Page 6. MAINE COASTAL NEWS July 2012 Eddie Drew & The Lowells By Ruth Lowell
based on interviews of Ed Drew by Jamie & Ruth Lowell
PART II ROYAL LOWELL
ON COMMERCIAL STREET Around 1964, after spending some time in the Navy and Coast Guard, Drew was walking along the Portland waterfront when he ran into Royal Lowell, building a boat in a brick building on Commercial Street. (The building is now a bank, next to the gate of DiMillo’s.) “I went by and I seen somebody was building boats in there so I went in, and it was Royal. We got talking for awhile, and he wanted to know if I wanted a job.” Lowell and Drew built quite a few boats in the Commercial Street building. “Of course one of the great things working with Royal... I don’t think we ever built the same boat twice. It was always a new design, ‘cause he really like designing.” The first boat Drew worked on there was a D330 Caterpillar demonstra- tion boat for Duncan Arnold of Arnold Ma- chinery, the local Caterpillar engine dealer. They had to knock out a brick wall to have enough room for it. “The boat Royal was building before was small enough to build the other way, but this one was a 36 footer. So we had to knock this wall out, and come out there with a kind of shed-like thing covered with plastic. That was my job, taking the wall out. There used to be a door there but they had bricked it up, so once you got a hole through why it wasn’t that bad.”
Drew also got to work with Royal’s fa- ther Riley briefly. Riley had suffered a heart attack but wanted to get back to building, so he came to help Royal start on a new 30-foot
strip boat.
“Royal and I were started in there, get- ting out the transom, and Riley showed up. Royal says ‘If Riley needs a hand, doing stuff on the bandsaw, why just help him out.’ So Riley made up the stem, and we made up the stern. Riley turned out - outside of me helping hold stuff on the bandsaw - Riley turned out the stem and the forefoot, the whole works in a day. Royal and I did the transom and had it all planked up and everything, that day. “So afterward, Royal says, ‘Quite a bit of
work, huh?’
“I says, ‘I guess so! I thought we were moving right along. But that ole sonofabitch, had a heart attack and all, come back and throw one of those together like nothing at all!’
“Royal said, ‘It isn’t.’
“I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ “He says, ‘That’s what Riley did down at the Boston Navy Yard. He made stems up for those 40-foot Liberty launches there, the captain’s gigs, that was one of Riley’s jobs. I don’t know how many hundreds of those things he made. He could make a stem in his sleep!”
Drew said, “We built that 30 footer for Jim Snow, then we built a quahog boat for a guy down in Long Island, New York. He went after quahogs, had a fish store down there, so we built this thing here was like a big cat boat, it was 32 feet long, with a motor in it. Again, another transitional boat. Royal was telling me, ‘Boy, look at those lines, this oughta be a real cinch to build.’ Course the guy wanted it planked with mahogany, it was one of the hardest things we had to do! The thing was, I think it was 32 feet by 12 feet wide or 14 feet wide, and then the bow of it from the keel up was probably only about this high. So you
Eddy Drew
had all these big wide planks and then you come up there to the ends and it’s just about big enough to get two screws in the planks there.”
Other boats were built for Bruce Dyer of Cliff Island, Ronnie Smith of Massachusetts (a 57 footer), and Dick Waltz (54'). A 55' dragger named Bonaventure was launched in 1967, owned by a consortium of fishermen and the owner of Seabreeze Lobster Com- pany.
“Another job I did with Royal, we went over to Tri Tank, and laid out the lines there for a dragger that was finished by Ken Bar- ley... a steel boat, Tharos. Royal and I laid the lines out for that, we put up all these sheets of plywood up on the wall and laid the lines out for ‘em, so they could make all the frames up.”
Drew worked some with Royal’s brother Malcolm. For one job, they repaired an old New York fireboat that had been made into a yacht, a 77' double-ender, owned by Elwin G.
Frost. “They brought the rails right down on the deck, and they had these lead scuppers on the deck. But everything else in between there, the stanchions and stuff, the water would stay in there. As a consequence, things rotted out.... There was maybe two or three strakes down that were rotted, and the stanchions, some of the timber heads there, we had to take and double up on that.” They were getting the covering boards made, two inches and curved, which was quite a bit of work. The boat was 500 or 600 feet away from the shop, at a dock, so they had to lug everything back and forth. Drew was on the boat and asked Malcolm to hand the piece to him. “So Malcolm comes down, I said, ‘Where’s the piece?’” Drew said. “He says, ‘Jeez, I don’t know! I stuck it across there, between the dock and the boat.’ She shifted out and that thing went down. The oak wasn’t dried out to be bouyant, that
Continued on Page 23.
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