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Business View Magazine
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
