Ocean City Yacht Club
club · founded 1928
Organised at Ocean City, Maryland in the summer of 1928 to promote water sports and racing at the resort, with Dr. Alva B. Burris, a physician and pharmacist of the town, as its first commodore. Reported in the Milford Chronicle of 20 July 1928 in a column so damaged by OCR that little beyond the club's existence, its newness and its commodore survives. No Ocean City yacht club of any date was previously in this registry; the Ocean Pines Yacht Club is a different place and a much later century.
In the record (9)
1928 · 1928-07-20
The Ocean City Yacht Club is organised in the summer of 1928, with the town's physician-pharmacist Dr. Alva B. Burris as its first commodore.
Milford Chronicle, 20 July 1928: "Dr. Alva B. Burris, physician and pharmacist of Ocean City, Md., has been elected Commodore of the newly-organized Ocean City Yacht Club, the purpose of which is to [promote water] sports at the [resort]… racing this summer…" The surrounding text is badly damaged by OCR and only the officer, the club and its purpose survive intact.
A yacht club is a sentence about a town's ambitions. Ocean City in 1928 has a golf course, tennis courts, bowling alleys, cinemas and now a yacht club — and it still has no pier. The bay side was organising itself while the ocean side argued about who would rebuild.
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1930 · 1930-06-18
A thousand people in winter, twenty-five thousand in summer, and a claimed 600,000 visitors in the 1929 season.
Washington Daily News, 18 June 1930: "Ocean City is known as the 'convention resort,' for during the annual summer season quite a number of large conventions are held there. The winter population of Ocean City is about 1000, while during the summer the resort accommodates more than 25,000 inhabitants. During the 1929 season more than 600,000 visited the resort. An airport, established in 1928, is also one of the many boasts of Ocean City. An annual feature is the Ocean City motor boat regatta, sponsored by the Ocean City Yacht Club Association."
Promotional arithmetic, and it should be read as such — but the winter figure of 'about 1000' lands within 6 per cent of the census enumerator's 946 that April, which is a reason to take the rest seriously rather than dismiss it. Six hundred thousand visitors to a town of nine hundred and forty-six.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-06
1935 · 1935-12-03
The Ocean City Yacht Club got the town's leave to improve 14th Street, and by Christmas was drawing plans for bulkheads, wharfs and a basin
The whole regular meeting of 3 December 1935 is one resolution: “that the Ocean City Yacht Club be given permission to improve 14th street for Benefit of Yacht Club. Council Passed the resolution & adjourned.” A week later the club held “its first smoker and meeting in Ocean City at Jackson's on last Friday evening to formulate plans for the building of the bulkheads, wharfs, basin etc., on their acquired land opposite 14th St. on the west banks of the Sinepuxent bay.” Commodore Charles R. Laws, M.D., presided; Vice Commodore George B. Cropper “explained in detail the blue prints, of dykeing, filling, construction work, costs and the prospects of probable dredge work to be done in the near future”; Frank Truitt, treasurer and cashier of the Ocean City Bank, reported the club in good financial condition; the secretary, Wm. L. Bennett, had written to the Salisbury Times recruiting Wicomico yachtsmen. The club had been organised in the summer of 1928. In 1934 the town's stated policy was to discourage the fishing fleet until the channel was finished; a year later the pleasure fleet was buying land and building a basin.
Source · checked 2026-08-11
1936 · 1936-05-12
What Ocean City paid for and charged in 1936: $25 a season for bicycles, $1,000 to the Chamber, $150 to dike a street for the yacht club, $75 for a wharf out of the channel's way
The council's smaller transactions of 1936 read as a price list for a Depression resort. A bicycle licence was fixed at $25.00 a season for Anthony Purnell on 12 May. The same meeting voted $1,000.00 to the Chamber of Commerce after discussing the question with its Board of Governors, refused John S. Gordy of Snow Hill a permit for a bus service on Baltimore Avenue, and paid Levin J. Bunting $50.00 and Charles R. Bunting $75.00 for the removal of their wharves for the digging of the channel. On 16 June the town voted not over $150.00 to dike 14th Street for the Yacht Club and gave the firemen $50.00 toward the expenses of the firemen's convention. Archie Davis was again given the care of the town toilet on the same basis he had held it in 1935 - three dollars a week from 10 June to 10 September. On 29 December the council gave $25.00 to the Community Fund and charged it to advertising.
Ocean City Chamber of CommerceOcean City Volunteer Fire Department
Source · checked 2026-08-11
1936 · 1936-06-01
The West Ocean City fishing harbour opened in June 1936: 3,250 feet long, ten feet deep, and the end of the town's policy of keeping the fleet out
Col. E. J. Dent, District Engineer of the U.S. War Department, said in Ocean City in early May 1936 that the new fishing harbour on the mainland side would be completed by 1 June. The Messenger printed its dimensions on 28 May: 3,250 feet long, ten feet deep at low tide, with a channel 100 feet wide at the bottom and 180 feet wide at the surface, two 200-foot turning basins, and a three-mile channel then being dredged north into Isle of Wight Bay. By 21 May the dredge had finished the west harbour and was starting the East Channel on the Ocean City side, with a large fleet of boats already anchored waiting for the bluefish run. By 11 June a majority of the craft in the new channel harbour were deep-sea fishing boats; by 16 July two $100,000 pleasure yachts lay there and hundreds of visitors came to look at them, and an improved road was being built to connect the harbour to Ocean City proper, with a filling-station base and a Yacht Club headquarters planned for the made island. In June the Worcester delegation was pressing the State Roads Commission for a 3,000-foot stretch of road to finish the connection. In 1934 the town's stated policy had been 'to discourage entrance of the fishing fleet until the channel is completed'. In 1936 the channel was completed, and the fleet came.
The hinge of Ocean City's identity as a sport-fishing port turns here. Two years earlier the town wanted the fleet kept out until the channel was ready. In June 1936 the channel was ready, and the town has been a fishing port ever since.
Ocean City Inlet & JettyMaryland State Roads Commission
Source · checked 2026-08-11
1937 · 1937-03-19
Eleven men of the Ocean City Yacht Club came to the council in March 1937 to ask for Fourteenth Street
'Delegation from Yacht Club were present asking for 14th street improvement, those present were, F. W. Truitt, Dr. C. R. Laws, J. B. Lynch, Cecil Blake, Wm. Bennett, H. Gundy, D. Trimper Jr., Parker Smith, Dr. Burkman, Josh Bunting. Dr. Laws Explained what they wanted & Council promised to let them know in few days.' The council did not let them know: on 31 March a 'Letter from Yacht Club read asking that answer be given on grading 14th street', and no answer is recorded that night either. The delegation is a roll of the resort's establishment - a former president of the Board of Trade, a Trimper, the man who had chaired the citizens' boardwalk committee in 1936 - turning up in a body over the grading of one bayside street.
F. W. TruittJohn B. LynchCecil BlakeDaniel W. Trimper, Jr.C. Parker Smith
Source · checked 2026-08-11
1937 · 1937-05-30
A Berlin doctor's cabin cruiser lost its steering and went onto the rocks of the north inlet jetty with ten aboard
'The tiller rope broke as we were heading into the inlet,' Dr. Charles R. Law of Berlin told the Evening Star, 'and we crashed into the north jetty, bursting the bottom of the boat.' His 35-foot cabin cruiser struck the rocks about half past four on the afternoon of Sunday 30 May 1937, six hundred yards off Ocean City, with eleven people aboard. 'Quick work by Coast Guardsmen from the Ocean City station was credited today with having saved the lives of 11 members of a yachting party which came to grief in the pounding surf on a jetty near here.' The Peninsula Enterprise of Accomac, reporting the same wreck, calls the structure 'the stone breakwater', gives the boat's number as 13-D-214 and has her towed to the Ocean City drydock. The jetties the state and the federal government had built to keep the inlet open were now the standing hazard at its mouth. Dr. C. R. Law had been one of the Yacht Club delegation that came before the council in March asking for Fourteenth Street to be graded, and he would be reported the following week by the Democratic Messenger under the head '10 Saved As Disabled Berlin Yacht Struck Jetty Off Ocean City'.
Source · checked 2026-08-11
1937 · 1937-08-05
Twelve boats off Ocean City took thirty-two white marlin in a single day in July 1937 — called at the time a world record
'Thirty-two white marlin were caught in the Atlantic Ocean off Ocean City last week by fishing parties, constituting a world's record for white marlin in one day,' the Messenger reported on 5 August 1937 under the head 'World's Record Marlin Catch At Ocean City'. 'A fleet of around twelve deep sea fishing boats participated.' Jack and Paul Townsend took five of them; James B. Whaley of Snow Hill three. Bill Dickey and Lou Gehrig had been fishing off the town the week before. It was that kind of season: the first marlin of 1937 fell to L. C. Dawson of Baltimore on 1 July; a hundred-pounder taken by Robert Jones of Washington from Capt. Crawford Savage's Hilda cost 'a 2-hour-40-minute fight, the longest on record locally', and came aboard with its sword snapped off; Jimmy Foxx landed a 72-pound marlin in thirty-five minutes from the same captain's boat in August while his companion Moe Berg took a dolphin; and the Bonnie Sprae, owned by Dan Trimper and William Scott and captained by Ray Savage, brought in three marlin of 65, 91 and 78 pounds from thirty miles out. At the Ocean City Day dinner at Baltimore's Lord Baltimore Hotel in October, before two hundred sportsmen, J. Paul Blundon of Keyser, West Virginia took the Eastern Shore Times trophy for the season's largest white marlin at 130 pounds, and Paul Townsend was named to the United States tuna team to meet the British Empire team at Wedgeport, Nova Scotia.
The Ocean City Marlin Club is still three years away and the town is already claiming world records — with a Yankee first baseman, a Yankee catcher and a catcher who spoke seven languages and would later spy for the OSS all fishing out of the same harbour.
Ocean City Chamber of CommerceDaniel W. Trimper, Jr.
Source · checked 2026-08-11
1938 · 1938-11-22
Ocean City was twice asked to buy the Yacht Club Island in 1938 and twice said it could not - the second time to keep it out of 'undesirable Hands'
On 10 May 1938 'John B Lynch & F. W. Truitt were before Council asking for advice on what to do about the Yacht Club Island and Council heard their story & decided they could not help.' On 10 November Truitt came back: he 'asked the Council if the city did not want to buy the Yacht Club Island as the present owners could not carry on much longer and thought the City should own the Island and keep it out of undesirable Hands. The Council promised to think it over.' Twelve days later, on 22 November, 'The Purchase of Yacht Club Island was next disposed of by refusing owing to the City's finances.' The Ocean City Yacht Club had been founded in 1928 and in March 1937 eleven of its members had come to the same council asking for Fourteenth Street to be graded. — 1939 FULL PASS, 2026-08-11 [corrected]: THE 1938 PASS'S OPEN QUESTION IS HALF ANSWERED, AND THE ANSWER IS THE TAX BOOKS. In 1938 the council was asked about the Yacht Club Island three times and declined three times - it 'could not help' in May, 'promised to think it over' in November, and on 22 November disposed of the purchase 'by refusing owing to the City's finances'. On 24 March 1939 a delegation including John Lynch, John D. Ayer and Frank Truitt asked for an extension of sewer and water to the island, and on 31 March the council resolved that 'if they wanted sewer & water City would run sewer & water to East Side Chicago Ave, they to connect there and put them on tax books for $15,000 assessment. Carried.' The new-assessment list of 21 June then carries 'Yacht Club 12000'. So the town's interest was rateable value, and it named its price the moment one was available. STILL NOT ESTABLISHED, and still the live question: WHERE the Yacht Club Island was, who owned it, and what the 1938 council meant by keeping it 'out of undesirable Hands'.
Source · checked 2026-08-11