Great Lakes Freighters
GreatLakesFreighers.com has been creating kits and custom models of Great Lakes Freighters since the 1970’s when Joe Volanski started Voco Marine Model. He was a merchant marine who tirelessly built ship models, some of his early models were made from cigarette cartons! Esther Beris Daniels bought Voco Marine Model from Joe in 2000 and continued to have Joe build some of the many commissioned models and, along with Esther being a master model builder, learning from Joe, and taking the business online as BearcoMarine.com, selling kits and custom models around the world. Our work is featured in many museums around the world (Mission Point Resort Mackinac Island, Miniature Wunderland in Hamburg Germany, MiniatureLand.ca, Fairport Ohio Museum) and many private collections around the Great Lakes.
Esther grew up in Lorain Ohio, a steel town where Shipbuilding was it’s first Industry and American Shipbuilding company was practically in her backyard. She graduated from Case Western Reserve University as a Mechanical Engineer and since she LOVED seeing the big ships as a child, had hopes of somehow building the behemoths. But by the time she graduated from college the industry was starting to dwindle and American Shipbuilding closed in Lorain in 1983.
https://www.loraincounty.com/shipbuilding/
Then, in 2000, when Esther and her late husband Richard (1952-2014) visited Joe’s shop to inquire about purchasing a Great Lakes Freighters kit, she ended up buying the business from Joe and took the business online as BearcoMarine.com. Richard also had a love for Great Lakes memorabilia and wanted to sell his ideas for tshirts, hats, videos and merchant marine items. And so they put the two ideas together as www.GreatLakesFreighters.com.
You have probably seen one of Esther’s model creations on the CBS-TV set of the soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful”, seen in this picture as the “Marone”. Esther originally built this model as the Amoco Indiana.
In 2019, Joe Volanski passed away and so Esther and Joe’s wife Teresa have now put together this large, one of a kind, collection of ship models that mostly Joe has constructed and are in current inventory. Once these models are gone, they are gone…
Esther continues to build custom models, as she learned the techniques from Joe but she is also involved in other business ventures. She would like to thank Freddy Martinez, for his inspirational model car building when they were kids, for planting the seeds of model building in her younger years! Her dream came true… she got to build the Behemoths! But who knew they were going to be scale models? Life is crazy like that sometimes, lol…
