Down East Books, 2004
$24.95
“The nearest thing you can build to something that’s living”
Wooden boatbuilding is an art and a craft, and Ralph Stanley is one of the foremost designers and builders of these boats in the country. In a career that started in the mid-1940s, Stanley, of Southwest Harbor on Mount Desert Island, has built (or rebuilt) dozens of Friendship sloops and lobster boats, as well as a variety of other vessels. Writer and photographer Craig Milner interviewed Stanley, then transcribed and shaped his subject’s words into a highly engaging first-person narrative – “tales,” as the title states, of a remarkable man who overcame some severe medical setbacks and stubborn bankers to make a name for himself.
The book follows a roughly chronological course from Stanley’s birth at the Bar Harbor Hospital in February 1929 to his current boatbuilding projects. Salt water, we learn, is in his blood: Among his ancestors were several sea captains (a great-grandfather, Adoniram Judson Robinson, is said to have steered a vessel to Boston at the age of nine).
While telling family stories Stanley traces the development of his eye for boats. As a youth he made crayon drawings based on calendar pictures of ships that his Aunt Alice hung in her house. Later, recovering from a near fatal bout of pneumonia, the 13-year-old studied boating magazines and read books by yacht designer L. Francis Herreshoff.
Stanley learned mechanical drawing in school and frequented boatyards on Mount Desert Island, picking up first-hand knowledge of the trade. Soon after graduating from Ricker Junior College in Houlton, Maine, in 1950, he fell into a schedule of boat building in the winter and serving as skipper for rusticators in the summer. He established his own business in the early 1970s.
A good bit of the book is devoted to accounts of building individual boats. Stanley describes the close working relationship he develops with clients to make sure they get what they want. One lobsterman requested a side deck “just wide enough so that he could put his dinner pail on it endways”-a detail inspired by many a lost meal.
Bits of history enrich the text, such as a reference to an early example of homeland security. During World War II, Maine fishermen were required to have special registration numbers painted on their boats. “Then you had to put another big number on the top,” Stanley relates, “so that the airplanes could read it.”
“A boat is the nearest thing you can build to something that’s living,” the master craftsman states. Stanley is modest, but honest, about his accomplishments, which include winning a National Heritage Fellowship in 1999 (an account of his trip to Washington, D.C., to receive the award is delightful). He is also a fervent champion of wooden boats. “You could say that the fiberglass boat moves on the water, while a wooden boat moves through the water,” he says, weighing in on the differences between the two materials.
The book highlights other Stanley talents, including his skill with a fiddle and his gift for telling stories. At one point he bemoans the loss of storytelling due to the prevalence of TV. Lucky for us, he resurrects this important art in this entertaining and enlightening memoir.
“Ralph Stanley: Retrospective of a Wooden Boat Builder” is on view at the Great Harbor Maritime Museum in Northeast Harbor through September.
Carl Little curated the exhibition “The Art of Lobstering” at the Penobscot Marine Museum.