a vessel to test the technology on the water. A former member of the club, Traficant was convicted on ten federal felony counts in 2002 and expelled from the House.
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