In 1888, the boat started taking Lansing-area residents up to the Waverly Amusement Park, a venture that lasted until it went out of business in 1918. Automotive pioneer R.E. Olds, along with another partner, took the boat, rebuilt it and turned it into a showboat between 1947 and 1952. When Olds died, he gave the boat, as well as about three miles of land on the north side of the Grand River, to the city of Lansing for a park.

“They fixed the (Grand River Park) up real nice, but they didn’t know what to do with this old boat, so they had an auction and I went to the auction and it started raining and everybody ran off and I bought that boat for $250,” said Chamberlain, captain of the boat. He was in business school at MSU at the time, along with Karla, the woman who would later become his wife, who was in the education program.

“We’d call up our friends after school and say, ‘Hey, want to go for a ride in the biggest boat in Lansing? C’mon over,’” he said. “We just played with it for a couple years and started fixing it up.”

After people started expressing interest in renting the boat, the two got married and founded the J&K Steamboat Line. During the first 10 years or so, they just ran the boat on weekends, or whenever someone wanted to throw a party. They never thought of it as a serious venture, but the business began to grow.

In 1991, Chamberlain said he rebuilt the whole boat, a process that took the original two-deck boat and turned it into Michigan’s only triple-deck riverboat cruise that was wider, longer and taller. They enclosed the sides, which were originally just rails, and installed heaters and air conditioning. The boat has a maximum speed of seven knots and is 110 feet in length. It underwent a makeover again in 1998 with the addition of a dance floor. This transformed it from being predominantly a dining boat to a kind of party boat — a floating bar, including a liquor license, with a 500-person capacity.

The Grand Salon, which features an atrium, chandelier and dance floor, seats 180 guests and the other four rooms seat from 24 to 130 people.

Chamberlain also owns a 1,000-person capacity riverboat called the Detroit Princess, which launched four years ago.

Just for fun

Chamberlain said most people are intrigued by holding their functions in such a unique venue. The boat is lit up with thousands of lights at night, an effect one passenger told him reminded them of a Lansing version of Las Vegas.

“It gets you out of the city of East Lansing, but you’re really not that far away,” said Chris Chamberlain, John Chamberlain’s 20-year-old son. “It’s real neat, especially in the spring and fall. You can go outside and walk on the top deck, which is open to the weather, and you can look up and see the stars and it’s real beautiful.”

The boat averages about 300 parties a year, with the summer months potentially holding lunch, dinner and moonlit cruises each day. Although the boat stops running in the winter when the river is iced over, it still often hosts parties or luncheons while docked.

After hosting one couple’s wedding in the ’90s, the two returned to the boat not to celebrate their wedding anniversary, but their divorce.

“The couple didn’t get along, but they did like the boat, so they both came back when they decided to get a divorce and they had a divorce party on the boat,” Chris Chamberlain said.

“They told their friends, ‘It just didn’t work out, but we still want you to be our friends,’ instead of, friends of the bride or friends of the groom,” John Chamberlain added.

A family venture

The boat has not only hosted other people’s celebrations, it has been a place full of memories for the family as well.

Chris practically grew up on the boat, his daughter once ran the kitchen onboard and his wife and her sister sell the tickets, John Chamberlain said.

“My wife and I were going to get married on that boat originally and her mother just remembered that boat being a piece of junk sitting along the river,” he said. “When it came time to get married, we were going to get married on the boat and we had no money — everything we had was wound up in cans of paint and everything else to get the thing fixed.

“So when we told her mother we were going to get married and it’s going to happen down there on the boat, she blew a fuse (and said) ‘Oh my friends aren’t coming down there on that piece of junk!’ So we had a very modest wedding. Her parents came and my parents came. That was about it. We had no money to do anything different. Believe me when I tell you, the diamond ring was $99. That’s all I had, and I borrowed that money.”

But when it came to the Chamberlain’s 25th wedding anniversary, they decided they wanted to have the wedding they dreamt of 25 years prior, John Chamberlain said. When the time came, the boat was finished — except for the carpet. So they went to his mother-in-law, Edna, and begged her to loan them the money. At first she wasn’t going to, but then Karla convinced her.

“(She) said ‘Mother, next week your friends will be standing in line to get on the boat and you’ll be embarrassed if it’s one of those just plain steel decks,’ and (my mother-in-law) said ‘Well, my friends will never be down there,’” he said. “But she did loan us the money.”

Working on raw knees until 3 a.m. on July 3, 1978, the night before the boat was slated to launch, John Chamberlain worked to install the carpet, with Karla vacuuming right along behind him.

“We got it ready and came back over the hill to see it at 9 o’clock in the morning and there was like a thousand people standing around that boat,” he said. “My heart just dropped. I thought, with a crowd like this, it must be sinking. We had had our problems fixing it up, finding parts and stuff.”

But it wasn’t sinking — the crowd had gathered because the Lansing State Journal had run a front-page photo of the boat with a caption that told everyone to come out for rides, beginning at 9 a.m. The day kept getting busier and busier, and then in the afternoon, in the midst of packed Grand River Park, Edna came over the top of the hill and got in line for tickets with her friend Clara, who had been waiting for more than an hour.

“Well, (Clara) started to tell my mother-in-law that when she was a little girl she rode the boat to the amusement park and what a big deal this was in Lansing,” he said. “(Edna) looked at that lady, and with a straight face said, ‘I told John and Karla this was a good idea. I even loaned them the money.’”

From then on, Edna was one of the biggest supporters of the business until she died last December at age 96. She helped by recruiting church and social groups to hold their functions on board the boat, as well as with mailings and sending out ticket information.

The future captain

Chris Chamberlain started working on the boat for 50 cents an hour when he was 8 years old. At 14, he started washing dishes. His father told him he was going to work his way up, doing every job that was done on the boat either as well or better than the other workers. So he went from dishes, to serving, to maintenance work, to being the boat’s DJ. At 18, Chris Chamberlain got his pilot’s license and began driving the boat in an official capacity.

John Chamberlain said the rule at their house when Chris was growing up was that he couldn’t go play boat with Dad unless he got all A’s — something he kept up all the way through school.

“I think that since day one I knew I wanted to be the captain of the boat,” Chris said. “There’s a picture of me in his office when I was about 2 years old, standing on the stool, pushing him out of the way, (like) ‘Let me drive.’”