Rich and Grindle: “Let’s Go Build a Boat in My Barn,” Part II

by Laurie Schreiber

Mick Fahey and Roger Rich caulk the pilgrim shallop, 1957; photographer unknown. Courtesy Southwest Harbor Public Library Digital Reference Archive.

SOUTHWEST HARBOR – Sugar Fenton recalls an odd incident that occurred when she was a little girl. She had a doll cradle that needed to be repaired.

“I took it across the street to Dad, and when he was hammering a nail in it, he came back with the hammer and it flew out of his hand across the boat shop, because he was getting sick,” she says. “They thought he had polio. But within 24 to 48 hours, he was paralyzed.”

Grindle was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a disease of the nervous system, and was unable to continue in boatbuilding. It’s thought he might have contracted the disease during his time in Hawaii. He was laid up for a year, but through hard work, he regained his ability to walk. Rich built him a wheelchair to use while he was recuperating.

“I remember him in our basement, working out with weights, with the sweat dripping off him when he was pumping iron,” says Fenton. “He wound up with a limp, and he did okay until the end. He lived to be 90. They just had to cope. They had to adapt to a different lifestyle. But it certainly changed things.”

To support the family, Fenton’s mother went to work as head waitress for her sister, who ran the Dirigo Hotel up the road. (The hotel burned during a hurricane in 1960.) Another sister arrived every summer from Massachusetts to help care for the family. Grindle regained enough strength to open a convenience store on Main Street, which he operatd for 30 years until handing it off to his son.

Back to the Hamlins, who traveled to Southwest Harbor the year that Grindle took ill. It was July, and they thought their new cruiser, the Aquarelle II, would be ready in time for a mid-summer cruise.

“As Cy drove us to the hotel, we passed Rich & Grindle’s shop – and there, looking out at us, was the graceful blue bow of Aquarelle II, her nose at the open doorway,” the Hamlins wrote. “We stopped for a brief glimpse – and we were appalled.”

The cabin top wasn’t on, the ports hadn’t been cut, and the cockpit floor framing had only just begun. The Hamlins asked Roger Rich to put more men on the job.

“He had tried to and couldn’t,” they wrote. “And the dearth of labor was a fact; too many boats were being built on Mount Desert that summer. One yard was setting up a 65-foot yawl. Another was building a 65-foot dragger. Still another was working on a 30-foot cabin cruiser, and so on down the list. Every good ship carpenter and cabinetmaker was employed.”

Forced to wait, the Hamlins found themselves fascinated by the boatbuilding process.

“We call Aquarelle II our ‘hand-carved ship,’” they wrote. “All the moldings were planed out, not machine run. The builder himself shaped the stem head and the toe-rail breast hook with a favorite knife, and the beauty of the result shows the sensitive skill of the carver; his father formed and finished the grab rails as well as the spars. This handmade finish was slow, perhaps, but how we are going to enjoy the results in the years to come! The men loved their work; they had an affection for their tools and for the wood they were shaping; they were having fun; they were creating.”

Lobster boat Meredith at Castine; photograph by Roger Rich. Courtesy Southwest Harbor Public Library Digital Reference Archive.

Launch day came in September – but was delayed by a skunk.

“To be launched, the boat had to be dragged out of the shop, into the busy road to Clark Point, and then back down a long gully to the ways; to do this dragging the one wrecking car of the town was needed. The night before, an expressman driving a load of fish had to turn out to avoid hitting a skunk (or what would have happened to the fish?) and tipped over and wrecked his truck. Of course the wrecking car’s first job was to salvage the express truck, and that took all day!”

The following day was warm and sunny. Aquarelle II was loaded on a rugged launching cradle and pulled by “great jerks” down the hard road surface.

“At the gutter she stopped. Much discussion. Then they commandeered another of the town’s trucks – a heavy oil truck – and chained it to the wrecking car; both of these with a great pull snaked her over the gutter and up the crown of the road and switched her round to the required angle.”

The boat reached the ways and slid into the water.

A few days later, the Hamlins left for their shakedown cruise, departing from Beal’s lobster pound. A newspaper reporter subsequently interviewed the couple’s nephew, Hamlin, and discovered the cruise to Long Island Sound was a success.

Of Roger Rich, the Hamlins wrote that he “has the feel and the know-how, a deep love for boats, and a deep respect for the sea; he is also an excellent mechanic with a profound knowledge of gasoline engines an their ways. And he has an immaculate sense of standards.”

Rich’s wife Lucile received beautiful bolts of fabric after her husband completed his next boat, a 32-foot cabin cruiser – built like a lobsterboat, but with a longer cabin – for John Wolf, a Fifth Avenue, New York, textile manufacturer who had a summer home in Freeport.

“In the spring of 1950,” wrote Hutchins, “my mother and father delivered the boat to him on Long Island for what turned out to be a really special vacation. Mr. Wolf had someone show them around New York City and got them tickets to South Pacific.

“After they had returned home, a large box of fabric arrived, a gift from Mr. Wolf. Inside were bolts of material my mother had selected in New York, enough for living room curtains, plus a contrasting design that she used to reupholster the chairs and couch. A second box that Mr. Wolf had shipped to us consisted of fabric samples in many designs and colors. Supposedly these large squares were for Rich & Grindle to use as paint rags. Needless to say, my mother saw to it that they never went near the boat shop, and soon there were decorative pillows scattered about the house.”

During the 1950s, Rich built a number of other boats, including Driftwood, a 34-foot lobster-style pleasure boat for Henry Bucknam Wass of Southwest Harbor, who reportedly intended to go tuna-fishing. Hutchins says the boat was built from western red cedar that came from a water tank Wass owned. In 1990, Southwest Harbor boatbuilder Jarvis Newman rebuilt Driftwood and sold it to Gerrit Livingston Lansing, an art historian and expert on American Surrealism who had a summer home in Northeast Harbor. Lansing renamed the yacht Chicken of the Sea. It is now thought to be the oldest Roger Rich boat in existence.

Rich wasn’t one to let one talent bog him down. He worked at a local car garage and served as a selectman. He flew a Piper Cub. Family lore has it that, at different times he: gave a guy a ride for a bucket of smelts, which he sold to pay for gas; flew to Sorrento and landed on the ice in the harbor; flew lobsters to Boston in a seaplane; and flew under the Bucksport bridge. The plane was made of wood and fabric and was easy to repair.

In the 1950s, Rich returned to Hinckley to help build the Venturer, the 73-foot Sparkman & Stephens designed-yawl, launched in 1956, that was the largest and the penultimate wooden sailboat built by the yard.

He was an avid outdoorsman and a Class B Maine Guide who spent a lot of time on Chesuncook Lake, an off-the-grid settlement in the North Woods, with his friend, Francis “Mickey” Fahey. The two took a month-long trip to the remote Allagash River in the mid-1940s, and Rich made his own sleeping bag.

“In my family if they could make something, they never bought it,” says Hutchins.

Fahey was himself an expert woodsman who had a passion for Maine’s remote North Woods from a young age. In 1923, he was the state’s youngest Maine Guide, at age 17. Income derived from guided trips, trapping, cruising timber, or working on the family farm dried up with the advent of the Depression. With a family to support (his daughter, Myrna, would become a well-known film and TV actor), he looked for new opportunities and landed a job in 1936 at Henry Hinckley’s yard. By the time World War II came along, Fahey was yard superintendent, tasked with overseeing the company’s feverish production for the military. (Information comes from A Mentor Would Appear: Mick Fahey and the North Woods Way, by Jerry Stelmok, WoodenBoat, 1985.)

After the war, Fahey served as an officer in the American Red Cross for 10 years. Around 1955, he returned to the Hinckley yard, became general manager, and oversaw production of the Venturer and the company’s final wooden yacht, the 46-foot Osprey.

Fahey, like Rich, had a penchant for adventure. So in the winter of 1956 to 1957, when a new project came through to build a 17th century replica shallop, the two friends went for it.

The shallop was a type of workboat brought over by the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, in 1620. The job originated with George Davis, who ran Plymouth Marine Railways on the waterfront in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Davis won a contract to build the 33-foot replica, which would sit by the side of a full-scale reproduction of the Mayflower, under construction in Devon, England, as a feature display at the Massachusetts living history museum called Plimouth Plantation, near historic Plymouth Rock. The Mayflower would feature re-created details such as solid oak timbers, tarred hemp rigging, wood and horn lanterns, and hand-colored maps. For the shallop, Davis, in search of craftsmen skilled in authentic wooden boat construction techniques, contacted his friend Bob Rich. Davis’ own boat was built by Rich, and he had turned the Massachusetts Law Enforcement Division and a number of Bay State fishermen on to the Rich brand.

Bob agreed to supply the wood and sent Roger and Mickey to do the work. A clipping quotes Bob Rich’s wife Mildred, who described the project: “When they built it, everything had to be authentic. Everything had to be done with old-fashioned tools, nothing electric. His father and grandfather were boatbuilders and they had those tools and they and Bobby and all knew how to use them.”

The project prompted a great to-do, making the front page of the Old Colony newspaper in Plymouth, with Roger, Bob and Mickey present for photos.

One of the photos shows the keel-laying ceremony. A handsome Fahey wears a fedora at a jaunty angle and has a movie-star insouciance in his expression. “The keel is plumb,” he announces to onlookers.

By the 1950s, Rich was ready to spend his time fishing. He realized he didn’t really enjoy the business end of his work– “the losing-money part, that is,” as Hutchins says. So he built for himself a 27-foot lobsterboat and named it after his daughter, Meredith. He made his living fishing for a while; his son Philip would go with him after school.

In the early 1960s, Roger decamped to Florida and went into fiberglass boatbuilding, thanks to his old employer from the war years. Bink Sargent had abruptly packed it in at his yard, Southwest Boat Corporation, and relocated to become plant manager at Bertram Yacht, the Miami-based manufacturer of fiberglass pleasure boats. Sargent then became involved in the production of smaller, center-console sportfishermen, also in fiberglass.

Rich joined Sargent at Bertram, and later took a job at Mako Marine. The idea, at first, was to go down for a winter, but then he stayed and eventually met his second wife. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew swept the roof off the couple’s house. This, combined with illness, prompted the couple to move to Chicago to be near his wife’s daughter. He died in 1996 at age 83, having lived a life pursuing many interests – and a bit of mischief.

“He could build anything,” says Hutchins. “I don’t think financially he was such a good businessman, certainly not like Bobby and Ronald. My father was a perfectionist and an artist, I will say that.”