Town Tinker Tube Rental, shuttered and for sale since the pandemic, may have finally found a buyer.
“I do have someone in the pipeline who has been talking to me since last October,” said Town Tinker owner Harry Jameson, 72, who opened the business in 1980. “He has not responded for a couple weeks now, so I’m wondering what’s going on. This is pretty straightforward. I’ve got my price. He knows what it is.”
Jameson is asking $945,000 for the business, on the Esopus Creek in Phoenicia. It includes 1.15 acres of property on two lots, tubing equipment such as life vests, helmets and wetsuits, as well as a retail inventory of shirts, watertight containers and water shoes, according to Jameson. A reconstructed railroad baggage car in the parking lot, which Jameson used as a store, is also part of the package, he said.
Jameson said the potential buyer plans to reopen the tubing business, declining to say who it is. He’s fielded interest previously in a sale but talks never advanced as far as they have now and he’s hoping to complete the deal soon so that the business can open for its typical mid-May to late-September season.
The tubing business hired as many as 20 teenagers each season and for four decades served as a prime attraction for Phoenicia. Kids cooled off on tubes on hot summer days and parents built lasting memories with their children on the bouncy trip downriver.
“It was a lot of fun,” said Erin Thalheimer, 50, who recalled tubing with her cousins at the age of 16 while visiting her aunt in Phoenicia. “I always remember having a good time doing it—cool water, very, very cold. It was always freezing.”
Jameson last operated the business in 2019, the year before Covid’s restrictions on social gatherings. By then, he was ready to move on, opting not to reopen as the pandemic ebbed because, he said, “I decided it was time to retire.”
Besides, the tubing business required plenty of time and energy. “I realized I wasn’t 26 years old,” he said.
Jameson also knew that he needed to modernize to stay competitive. That would mean implementing a reservation system to replace his walk-in policy, and probably raising prices from the $40—$50 with a wetsuit—that he charged for a tube, life jacket, helmet and transportation to the upriver dropoff.
In addition, the bureaucracy connected to operating his ground transportation had grown cumbersome, frustrating and mired in red tape, he said.
As he exits tubing, Jameson will remain involved with another tourism-driven business as chairman of Catskill Mountain Railroad in Kingston, which drew more than 60,000 riders on its historic trains last year.
Jameson is originally from Westchester, but his family moved to Chichester, a hamlet of Shandaken, when he was 10. He started tubing the Esopus as a kid.
After graduating from Onteora High School, Jameson spent four years in the U.S. Navy and then four years working in flight simulation. He was later a mechanical engineer at Rotron in Woodstock before it was bought by AMETEK in 1998.
In 1980, Jameson bought a barn on Bridge Street in Phoenicia to house his 1954 XK140 Jaguar while he worked on it. That’s where it occurred to him that the barn could serve as a base for a tubing operation. That set the stage for the Town Tinker business to open nearly 50 years ago.
John W. Barry is a reporter for The Overlook. Reach him at john@theoverlooknews.com.
