22 Business View - February 2016
Gordy’s Lakefront Marine
Gordyworld lures boaters to wisconsin’s lake geneva
As the story goes, one day in 1944, Gordon Whowell,
an automobile salesman from Chicago, agreed to take
a customer’s boat in as trade. That summer, he rented
a house for a month in Fontana, Wisconsin, on the
western shore of Lake Geneva, and he and his fam-
ily used the boat the whole time. The next year the
Whowell’s moved to the lake, while Gordon continued
to commute to his auto sales job in Chicago, his pas-
sion for boating only growing with the years.
According to Tom Whowell, current co-owner with his
brother Steele of Gordy’s Marine, the famed boat rent-
al and sales company that bears their grandfather’s
name, one Sunday in 1955, after having spent ten
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