Hans Moen, Early Outboard Racer

Hans Moen photo from www.barneschapel.com.

Racer Profile by Craig Fjarlie

Hans G. Moen was an outboard racer who lived in the Pacific Northwest. He was born in 1912 in Roslyn, a small town in South Dakota, where his father owned a farm. Moen developed his mechanical skills working on the farm. As a young adult, he moved west where he found work in Spokane, Washington, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. He then operated a marina where he learned about outboard racing. Moen raced for years in various classes, but spent the most time driving an alky C Outboard Hydro. This profile is based on an interview with Moen that was conducted on September 2, 2013, when he was 100 years old.

“There were four of us brothers in the family at home,” he recalls. “I stayed, as the mechanic all the time.” Moen’s father was a farmer but needed help with mechanical work. “He was pretty vague on mechanics. When one of his first cars needed attention, that’s where I started my mechanical phase. I was one of the last boys that stayed with him. Finally, at a dollar a day, you could hardly exist. So, I came west to Spokane. I couldn’t find anything I could do there, so I came back to Coeur d’Alene and worked there for a while.”

Moen made one return trip to South Dakota, so he could marry a young neighbor lady. “We came back to Spokane. This time I landed a job right there in Spokane for a few months. Then the Chevrolet representative came around picking up mechanics.” Moen was hired by Knutsen Chevrolet in Coeur d’Alene. He worked three days a week at first, but eventually was given full-time work. “I built a house in Coeur d’Alene, then stayed with Chevrolet there for 12 years. There were 200 or so people in Coeur d’Alene at the time. Everything was orchards.”

Next, Moen bought a Texaco service station. “I built that. I spent about five years and then I went into the outboard business,” he explains. “I had watched all kinds of boats on Lake Coeur d’Alene. I was selling some outboards on the side. I wasn’t making any money on it, but I had a business started. I leased out the service station. Somebody had started a big, huge Phillips station and they went out of business. I bought that place and made a marina out of it. Added on a 40-by-60 showroom. I stayed in that building for 35 years.”

Moen was interested when some young people in town were building homemade racing boats. “I built one. They were eight-foot hydros. That was my first boat,” he says. Moen admits it took a while for him to set the boat up for racing. “I bought a 20-horse racing engine. First race, Lake Sammamish.” He competed in the B Stock Hydro class for a year. “Then I went and bought a Swift, had it shipped in. I raced it probably a year and a half. They were all stock engines. We did a little tinkering with ‘em to get them to go faster.”

The first few years, Moen spent time learning how to race and win. “You might say I wasn’t in the winning stages, but I was in third or fourth. My wife kept me in dry clothes if I flipped or anything.”

He soon moved into Racing Outboard classes (now the PRO category). “All of a sudden I had an alky. Different cylinder head, different pistons, heavier rods and everything. I didn’t do all of my own engines, but most of them.” Moen moved through the classes, and found he preferred C Racing Hydro. He drove a hydro built by Ron Jones. “I never flipped it or had any accidents in it. That particular boat, I could do almost anything with it. I won a lot of trophies, too.” Moen sold the boat to a younger racer. “After he’d run it for a year or so I understand he flipped it.”

Moen’s son, Richard, started racing and participated in B Outboard Hydro. “We raced together for probably 15 years. Ed Karelsen built me a boat. In the meantime, my son’s boat was pretty much falling apart so I had Ed build him one, too. A lot of times he teamed up with me, depending on when I’d tuned my engine.” The Moens were known for doing very little testing. “My son and I, we’d maybe take one lap on a test run and that’s all we’d do. Everybody said, ‘How come you don’t go testing?’ ‘What for?’ Instead of wiping out an engine. A lot of times, if you didn’t watch, you could blow one. For instance, if driving a B boat, if it wasn’t balanced, the engine would run away. You couldn’t stop it. They plain burned it up. But we watched that pretty closely.”

The Moens traveled all over the country to race. “Went to Nationals in DePue, Illinois and Bakersfield, California.” They also raced on Green Lake in Seattle. “One year I went to Wyoming to race. That year I put 10,000 miles on a pickup, with a camper, just hauling boats to races. But the races in Wyoming didn’t turn out too good. The officials didn’t show up and didn’t show up and didn’t show up. Finally, we had to make up a crew of our own.”

Moen’s son eventually decided he could no longer afford to race. “I was in my 70s. I raced for a couple years without him. My wife kept prodding me, ‘Why don’t you give it up?’ I finally decided I’d had enough.” Although he was no longer actively racing, Moen remained involved. “I had parts and for five years I’d be furnishing parts for all these racers. I’d build and rebuild and build and rebuild.”

When he retired from work, Moen and his wife moved to Bridgeport, Washington, a small town on the Columbia River. He built a house and lived there the rest of his life. Still, he remained involved with outboard racing. Seattle Outboard Association had races at Bridgeport. “I sponsored racing behind the dam for 10 solid years, but it got too expensive. We had a guy on the Corps of Engineers who was a boat racing fan. As long as he was there, we got along real well. After he was transferred to Seattle, a young guy came in and it wasn’t as easy to get racing in. The Corps of Engineers wanted this much and somebody else wanted the insurance. It got to a point where I couldn’t afford it.”

Moen has memories of several top racers. “Bob Waite used to run the runabouts. He had a heavy gal as a partner. They had good races. The gal that used to ride with him was Millie Laird. Good team. And Howard Anderson. I don’t remember any time that he’d start without having a problem. Something would go wrong before he could finally get it started. Always problematic. And go, God, did he ever go!”

At age 100, Moen still maintained active. “My wife passed away in 1993. I go to seniors’ lunches about three times a week in Brewster. Do my own cooking. I do a lot of cooking.” Looking back at his years in racing, he feels lucky that he came away with no serious injuries. “Never had anything other than maybe a skinned knuckle or something. Not serious, any of our flipping. After two or three years, we learned. You know, experience.” Whenever Moen came to an outboard race as a spectator near the end of his life, he was always treated as an icon from an earlier era. His story took some interesting turns, from a farm in South Dakota to a mechanic and marina operator in the Pacific Northwest, and a pioneer in early outboard racing. When he passed away in 2015, he was a life member of Seattle Outboard Association. Older racers still remember him and talk about him to this day.