OBEXER'S BOAT CO

Boating and Marine > Marine Products

Establishing a commercial enterprise at Lake Tahoe carries with it no guarantee of success. Many local ventures do not survive their first season, and to boast several decades in business is rare indeed. A notable exception to the rule is one west shore enterprise, the existence of which extends so far back into yesteryear that no one now living can recall when it wasn't a fixture of the Homewood landscape. Obexer's is the business qualified to make such a claim, tracing its beginnings to 1911 when its progenitor, Jacob P. Obexer, first laid his eyes on this beautiful lake.

It was a long and improbable route that led Obexer to the shores of Lake Tahoe. Born May 9, 1886 in the Austrian-Italian border town of Bozen, "Jake" was an ambitious and restless young man who early abandoned his family's baking business for the more lucrative profession of waiter.

By the age of 20, Jake had sewn his culinary apprenticeship by working in the restaurants of the finest hotels of Austria, France and Switzerland. But America was calling and by 1908 he had crossed the pond and landed in Boston where he found work on the staff of the Parker House, a grand establishment of the day. From there, he gravitated to New York where he worked in such distinguished hostelries as the Ritz-Carlton, Waldorf-Astoria and Plaza Hotel. By 1909, he had arrived in San Francisco where he renewed his employ as a waiter and worked in such elegant restaurants as the Palace, the St. Francis and the Fairmont. There the fine cuisine included mountain trout, the primary source of which was a lake called Tahoe located high in the Sierra 250 miles to the east. Endowed with an adventurous spirit, Obexer took advantage of an opportunity two years later to visit this pictorial paradise and his future was decided. "When I first saw the mountains, the sky and the waters of Tahoe," he recalled in an interview for the Tahoe Tattler in 1935, "I knew I was on my way to anchor here for a lifetime."

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