Pacemaker Yachts
Charles Platt (C.P.) Leek, was building, mostly commercial, wooden boats back in the 1920 and 30s in New Jersey. By 1949 his company, C.P. Leek & Sons, Inc., was building pleasure boats and putting the Pacemaker name on them. He also had gotten together with a few other New Jersey boatbuilders a few years earlier and formed Egg Harbor boat company. In the 1950s he bought out his partners in that venture and produced both Pacemaker and Egg Harbor boats. His company, C.P. Leek & Sons, Inc. obtained a federal trademark registration in September, 1960 for "Pacemaker". In the 1960s Leek formed a new company, Pacemaker Corporation, replacing C.P. Leek & Sons, to produced both Pacemaker and Egg Harbor boat lines. In September 1970 the Pacemaker Corporation received a federal trademark registration for "Egg Harbor".
In December of 1976, Leek sold Pacemaker Corporation, including trademarks for Pacemaker and Egg Harbor, to a California company, Mission Marine, Inc., which continued to produce both boat lines. (Jack Leek, son of C.P. Leek, left Pacemaker and formed Ocean Yachts in 1977). In 1979, during a bad economy and historic high interest rates, Mission Marine filed bankruptcy, primarily due to factors in other businesses. They ended production of all yachts in August of 1980. That would be the end of Pacemaker Yachts.
The Egg Harbor line would be saved in 1980 by the sons of two of C.P. Leek's original partners and others, who purchased some of the Egg Harbor assets from the bankrupt Mission Marine. In December, 1980 Misssion Marine held an auction to sell equipment, materials, and the Pacemaker trademark - essentially the Pacemaker boat line. Although they sold some equipment, they were unable to sell the trademark.
At the 1980 auction a relatively new sailboat builder, Robert Seidelmann, purchased some of the equipment from Pacemaker Yachts that was being auctioned. A few years later Seidelmann would resume building Pacemaker Yachts and advertised that "Pacemaker is back". We cover these separately as the Siedelmann Models.