John Hacker's design for the Thunderbird gave Whittell what he wanted: The bow of the mahogany hull echoed
the curve of his Deusenberg Speedster's boat-tail rear end. The brushed stainless steel cabin looked like it
was pilfered from an airplane left unguarded in its hangar. The boat's appearances on the lake in the summers
of '40 and '41 were teasingly brief. Worried that the government might try to commandeer the boat or its engines
for use in WWII, Whittell kept it hidden away in a blended-into-the-landscape boathouse. As the years rolled by,
and Whittell became more and more of a recluse, the Thunderbird became the stuff of legend, like Bigfoot in the
forests of the Pacific Northwest, the Monster in Scotland's Loch Ness, or the Yeti in the Himalayas. . . .