L to R front row: E-Board Joe Dunne, Commodore Bill Rogers and Vice Commodore Joe Basile. Back row: E-Board William Tauro, Frank Palmisano, Bob Foley, Cynthia Snow Murphy, Ken Webber, Chairman Ray Snow and Peder Acres.

By William Tauro

Somerville’s only yacht club, the Winter Hill Yacht Club, turned 100 years old this year. Members of the century old club celebrated this past Saturday evening with a formal centennial gala in the club’s main ballroom.

The biggest story of April 1912 was the sinking of the Titanic. In the same month of that year, Boston Baseball fans flocked to the official opening of Fenway Park, “The mammoth plant with commodious fittings,” which also celebrates its centennial this year.

On April 10, 1912, Commodore Robert K. Jenner, Treasurer Everett Williams Bray, Clerk Otis W Rogers, Secretary Austin C. Wallace and Executive Committee member Willis J. March, James W. Dixon, William A. O’Kane, Ambrose W. Isele and Henry J. Donnelly personally appeared before the Secretary of the Commonwealth. These original members attested that the Winter Hill Yacht Club was “constituted for the purpose of yachting and athletic exercise and to acquire such property real and personal as such be useful in promoting the same and to manage and administer and dispose of such property under the laws of Massachusetts in the bylaws of the club in the interest of such purpose.”

The 10th day of April 1912 and 8:00 p.m. at 608 Mystic Ave., Somerville, was appointed the time and place of holding the first meeting. The commissioner of Corporations approved a Certificate of Organization for the Winter Hill Yacht Club the first day of May, nineteen hundred and twelve.

In 1966, with the construction of and making room for the new Interstate Route 93, the yacht club was relocated down river to its present location on Foley Street.

Today the Winter Hill Yacht Club’s membership has risen with hundreds of members and it has become a landmark within the city that reaches out to the community with its much welcomed community involvement programs for the city’s elderly as well as its disabled veteran programs and activities.