Gary Comer, who died Oct. 4, 2006 after a long battle with cancer, will be remembered mostly for his phenomenal entrepreneurial success in founding and building Lands’ End into a worldwide brand. But from his boyhood days in Chicago, Comer harbored a passion for the sea and for remote places, especially islands and the frozen expanses of the Arctic, where stories of the Eskimos fascinated him.
Comer taught himself to sail from the public landing at the foot of Lake Michigan and went on to represent the United States in the 1956 Olympics on the sailing team.
After ten years in the advertising business, Comer started Lands’ End in 1963 as a mail order sailing hardware and accessories company, reflecting his enduring passion. After several years of increasing sales but with large inventories of hardware to maintain, Comer decided to focus the company on its sailing and outdoor clothing lines. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Comer’s love of the sea led to a progression of larger and larger ocean going sailing vessels, all named Turmoil, story has it, after a sailing friend looked into the cockpit of his racing Star and said, “Gary, your boat is always in turmoil.”
Comer sailed throughout the islands of the Great Lakes and then to archipelagoes in most seas of the world where he loved meeting cranky, idiosyncratic islanders. He once built a dock on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan for a new boat, but wanted to know why it the builder had installed light posts on it at either end. “In case you had to back a vehicle down the dock at night,” said the islander. But why would he want to do that? Comer asked. “In case someone told you that you couldn’t.” The two light posts stayed.
In 1996, Gary Comer launched a new Turmoil, an expedition vessel with a cruising range of 10,000 miles that could take him to any corner of any sea on earth — and did. After a mere four years, Turmoil passed its 100,000th nautical mile, the equivalent of one circumnavigation of the earth at the equator each year for four years. The following year, after an 1,100 mile cruise up the west coast of Greenland, Comer decided to press further into the Central Arctic Basin, where the mysterious disappearance of an expedition of two ships under the command of Sir John Franklin had long haunted mariners. Turmoil successfully navigated the Northwest Passage that summer, crossing into Alaska’s Beaufort Sea when the Arctic ice pack suddenly receded.
Reflecting on this voyage, Comer recognized how quickly the Arctic was changing, literally melting away. He determined to use his considerable marketing and entrepreneurial talents to fund major new research into the emerging new field of abrupt climate change. Turmoil’s expeditions became the “University of Turmoil” as he invited leading climate change scientists to help plan and participate in new expeditions to remote places in the Arctic to study the ice packs, ice caps and glaciers. During the past four years, the Comer Fellows Program has funded on the order of 100 post-doctoral students from over two dozen leading research universities and institutions across four continents, and literally defined this new field of research. Comer launched a new Turmoil equipped for exploration and research this summer and spent some of his last days aboard her with his wife and two children.
On the Maine coast, Gary Comer will be remembered as a supporter of efforts to protect Maine’s scenic beauty through the Maine Coast Heritage Trust and to help sustain island culture and working coastal communities through the Island Institute. q
(Philip Conkling voyaged north several times with Gary Comer, chronicling the trips in several articles for Island Journal. -ed.)