Page 20. MAINE BOATBUILDERS SHOW Profi le: Vinnie Cavanaugh, 1912-1999 Continued from Page 19. “So on the way home I bought a bottle


of Caldwell’s rum and a 6-pack of Pepsi. The next day about 2, why Cavanaugh says, ‘I gotta go over to the shop for a minute.’ “And I says, ‘No,’ I says, ‘you don’t.’ “‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I do.’


“And I says, ‘No, just go in the back of my truck there.’ (I had a camper-like body I had built on, for a mobile shop. Also had it fi xed up for camping, so it had a counter in there and a stove and stuff.) I says, ‘What you want is right on the counter there.’ “So he goes up in, he comes back out, he says, ‘Okay!’ So he had his drink and then he went back to work. “I told him, ‘You want another one a little bit later on, go to it. I know it ain’t gonna affect your work.’” Cavanaugh’s shop was known as a hangout for all different sorts of people. “There were fi shermen there, millionaires there, lawyers, doctors, car salesmen, all kinds of people would come down to this ratty little boat shop,” said Drew. “John Nissan used to come down there, Charlie MacDermott, Grover Richards, that donated the Richards Wing at the medical center... Like I said, there was a wide variety of people come down there.” Others included Stan Bennett, Richard Waltz, Rufus McVane, George Morrill, Jr., and John Gould.


Cavanaugh told Drew a story about Grover Richards: Grover was worth maybe 3, 4, 5 hundred million dollars. Vinnie said that one day, Grover was down there and he was complaining about how he’d like to buy a new Rolls-Royce. But Grover says, “You know they want 70 or 80 thousand dollars for those goddam things!”


It was summertime and the door to the shop was open. When you went out you were on the roadway, and the water was right there, too. Cavanaugh said he reached in his pocket and hauled out some change. He picked out a quarter.


“Grover,” he says, “what’s that?” Grover says, “Why, it’s a quarter,


Vinnie.” Vinnie says, “Yuh” and threw it out the


door, and it fell into the water. Grover says, “Jesus Christ, Vinnie, you threw a quarter overboard!” “Yuh,” Cavanaugh says, “I did, Grover. You know, you could do that with 70, 80


thousand dollars and you wouldn’t miss it any more than I do that quarter.” A couple weeks later, Grover came down to the shop. Cavanaugh says, “Hey Grover, how you doing?” He says, “Good, Vinnie. Come on out, see the new Rolls!”


Cavanaugh says, “Did you get a new Rolls, Grover? Good for you! Goddamit, you got all that money, if you want something then why the hell not get it?” Grover says, “You know, after you did that thing with that quarter, I was going home, I was thinking the same thing. What the hell is 70 or 80 thousand dollars to me? So I bought it. Bought the new Rolls.” Vinnie said there she was, all a-sparkling, and Grover tells him, “Yes, in fact, I bought my wife one too.”


Drew remembers another hanger- on who would always rush into the shop breathing heavily, as if he had been running. “Can I have a drink?” he would ask, and so Cavanaugh would pour him some Caldwell’s rum. The guy would drink it and then leave soon after. One day Cavanaugh asked him, “How about you bring me a bottle down sometime? I’ve given you a lot of this rum.” So the next time the fellow came in, he brought a bottle of Caldwell’s rum. Then, instead of having a drink and running off as usual, he stayed until the bottle was empty. The shop on Merchant’s Wharf hosted some legendary chowder parties. “Everybody would bring a bunch of stuff, all kinds of different things, and make up a big fi sh chowder in a steamer, he had one of those big gas rings there,” said Drew. (According to Gould, they cooked the chowder on top of the old Stationmaster stove, taking turns climbing a stepladder to stir the chowder with a dory sweep. Parts of Gould’s essay sound tongue-in-cheek to me, but Drew told me it was accurate...) Fishermen would bring the seafood for the chowder, Stan Bennett of Oakhurst Dairy would donate milk and cream, Hannaford Brothers would send a stem of bananas, wheel of cheddar and sack of peanuts, and so forth until there was quite a feast. One year, Drew had gone home before the party ended, so the next day Cavanaugh was fi lling him in on the late night happenings. Vinnie told him that when everybody was about gone, O’Donovan had come to Vinnie and said, “Hey, so-and-so’s taking stuff out of here. He’s made half a


dozen trips, taking them out to his car.” So Vinnie didn’t say anything to the guy, but he watched him. “Pretty soon I see him,” Vinnie said, “he grabs up a bottle of booze, goes out the door, and after a little bit he comes back again.” Vinnie went out back in the shop, went out the side door, and up around to the guy’s car. Sure enough, there’s all this stuff in there – bottles of booze, cans of sardines, all kinds of stuff from the party. So Vinnie took it all out and set it on the wharf, and went back in the shop. Apparently the guy fi gured he’d sent out enough, and didn’t dare take anything more, so he says, “Well, I guess it’s time to go home now. I’ll see you fellas sometime later on.” So he went out and got in his car and took off. Vinnie told Drew, “I’d give a week’s pay to see his face when he got home, opened up that back door and there wasn’t a damn thing in there!” The old Stationmaster stove was an


object of affection in the shop. Drew says that in the spring of one year Vinnie and a bunch of the guys were sitting around shooting the breeze when someone said, “You know, the old stove has been working hard keeping us warm all these years, I think it deserves a vacation.” So they talked it over and decided to send it to Florida. They crated the stove up, sent it via railway express down to Florida, had them hold it down there for a week, and then shipped it back up again. The shop was also home to the steam whistle from Casco Bay Lines’ fi rst fl agship, Aucocisco. According to Gould, the whistle was rigged to a propane bottle and boiler so that it would toot when you pulled the lanyard.


Attendees were also treated to speeches: “The recording secretary, one Joshua Hathaway, would arrange for six speakers to talk on diverse subjects, and to save time they gave their remarks simultaneously,” wrote Gould. After the chowder, supposedly someone would read Irishman Edmund Burke’s “Speech on Conciliation with the [American] Colonies”. The men would also perform marching maneuvers along the wharf. (No women were allowed. Gould says this was because of the primitive restroom facilities.)


By the 70s, Cavanaugh’s boatbuilding was winding down. “I think Ted Rand’s boat was the last boat that he built,” Drew said. “I think he probably did that one in the 70s or so; after that he just did repair work, stuff like that.” In the mid or late 80s, Merchants


Wharf and Brown Wharf merged to create the new Portland Fish Pier, and Cavanaugh’s shop was “improved” out of existence. Local photographer Jeffrey Stevensen described meeting Cavanaugh in January 1982: “I was poking around and set up the camera to shoot the end of the wharf, his shop. He invited me inside to talk a bit and take a look around. As soon as I walked in I knew I had to shoot his portrait. The shop was such an interesting mix of old, time- worn elements incongruously decorated with posters popular in college dormitories. Vinnie sat in his chair at my request and picked up a bottle of some inexpensive whiskey, which he cradled comically in his arms with a wise-guy expression. I made that shot, then asked him to set the bottle aside for a shot. I took it from his arms, and he settled back with a most vulnerable expression on his face, as though he felt exposed without a shield. It was a very poignant moment.” (From a photo caption in the 2010 photography show “Seeing Portland – 1970 to 1984”.)


Also in the 80s, Cavanaugh lost his larynx to throat cancer. (He had been a heavy smoker.) He received an artifi cial voice box, but preferred writing his comments down on a little pad of paper that he carried with him. After his bout with cancer, Cavanaugh spent his days making the rounds of local boat yards. Chip Flanagan says that he still has piles of little papers with comments from Cavanaugh’s notebook. “He would write something down, tear off the sheet and hand it to you.” Bob Turcotte was a young boatbuilder


at Gowen’s and also enjoyed Cavanaugh’s visits. “He’d come around, hide your tools, or do something to goof on you,” said Turcotte. “If he liked you, he would show you how to do something – caulking, or planking, or something. Of course he didn’t have to take up the bevels on the frames like some of us do, he was pretty good at eyeballing it.”


One day out on the dock Turcotte saw an old wreck of a barge that was later condemned by the Coast Guard. Turcotte says to Cavanaugh, “Hey Vinnie, I see one of your designs in the slipway out there!” Vinnie looks out the window, then pulls out his pad of paper. After a moment’s pause he writes, “You’re one clever bastard to recognize one of my designs!”


Cavanaugh passed away in March of 1999. Drew says he used to tease Cavanaugh: “Vinnie was a lifetime member of Bath Maritime Museum. I told him, I said, that’s what I’m gonna do with you when you kick off. I’m gonna make a nice teak stand for you, drive a couple a screws up into your feet, and put a brass plaque on there that says ‘Vincent Cavanaugh, Antique Boatbuilder.’ I won’t have to worry about you lasting, you’re already embalmed with all that goddam rum you put into you! Once a week, why some young woman will come along with a feather duster and take the cobwebs off you.” Vinnie got a big laugh out of that. List of Vinnie Cavanaugh boats,


KAYLA MARIE, a Calvin Beal 38, hull and top laid up by SW Boatworks of Lamoine and fi nished off by Taylored Boats as a lobster boat. She is powered with a 500-hp John Deere diesel with a 2.5:1 ZF gear and a 32 x 32 propeller. On sea trials she did 23.8 knots.


from the research of boatbuilder Chip Flanagan: 44’ Cadet (dragger for Bob Walker); 35’ (1946, fi rst boat on Merchant’s Wharf); 35’ JJ (for John Nissan; now Mariah Willow); 35’ Tara; 35’ Teaser; 35’ Bamba (originally Blue Chip; now Bear); 35’ Swell (1951); 35’ Little Audrey (work boat for Ted Rand, 1972); 33’ Grey Goose; 32’ Esther Rosa (1963); 25’ 6” Young Teaser (1965); and 25’ 6” Kenebis (1956).


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