Sep. 7--Wayne and Alice Forbis will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in December, but one family member has been with them longer: Their all-mahogany, 1958 Chris-Craft boat.

The couple has plied Lake Wylie on the 18-footer with red-and-white leather interior since Alice's father, the late Everett Pearson, bought it new at the former Creech Motorcycle Co. on West Morehead Street.

The couple will display and ride the boat this weekend at the 12th annual Charlotte Antique & Classic Boat Show at the Queen's Landing entertainment complex on Lake Norman. They'll join about 65 other owners from various states.

Wayne and Alice dated at East Mecklenburg High School; he graduated in 1955 and she a year later.

When Wayne returned from serving in the Army from 1956 to 1958, his timing was impeccable: the Chris-Craft was just six months old.

The Forbises loved cruising Lake Wylie with young sons Dean and Danny in the 1960s. They fished and water-skied and explored the lake's coves.

Lake Wylie was known only as "the river" back then, Alice said, and her family leased a cabin from Duke Power that she and other family members now own.

"With our boys, we spent just about every weekend at the cabin," Alice said. "We taught both boys to ski."

The '58 Chris-Craft was an eye-catcher for its time but still just a utility boat, Wayne said.

"It was a flat-bottomed boat that beat you half to death and ate up a lot of gas," Wayne said with a smile at the couple's home on Lake Wylie in the Steele Creek section of Mecklenburg County. "It was not a smooth ride."

Alice's father even put the boat into storage in 1973, lured by more fuel-efficient fiberglass models that had long become the norm.

The Forbises owned Custom Corrugated Containers on Westinghouse Boulevard from 1971 to 2000, when they sold the business.

The couple took to traveling in their retirement and were in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in 1998 when the classic-boat craze struck them. They toured the StanCraft wooden-boat manufacturing plant in nearby Post Falls, and while driving back to North Carolina talked about their love of the old Chris-Craft.

Alice's dad had given the boat to her brother to restore. So the Forbises found and bought an identical one in New Bern, shipped it to Post Falls to have it restored, then drove it back to Lake Wylie. They called it Alice I. In 2000, they took it to its first boat show, on Lake Norman.

Alice's brother, Everett Pearson Jr., died in 2003, and she and Wayne obtained that Chris-Craft as well, naming it Alice II.

Wooden-boat restorer Pat Crusse of Mooresville refurbished its wood and added twin exhaust pipes.

"It's as solid as it could be," Wayne said.

Wayne and his brother, Jeff, of Clover, S.C., built Alice II a new 350 Chevrolet engine from scratch earlier this year.

"It can go 40 to 50 miles an hour, but it has to be smooth water," Wayne said.

Alice II had been vandalized the last year it was in storage on Westinghouse Boulevard. All of its chrome was stolen and its windshield was broken. Today you could never tell: It looks just like it did when Alice's dad bought it.

The Forbises are 71 and 72 now. They belong to the Blue Ridge Chapter of the N.Y.-based Antique & Classic Boat Society, and will display Alice II for the first time at this weekend's show.

They almost decided not to attend, however, after son Danny, 49, died of a still-unknown cause Aug. 18 while camping in Pisgah National Forest in the N.C. mountains he'd cherished.

Danny Forbis worked for the National Park Service in Puerto Rico, New Mexico and Louisiana over the years. He was forever in the outdoors, whether rafting the Colorado River with his dad, backpacking the Appalachian Trail or camping beside an ancient castle in England.

Such an avid outdoorsman and loving son, husband and father would have wanted his parents to be on Lake Norman this weekend, Alice and Wayne realized.

"If that is where Danny would have wanted us to go, then that's where we should be, with our friends," Alice said.

And the boat that's been so long a part of their lives.

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