Master boatbuilder Ralph Stanley turned 80 and is feeling a little less chipper than he used to. That’s why son Richard, his lifelong business partner, is taking over the business, helped by Richard’s wife Lorraine.
Ralph Stanley, dean of wooden boatbuilders in Maine, once dreamed of working at the United Nations in New York City. The son of a lobsterman and a nurse, he didn’t have money to continue college so he turned to constructing both workboats and yachts in Southwest Harbor.
From his harbor-side shop, that’s what he’s been doing ever since. “Stanleys” range from 10-foot rowboats to a 44-foot lobsterboat, with a fleet of sizes in between. In all, he has built and restored more than 70 boats.
That, and playing bluegrass on a fiddle he built, its dark wood gleaming like the varnished mahogany transom on one of his sloops. He has played with a country band at the grange halls in Northport and Surry, and most winter Sundays for “seniors” in Bucksport. And when you talk to this seasoned builder, it’s hard to believe he, too, has reached old age.
Ralph Stanley probably wouldn’t think of retiring but a heart condition has slowed him down. He can still balance on narrow planks high above the ground but he has undergone two bypass surgeries. Quit? “Not because I want to,” he said, taking a seat beside shelves of paint and caulking in his snug office. “It’s my health. I had a heart attack 10 years ago. I’m all right so far.”
Also 10 years ago, he received a lifetime award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
In the 57 years since he built his first custom lobsterboat, a 28-footer, he has become a living legend, building classic yachts and sturdy lobster boats that continue to ply the bays and harbors up and down the New England coast. It’s been a few years since anyone ordered a commercial wooden vessel, and the recession means fewer orders for pleasure craft, sail or power. Maintenance, storage and repair keep the yard going, and Stanley and son have steadfastly refused to build or work on fiberglass boats.
Instead, he has stuck with local pine, white cedar and oak, complaining only that modern lumberyards can’t supply wood the way he wants it. “The old mills are gone and the new mills don’t know how to cut it.”
The old man is careful not to condemn glass boats. “I finished off one of those but I didn’t want to do any more,” Stanley recalled.
Jarvis Newman, fellow Southwest Harbor builder, has launched 100 fiberglass hulls copied from a Ralph Stanley wooden boat. He acknowledged there’s a lot less maintenance on molded hulls. Still, there are sailors who swear wood is more sea-kindly and the sound of waves alongside is more pleasant on a wooden-planked hull. For thousands of years boats were built of wood, and some customers are willing to hang onto tradition.
For sailors who crave a boat built from trees, some of which grow right on Mount Desert Island, Ralph W. Stanley Wooden Boats is the place to go. It’s so small you could easily miss it. A tidy, wood-shingled shed is the office, above the windows a carved black and gold sign-Stanley is an accomplished wood carver. Nothing is fancy, except perhaps the sign. Behind the office shed are three boat sheds and a couple of wooden marine railways, all crowded onto a third of an acre.
Stanley and his wife Marion, along with their cat Pretty Pussy, live next door in a 1928 bungalow built by his great uncle, who settled in Southwest Harbor after leaving nearby Cranberry Isles. Stanley said his ancestors arrived in the 1700s, apparently some from Archangel, Russia, and he maintains a strong interest in local history. His great grandfather hauled lumber from Bangor, at head of tide on the Penobscot River, by three-masted schooner.
He serves on the board of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport and has a long relationship with the Mount Desert Island Historical Society. He is comfortable asking summer folk for hefty donations, and said there is mutual respect between the wealthy families who have come to the island for generations and local families who work for them.
He looked at one of the round-bottom skiffs built by son Richard. Originally for gunning birds, he said such boats once sold for $35. Now one of these beauties would fetch $20,000. Among his regular customers is multi-millionaire Tom Chappell, founder with wife Kate of Tom’s of Maine toothpaste. Stanley’s shop maintains Chappell’s 39-foot cabin cruiser.
Stanley complained that taxes on the waterfront parcel are now $12,000 per year and he wonders if some nonprofit group might buy his land and give him life tenancy. Meanwhile, son Richard is considering moving the entire business off the water to an in-town parcel of land where he could consolidate storage and construction operations. For now, the yard leases two cavernous boat storage buildings in nearby Manset.
A list of boats built by the Stanley yard includes: 25 lobsterboats, eight pleasure powerboats of the lobsterboat design, seven Friendship Sloops, five similar sloops, two schooners, an English cutter and a flat-bottom riverboat. Then there are several small racing class sailboats, rowboats and various restoration projects.
One of his projects was the 28-foot schooner Dorothy Elizabeth, built for cruising guide author and master mariner Roger Duncan and his wife Mary of East Boothbay.
Nearly complete in the shop is a complete rebuild the 40-foot Westwind, a 1902 Friendship Sloop built in the town of that name by Charles Morse. Friendships were beamy, no-frills fishing boats that later became popular pleasure craft. Westwind’s wheel helm may be the only original feature left, but the graceful gaff-rigged vessel’s lines are historically accurate. Richard Stanley has a soft spot for Friendships. “I just like sailing them. They feel comfortable,” he said.
He has raced since a boy aboard sloops at the annual Friendship Sloop regatta, which takes place each summer in Rockland. For years Ralph Stanley has manned the committee boat, itself a product of his shop. In fact, Seven Girls, named for his seven sisters-six of whom survive-is now his own “lobster yacht.” He originally built it for his fisherman father.
Ralph Stanley won the Class A Division at the Friendship Sloop regatta for three years in a row. And a regatta tradition continues: the award for best-maintained wooden Friendship is called the Stanley Cup, and the top prize, the State of Maine trophy, is a half-model built by Ralph Stanley.
Stanley said that when he started building boats he mainly used hand tools. “I think I had six C-clamps, a jigsaw and an old band saw that I rigged up. I finally got an electric plane and a Black & Decker screw gun. It’s still going.”
Richard Stanley, 47, lives in nearby Bass Harbor with his wife, Lorraine and Percy, their 175-pound Newfoundland. He said he has never tired of wooden boatbuilding: “It’s what I know. It’s what I love.” He said learning boat building from his taciturn father wasn’t easy but the lessons stuck. Ralph Stanley would rather use his hands to show how it’s done than explain it in words.
“There was a lot of wooden boatbuilding going on when I was a kid. I’d watch them tear apart a sardine carrier and put it back together. Just stand back and watch.”
“I was out scrubbing boat bottoms when I was three years old,” Richard said. His first boat was a Whitehall skiff in 1983. “I’ve learned a lot. Most of it I learned by doing it myself,” he said.
“Richard can fit wood together like it grew that way,” said Lorraine, who calls herself a “painter-varnisher” at the boatyard. “There is a lot of stuff that’s pretty simple and basic,” she explained, standing beneath the mirror-finish of an older sloop. Lorraine said keeping the boatyard going isn’t easy, but several loyal, long-term employees, such as shop manager Tim Goodwin, make the job easier. Goodwin is Ralph’s son-in-law. Richard’s naval architect brother Edward has left the business, as has their sister Nadine. She was bookkeeper after Marion Stanley retired from the shop.
Lorraine said transitions are challenging. “It’s tough, it’s really an emotional thing for Richard, myself, for Ralph and Marion.” Lorraine was born on nearby Gotts Island, and said she enjoys working on beautiful boats. “We get to do stuff that let people do what they want to do.”
“We have a niche,” said Richard. “There will be people who want wooden boats-I hope.” Noting the sinking economy, he said, “I just hope it turns around and comes back.”
Nobody has ordered a commercial wooden vessel in five years. The last one the Stanley yard built was for sale but last year was destroyed by fire.
As for Ralph Stanley, dean of down east boatbuilders, he’d like to keep fiddling, sailing and maybe do some boatbuilding too. “I’d like to stay here as long as I can.”