After 50 years, Charlevoix’s 87-year-old Bob Timms is retiring his boat business.
Timms, who was also a city council member for over 23 years, is putting to bed the Chief, a boat originally built in 1957 as a gill netter, and retrofitted to serve as a reconnaissance and mooring vessel.
Along with his boat services, Timms has also been a staple in the community for his repair work on household appliances.
Timms was born in Detroit and moved with this family to Petoskey in 1957. In 1963 he bought out Gill’s Television Repair.
“I had the store for five years and then sold it to LD Potter,” said Timms.
At that time, he went to Holland for a year’s training on marine construction.
“But I have been doing TV and appliance repair ever since,” said Timms. “I don’t do the TV repair anymore. The new ones I don’t know anything about.”
Timms is still a staple in the community for repairs on washers, dryers and refrigerators, and that is part of what made him able to understand the people of Charlevoix so well he was able to represent them as a city council member.
“I am always going into people’s homes and that has helped me to understand them,” said Timms.
Timms started on city council in the 1960s and served until the mid-1980s. He has served on the county’s board of review for the better part of four decades.
After 31 years of marriage, Timms’ first wife passed away and he has now been married to his current wife Alice for about 31 years.
After working with the marina reconnaissance industry for some time, Timms started rehabilitating “The Chief” around 2000 for that purpose in the Charlevoix area.
He personally stopped diving around three years ago, when he was 84.