Wayne,
I'm not going to be much help filling in the gaps about Joe Michelini. His boat shop, as I said earlier, was on the South side of Chicago, in a real bad neighborhood. As you walked in to the building there was a counter blocking access to the rest of the building. I was at the old building twice and never got past the counter. The only boats I ever saw there were pleasure boats, if Joe had a collection of race boats they were not in public view. Joe had told me in 1966, that in back he had a warehouse of boats.
In his last boat shop, near Midway Airport which was much smaller in size that the South side store, is the only place I saw any race boats and the one I saw is the one you described from 1977.

Outboard Club of Chicago was our local club at the time, we met in the Winter every month, I don't believe Joe ever attended a meeting with us. I knew of Joe as I remember from an article about the AirMarine race boat and later from Ray Hardy or Clyde Queen.