The Outrigger’s Outdoorsy Gal- Frances Langford, Born April 4, 1913
Frances Langford was singing, and Ralph Evinrude was falling in love.
In and of itself, Evinrude’s attraction to Langford was not unusual. Millions of men had done the same thing during Langford’s selfless USO tours with Bob Hope during the war, when the highlight of the act was her creamy rendition of I’m in the Mood for Love, written for her in a movie called Every Night at Eight in 1935. Langford personified the girls the boys had left behind.
But the war had been over for nearly 10 years, as was her marriage to actor Jon Hall. Now Langford was singing in a nightclub in Milwaukee. Evinrude, the son of the founder of the Evinrude Outboard Motor company, was enchanted by her music and her. He invited everyone in the show back to his house for bacon and eggs.
“He was so nice and shy, such a sweet man,” remembers Langford. “I had the nerve to tell him I preferred Johnson outboard motors. Then he told me he made those, too.”
After their marriage in 1955, Langford brought Evinrude to her 400 acres around Jensen Beach. Langford had begun amassing the land in 1936, when she bought a 100-acre parcel for $15,000.
“I always wanted someplace where people couldn’t move in on me,” she says.
Frances Langford has always been a Florida girl. Born in Lakeland in 1914 to a carpenter and his wife, she was drawn to the outdoors, especially when it came to fishing. (She once landed a 419-pound marlin.)
Evinrude fell in love with his wife’s state just as he had fallen in love with his wife. After building a motor testing division on the north side of the St. Lucie River, where he could tinker with his engines to his heart’s content, Evinrude adopted Martin County as his own base of operations.
Langford and Evinrude opened the Outrigger Marina, which berthed their stunning 118-foot yacht, Chanticleer. They also opened a small restaurant as a convenience for people who had just docked their boats.
“The first night, there was this long line outside the place, and we looked at each other and said, ‘What is this?’ People had decided that this was where they wanted to eat. So we started adding on rooms, then some guest houses.”
The glorified lunch counter grew into the Outrigger Resort on the Indian River, the primary restaurant for the area in the late ’50s and ’60s.
Evinrude became a noted philanthropist, helping to fund hospitals and the Jensen Beach fishing pier, as well as a park named after his wife.
Ralph Evinrude died in 1986. Soon afterward, Frances closed the resort. She continued to maintain the marina and the Chanticleer. She’s remarried, to Harold Stuart, the assistant secretary of the Air Force under Harry Truman. Summers are spent in a house on Georgian Island in Canada, and in September she begins the long trip home to Jensen Beach aboard her boat.
“The greatest thing in my life was entertaining the troops,” she says. “And I have Bob Hope to thank for that. It was exhausting, but it didn’t matter; I was raised camping.
“Looking back on it, I’ve had so many lives. New York, Hollywood, and Florida. Always Florida.”
- SCOTT EYMAN
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