Photojournalist Everett “Red” Boutilier, whose photographs are being digitized at the Penobscot Marine Museum, was known for being talkative.
“He talked a blue streak,” says Peter Spectre, who was working as a journalist/editor during the 1960s through the1990s, when Boutilier covered the Midcoast working waterfront “He’d go on and on and on. It was one of the reasons why he managed to get into all those boat shops and take all the photos. He’d talk everybody up. You couldn’t help liking him, but he would drive you nuts.”
Boatbuilder Bruce Farrin of South Bristol got snared by Boutilier’s gift for gab when he and his wife visited at Boutilier’s home in Bristol in 1965 to talk with him about photographing their wedding. “I said to Red, `I understand you have some pictures of the whaling fleet in Nova Scotia,'” Farrin recalls. Right away, Boutilier’s wife stood up and said she couldn’t sit there any longer because it would be several hours for him to tell about the photos. “It was,” Farrin says. “We left there about midnight. Red never wanted to be in a rush. There was plenty of time in the day as far as he was concerned.”
People also remember that Boutilier not only talked; he’d do just about anything to get the shot he wanted. One time, says Edward Gamage, who worked for the Harvey F. Gamage Shipyard in South Bristol, that involved getting into a barrel and being hoisted to the top of a crane so he could have an unusual angle to photograph a vessel being worked on in the yard.
Larry Kelsey, who still works at Gamage, says Boutilier started showing up at the yard around 1960 and learned about shipbuilding while he worked. “People took a liking to Red and led him along,” Kelsey says. “He did very good work. We’d notify him when sea trials were coming up and he’d go out with us. I’d write up all the equipment and give him a copy.”
For all the memories of Red as a “character,” there are more about how hard he worked to make a living as a freelance photojournalist. Even when he was gossiping with someone, he was working. “He would always talk about what I’d been doing and what I was going to do and about people we ran into,” says Spectre. “And all along, he would be pumping me for information, thinking I didn’t know he was doing that.”
Spectre adds that Boutilier must have gone to just about every boat launch on the coast during the period he was working. He was easy to spot, because unlike other photographers who had switched to 35 mm cameras, he always carried a boxy Speed Graphic four-by-five inch camera he had been using since earlier days when he worked the harness racing circuit in New York and Florida. During that period, he had set up a portable darkroom in a small trailer which he took to the tracks so he could develop photos immediately and sell them to owners of horses, newspapers and anyone else who was interested. When family ties brought him to Bremen in 1960, he set the trailer on blocks in his yard.
Gretchen Piston Ogden, an editor at Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors, says when Boutilier appeared at the office, he made her think of the old days in journalism: “Guys smoking cigars in a newsroom; the guy with an easy manner who could hang out with the boys and get them to talk. He created his own beat and covered the waterfront for anyone who would listen,” she says. Over the years, in addition to Maine Boats and Harbors, that included numerous shipyard and boat owners and publications like The National Fisherman and Lincoln County News.
Ogden says she always looked forward to the arrival of Boutilier’s photos and stories for a column, Working Watercraft, which he wrote for ten years. The stories were typewritten sheets with x’d out words, corrections, varying shades of type, uneven letters where the shift key wasn’t hit exactly at the right time. “No one gets manuscripts that look like that any more,” she says.
What drove Boutilier was making a living, says Dave Getchell, who spent 22 years as an editor at Maine Coast Fisherman (later National Fisherman) and knew Boutilier when he contributed to the publication. “He was going from a to b to c, and all the way to x, y and z ,” he says. “He was very reliable. He had stuff at the office almost every month. The beauty of Red’s work,” he adds, “is that no shop was too small. He was very even in his coverage.”
The Penobscot Marine Museum acquired Boutilier’s work from his son, Jim, after Boutilier died in 2003. It includes approximately 15,000 four-by five-inch negatives that Peter Lindquist has been scanning for the museum to create a digital archive of all the photos, a treasure that will be accessible to the public at a museum web site.
Lindquist says Boutilier, who he describes as “an organized pack rat,” had stored his work in meticulously labeled boxes. They contain not only negatives and prints, but also clippings, notes and anything else germane to the subject listed on the outside.
Opening one of these boxes while talking on the phone in September, Lindquist took a peek in and gasped, “O my, here he’s got some kind of schedule for a little ferry boat, The Julie, on the New Meadows River. It says it was built in Weymouth, Massachusetts, and brought up here.” Lindquist believes there is a book in the collection, not only in the photos, but also the accompanying notes Boutilier made when he shot his pictures and the related material he collected afterwards.
Spectre’s observation that he believed Boutilier had covered every launching during the 30 years he worked seems feasible when one looks at the 23-page list of box and notebook titles Lindquist has prepared. They cover all types of boats, including fishing schooners, draggers, lobster boats, canoes, motorboats, Friendship sloops, ferry boats, tug boats, sailboats. Many familiar names are included: Clearwater, Appledore, Bluenose and Bowdoin, and less familiar such as Dandelion, Doll, Growler and Heart’s Desire. Other boxes contain scenes beyond boat building and boat launchings: machine shops, clam diggers, dory races, eel fishing, smelt fisheries, sheep dogs, sled dogs, log drive, sardine fishing, Monhegan lighthouse, pogies, Airstream Caravan and covered bridges, plus material on the Gloucester Fishing Museum, Moosehead Lake, and the schooner races in Gloucester and Halifax.
Overall, the archive adds up to a unique look at approximately 40 years of the working history of the Midcoast peninsulas. Lindquist says he, David Andrews of South Bristol and Mark DesMeules, Director of the Damariscotta River Association, are contacting members of historical societies located in the Damariscotta River watershed so they can help find ways to make sure this treasure is appreciated for its historical value. They hope to get some financial support and to find volunteers who will help create a database that attaches information to the images.
“This is these people’s history,” Lindquist says. “We hope they will become enamored with this material and celebrate the connection between the photos and their friends and families.”
Images from the Penobscot Marine Museum’s Boutilier archive can be viewed at the Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors website: www.maineboats.com.