COEUR d’ALENE — There is a unique souvenir perched on the fireplace mantle of Sandy Emerson’s summer home on the south shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene.

It’s a small piece of the framework from the Miss Exide unlimited hydroplane, which exploded into smithereens during the 1963 Diamond Cup not far from the Emerson home.

“We could see it right off the porch,” Emerson said. “We watched it blow up out there.”

But it wasn’t entertainment. Not at all. Because the Diamond Cup was a big part of Emerson’s young life.

Emerson knew Miss Exide’s driver, Mira Slovak, who was dragged unconscious from the water by another driver, Warner Gardner, who dropped out of the race to save him.

Emerson’s father, Tom, an aviator and banker, served on the Diamond Cup Committee, which gave his son access to the race pits where he met the drivers and fell in love with the risky and wild thunder-boat culture.

Lake Coeur d’Alene and boating are in his blood.

Emerson, a 71-year-old father of three, spent his childhood at Sanders Beach or anywhere within a stone’s throw of the water. He flew almost every day in a seaplane with his father, who started the flight service from the city dock.

“As kids, we lived on Tubbs Hill,” he said.

And he had his own hydroplane mishap in junior high. He was running a high-speed mini-hydro off Sanders Beach with friends in whitecap weather when the boat caught a wave and flipped. The outboard engine blew up and Emerson almost drowned when his oversized lifejacket flew off. But that was part of growing up in Coeur d’Alene.

He went on to Coeur d’Alene High School, which he described as “super.”

“I never had a bad day. It was always fun,” he said. “I always met people easily, and liked people.”

He participated in baseball as a scorekeeper and basketball as a manager and trainer. But he actually saw action on the football team as a 135-pound linebacker and experienced a few rough encounters, including one against a standout fullback from Spokane’s Central Valley High School, who was the boyfriend of Emerson’s future wife, Jeanne. Emerson’s impossible job was to stop the fullback. On one play Emerson hit him in the legs, which accomplished nothing except sending Emerson unconscious to the locker room. His nemesis went on to the University of Washington and the Los Angeles Rams.

Emerson also carried a clarinet in the CHS marching band, but was denied use of it.

“You weren’t supposed to toot your horn if you didn’t know how to play it,” he said. “So I was forbidden to actually play.”

Emerson worked during summers for lake legend Fred Murphy on barges, pile drivers and tug boats. He and some buddies gathered up enough of Murphy’s discarded materials to create a dock-like barge which they powered with a 35 hp outboard to the Diamond Cup race course to watch the action up close. Emerson also was volunteered by his father to sleep overnight at the point of Tubbs Hill to protect the Diamond Cup’s starting clock from potential vandalism.

And he got caught up in the 1963 Diamond Cup “riots.” About 10,000 people were in Coeur d’Alene to watch the race, who quickly bought all the available beer and filled up the motel rooms, he said.

“People were just wandering the streets with nothing to do. There were too many people for a little town,” he said.

When the crowds refused to disperse, the city called in firefighting equipment from Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane.

“They were going around in circles shooting foam on the crowd,” he said. “It was just silly. We never did anything wrong. We weren’t bad people. It was weird.”

Emerson went on to the University of Idaho where he studied business, marketing and real estate and met Jeanne during his freshman year. She was an English major, so Emerson enrolled in English and American literature classes to be near her.

They married just before Emerson was drafted into the Army after graduation. A shoulder injury from a motorcycle accident kept him out of combat duty during the Vietnam War. Instead, they spent most of Emerson’s six-year tour in southern Germany where “they ski and make beer,” he said. “It was like a giant vacation that no one could have imagined.”

They returned to Coeur d’Alene and Emerson went to work in 1974 for McFarland Realty, a business he inherited when Bob McFarland retired. Then the housing market collapsed as interest rates approached 20 percent. Emerson left real estate in 1980 and was hired to manage the Coeur d’Alene Chamber of Commerce.

The high-energy, eternally exuberant chamber manager was always on the go. During his seven-year tenure he bolstered the chamber’s membership numbers, recruited new businesses and promoted existing businesses. During Oktoberfest he hit the streets in lederhosen.

Emerson was one of Coeur d’Alene’s more popular and memorable chamber managers, yet he said he stayed a little too long. His original plan was to serve only five years.

“I enjoyed it and they liked me. But you make friends and enemies,” he said. “They’ll never remember what you did good for them, but they’ll always remember what they didn’t like.”

The many connections he made through the chamber led to community service. He helped with the transformation of Northwest Boulevard, served on the Coeur d’Alene School Board, on the steering committee for McEuen Park and as president of the Idaho Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

His wife refers to him as “Mr. Sherman.” because “everyone knows him on Sherman Avenue.”

Following his stint with the chamber, Emerson worked in sales for five years for Energy Products of Idaho then went into the real estate appraisal business, which had been his original intent.

Emerson still owns Emerson Appraisals, but he is trying to semi-retire to allow more time to be at his lake home overlooking the lake he loves and sailing with his favorite deckhand, Jeanne, on one of three boats he keeps there.

“I have been boat-oriented my whole life,” he said. “I was in the Army, but I have a Navy windsock hanging from my boat slip.”