Conrad's parents were James and Ella. He was born in Ludington, Michigan, on July 8, 1917. His father worked for 35 years on carferries. Conrad graduated from Ludington High School in 1935. From 1935 to 1936 he had part-time jobs as a dishwasher at Stearns Hotel and as a woodworker for Carrom Manufacturing Company and Thompson Cabinet Company, both in Ludington. During this time he took correspondence school courses to learn refrigeration. Conrad's first career job was in 1937. During this time Conrad worked full-time as a refrigeration service repairman in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He moved to Lansing, Michigan, in 1940 and worked in the refrigeration field. Conrad then moved to Holland, Michigan, in March 1941, and in that year established a refrigeration service business, having borrowed "three or four hundred dollars". In 1945 it was re-established as Charles F. Conrad Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Service/Sales Company.
Mid life
In 1951 Conrad started a company called Conrad, Inc that was involved with designing and building extreme temperature environmental chambers for testing precision electrical and mechanical components. The chambers were capable of going to one hundred and twenty-five below zero. He built the first unit on the front porch of his home in Holland, Michigan, and managed to sell a few of these units, one to General Motors Heat Treat Lab in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Conrad's company eventually merged into Crampton Manufacturing Company at the end of 1954. Conrad was a Crampton company employee until 1962, when he quit and started a company called Thermotron with a budget of a thousand dollars. His new Holland company received their first order to build some environmental test chambers from Republic Aviation to test precision aircraft components under extreme temperatures. At the time he was the only employee. The company eventually grew to over 500 employees, becoming the largest in the industry. The company expanded from one office building location to seven factories in Holland, Michigan. The environmental test chambers were also used in the aerospace industry to test satellite electronics and for the national space program of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects. His company title was President, Chief Engineer, and Sales/Marketing manager. Conrad sold the company in 1980. He then operated four Ludington area family-type resorts at Hamlin Lake from 1981 to 1987. Five years later in 1992, after spending a million dollars in renovations for the resorts, he sold them.
Conrad purchased three ships called, and from the defunct Michigan-Wisconsin Transportation company in 1991. He renamed this company Lake Michigan Carferry Service when the U.S. Bankruptcy Court awarded the Badger and two other ships to the Lake Michigan Carferry Service on February 18, 1992. Conrad converted Badger to a tourist passenger cruise ship and automobile carrier from a railroad carferry at a cost of $1.5 million. He put the ship back in service in 1992, hoping to get 80,000 passengers the first season. He exceeded his goal with 115,000 passengers in their first year of operation. Badger is the only ship carrying both passengers and automobiles across any of the Great Lakes, and it is the last coal fired passenger steamship in the United States. Conrad referred to the ship as "The Big Badger". Since 2009 it is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Badger is the largest carferry on the Great Lakes. It is four hundred feet long and travels at 18 mph to make the four-hour trip across Lake Michigan. It does almost 500 crossings per year during the summer with about six hundred passengers and just under two hundred vehicles on each trip. The ship contains 40 staterooms and an outside deck. The ship was designated a registered Wisconsin Historic Site in 1997. SS Badger was named Ship of the Year by the Steamship Historical Society of America in 2002.
Conrad sold Lake Michigan Carferry company to a group of its executives in 1994, headed by his son-in-law Robert "Bob" Manglitz. Conrad spent the winters of the last years of his life in Florida. He died at St. Luke's Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, in the morning of February 9, 1995.
Family
His wife's name is Elsie Alida Conrad and his two daughters are Barbara and Janet. Janet is the wife of Robert Manglitz, the President and CEO of Lake Michigan Carferry from 1995 on.
