I wrote this article in 2007, but haven’t updated it at all. I find doing that breaks up the story too much with asides. So necessary updates are in brackets in the text.

I love this shot of a troop of shipyard guys carrying a mast across the bridge in East Boothbay. It takes me back to my childhood here, when most jobs were carried out with manpower and main strength. If you needed to move something big and heavy, you got a bunch of men; if it was extra big and heavy, you got even more men.

Some time in the 1960s, my father built an interconnected system of overhead metal trusses to move heavy objects around the Goudy & Stevens shipyard. But before then it was mostly done with human arms, except for stepping a mast in a vessel for which the yard had a small crane. I felt a burst of pride when Royall Dodge told me that Paul Luke couldn’t get back fast enough to his shipyard to enlist my father to build him one after he saw what Goudy’s had.

The Back of the Photo

An unknown person wrote on the back of the photo, "October 1951, men with mast of ketch built by G & S." I started with the assumption the ketch was built in 1951 and that the mast had come by truck and was being carried into Goudy's [in 2007 the site of Hodgdon Yachts]. The twisty entrance to Goudy's by the bridge made deliveries difficult. However, no ketch or large sailboat of any kind was built in 1951. The largest vessel launched locally that year was the 68-foot motor yacht Lion's Whelp for Shaw Sprague of the Portland area. The family came over in 1629 on a Lion's Whelp, and the Spragues had many boats built with that same name. Locally, Hodgdon's built one in 1929, and Goudy's in 1951 and 1966.

Hoping to solve the photo the easy way, I went up to the Jim Stevens house on the River Road last winter to look at photos of the yard. Jim, who worked at or ran the yard for about 50 years with brother Tunk and brother-in-law Frank Cummings, has been dead a few years; his widow Evie was in Florida temporarily; but daughter Ellen Newton was there. We went over late 1940s and early 1950s photos, hoping to find the same shot, with Jim's customary detailed info on the back. No luck.

The Boothbay Register and Sarah Giles

I read the 1951 Boothbay Registers, looking for news of a big ketch in for repairs or something of that sort. The closest I could come was the East Boothbay columnist's mentioning November 9, 1951 that a fleet of trucks had brought equipment for the yards' coming NATO-Korean War minesweeper building work. She remarked on the odd long crane or railroad car that arrived. Hmmm—it could be that the caption was wrong and the long mastlike thing had something to do with that.

But I and my friend Sarah Giles, whose mother Sally was of the Hodgdon shipbuilding family, decided that delivery had probably been the Hodgdon Brothers steam crane. It was one of our favorite items to clamber on as kids, and the crane did an elegant job of flattening anything we placed on its track—gracefully bent staging nails made great little scimitars. Thinking about it now, I'm sure my pre-OSHA childhood without hovering parents was more interesting than many lived today. We weren’t run off by the workmen since Sarah’s family owned the yard.

Jerry Hyson, Royall Dodge, and Jimmy McFarland

Jerry Hyson used to work at Goudy's and Hodgdon's, among other yards, and he drives by my house most days. I flagged him down and showed him the photo, but it didn't spark thoughts of a memorable event that happened in his time in the yards. He did carry his share of masts inside the yard, and he said you never wanted to be man-in-the-middle on uneven ground since you ended up with all the weight. I can picture the men, when needed to move a mast, coming on the run instead of hanging back to get to the ends.

Royall Dodge knew large groups of men carried big masts around, but in 1951 he was headed for Korea. He told me to call Jimmy McFarland of South Bristol who worked for Goudy's for 48 years. He started out planing on the hull of the 68-foot Alden-designed ketch Quail in 1948. Jimmy didn't remember the mast-carrying in the photo, but said, like Jerry, that carrying them on uneven ground kind of made you dance.

Next time: Bob Dighton’s memories of those days at Goudy’s.