Bowdoin Magazine mentions & 2011 obit (was Re: Bolger obit in NYT)
News to me. Why? The BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2009 issue obit header informs at page 89:
"For a variety of reasons, we have a very long
list of people for whom the College has had
news of their deaths, but for whom a full
obituary has not appeared. Because we feel
passing that news on to you as soon as
possible is important, we are including all of
those names in this issue, while we work to
create a better system for reporting on the
deaths of your friends, classmates, and
associates and for properly honoring their
lives and connections to Bowdoin."http://www.bowdoin.edu/magazine/archives/2009/pdf/BowdoinVol81No1.pdf
PCB noted here on page 90 as: Philip C. Bolger '49 May 24, 2009
The PCB obit occurs in the BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2011 issue at page 92:
"Philip Bolger '49, renowned boat
designer and builder, died May 24,
2009, at his home in Gloucester, Mass.
He was born on December 3, 1927, in
Gloucester, and prepared for college at
Gloucester High School, Winchester
(Mass.) High School, and Brooks School
in North Andover, Mass. He spent one
year at Bowdoin, followed by one year
in the Army, then returned to Bowdoin
to complete his degree in history. He was
a member of Theta Delta Chi fraternity.
He took his own life, having planned
his suicide when he noticed his mind
beginning to slip. A man who reveled
in solving design problems and who had
begun whittling boats at the age of seven,
he left a legacy of unique and creative
watercraft. In 1948, while serving in the
Army in occupied Japan, he wrote an
article for Rudder magazine marveling at
the Japanese boats that float in just several
inches of water. He went on to create
nearly 700 of his own designs, ranging
from the silly to the sublime. In the early
1960s, he began selling the Light Dory,
which measured 15.5 feet long and 4 feet
wide and weighed only 124 pounds. He is
said to have perfected the wooden kayak,
and he designed plywood boats dubbed
"Bolger boxes" that could be built in
a matter of hours. He also designed the
Bolger Brick, an ultra-small, squared-off
sailing skiff made of three 4-by-8-foot
sheets of plywood; the Bolger Pirogue, a
tiny sailboat; and the Bolger Sneakeasy.
His grandest vessel was the HMS Rose,
a replica of the 18th-century HMS
Surprise, built to his design specifications
based on the original British Admiralty
drawings. The 115-foot, fully rigged
tall ship, complete with 20 guns, served
as the stage for Russell Crowe in the
2003 movie "Master and Commander."
The ship now resides at the San Diego
Maritime Museum. He was also a prolific
writer who authored many boat-related
magazine articles and books, including the
2004 book, Boats With An Open Mind,
in addition to a science fiction novel
about apartheid in South Africa. He was
a staunch libertarian and member of the
National Rifle Association. In 1970, he
ripped his diploma in half and mailed
it back to Bowdoin in response to the
College's tolerance for a well-publicized
Vietnam War protest and student strike.
He is survived by Susanne Altenburger,
his wife and business partner of 15 years."
http://www.bowdoin.edu/magazine/archives/2011/pdf/Bowdoin-vol82_No1.pdf
-------------------------
Further,
PCB was the subject of two brief letters concerning an earlier oversight of alumni engaged in the boatbuilding industry in Maine -- see the "mailbox" of the BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2005 issue at page 2http://www.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinmagazine/archives/pdf/Bowdoin_Fall_05.pdf
Archived magazine issues
http://www.bowdoin.edu/magazine/archives/index.shtml
"For a variety of reasons, we have a very long
list of people for whom the College has had
news of their deaths, but for whom a full
obituary has not appeared. Because we feel
passing that news on to you as soon as
possible is important, we are including all of
those names in this issue, while we work to
create a better system for reporting on the
deaths of your friends, classmates, and
associates and for properly honoring their
lives and connections to Bowdoin."http://www.bowdoin.edu/magazine/archives/2009/pdf/BowdoinVol81No1.pdf
PCB noted here on page 90 as: Philip C. Bolger '49 May 24, 2009
The PCB obit occurs in the BOWDOIN MAGAZINE WINTER 2011 issue at page 92:
"Philip Bolger '49, renowned boat
designer and builder, died May 24,
2009, at his home in Gloucester, Mass.
He was born on December 3, 1927, in
Gloucester, and prepared for college at
Gloucester High School, Winchester
(Mass.) High School, and Brooks School
in North Andover, Mass. He spent one
year at Bowdoin, followed by one year
in the Army, then returned to Bowdoin
to complete his degree in history. He was
a member of Theta Delta Chi fraternity.
He took his own life, having planned
his suicide when he noticed his mind
beginning to slip. A man who reveled
in solving design problems and who had
begun whittling boats at the age of seven,
he left a legacy of unique and creative
watercraft. In 1948, while serving in the
Army in occupied Japan, he wrote an
article for Rudder magazine marveling at
the Japanese boats that float in just several
inches of water. He went on to create
nearly 700 of his own designs, ranging
from the silly to the sublime. In the early
1960s, he began selling the Light Dory,
which measured 15.5 feet long and 4 feet
wide and weighed only 124 pounds. He is
said to have perfected the wooden kayak,
and he designed plywood boats dubbed
"Bolger boxes" that could be built in
a matter of hours. He also designed the
Bolger Brick, an ultra-small, squared-off
sailing skiff made of three 4-by-8-foot
sheets of plywood; the Bolger Pirogue, a
tiny sailboat; and the Bolger Sneakeasy.
His grandest vessel was the HMS Rose,
a replica of the 18th-century HMS
Surprise, built to his design specifications
based on the original British Admiralty
drawings. The 115-foot, fully rigged
tall ship, complete with 20 guns, served
as the stage for Russell Crowe in the
2003 movie "Master and Commander."
The ship now resides at the San Diego
Maritime Museum. He was also a prolific
writer who authored many boat-related
magazine articles and books, including the
2004 book, Boats With An Open Mind,
in addition to a science fiction novel
about apartheid in South Africa. He was
a staunch libertarian and member of the
National Rifle Association. In 1970, he
ripped his diploma in half and mailed
it back to Bowdoin in response to the
College's tolerance for a well-publicized
Vietnam War protest and student strike.
He is survived by Susanne Altenburger,
his wife and business partner of 15 years."
http://www.bowdoin.edu/magazine/archives/2011/pdf/Bowdoin-vol82_No1.pdf
-------------------------
Further,
PCB was the subject of two brief letters concerning an earlier oversight of alumni engaged in the boatbuilding industry in Maine -- see the "mailbox" of the BOWDOIN MAGAZINE FALL 2005 issue at page 2http://www.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinmagazine/archives/pdf/Bowdoin_Fall_05.pdf
Archived magazine issues
http://www.bowdoin.edu/magazine/archives/index.shtml
I was contacted by the New York Times for permission to use a photo of our Bolger Brick in Phil's obituary. Here is a link to the article.
Sad news, but Phil left on his own terms in a way which many say they would prefer but few have the courage to put into practice.
He will be missed.
US
Philip C. Bolger, 81, Dies; Prolific Boat Designer
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: June 1, 2009
Mr. Bolger's hundreds of boat designs ranked him among the most prolific and versatile recreational boat designers in the world.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/us/01bolger.html>
Sad news, but Phil left on his own terms in a way which many say they would prefer but few have the courage to put into practice.
He will be missed.
US
Philip C. Bolger, 81, Dies; Prolific Boat Designer
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: June 1, 2009
Mr. Bolger's hundreds of boat designs ranked him among the most prolific and versatile recreational boat designers in the world.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/us/01bolger.html>
Philip C. Bolger, 81, Dies; Prolific Boat DesignerBy BRUCE WEBER
Published: May 31, 2009
Philip C. Bolger, whose hundreds of boat designs, from classic schooners to sportfishing yachts to simple dories and dinghies, ranked him among the most prolific and versatile recreational boat designers in the world, died on Sunday in Gloucester, Mass., where he had lived nearly all his life. He was 81.
Susanne Altenburger
Philip C. Bolger experimented and did not mind failing.
Susan Davis
Mr. Bolger's Gloucester light dory.
Enlarge This Image
Peillet-Long Family
His Brick sailboat.
The cause was a self-inflicted gunshot, his wife, Susanne Altenburger, said. His mind had slipped in the last several months, and he wanted to control the end of his life while he was still able, she said. They had discussed the matter of his death, she added, but he had not told her of his intention. “He wanted to make sure to leave me out of the loop,” Ms. Altenburger said.
Carrie Kimball Monahan, a spokeswoman for the Essex County district attorney, said on Friday that the medical examiner had not yet determined the cause of death.
Mr. Bolger, something of a cult figure in the world of recreational boating, was a bit of a mad scientist, an experimenter who did not mind trying things and failing and then acknowledging his failures. Though he thought a boat could be perfect, he never thought a boat needed to be perfect to be useful or fun.
One of Mr. Bolger’s foremost interests was making boating easier and more accessible for people who were not full-time enthusiasts. For them he created the so-called instant boats, plywood craft that an amateur could build in a matter of hours. Often referred to as Bolger boxes, many were criticized as being out-and-out ugly — “They looked like floating packing crates,” Dan Segal, a boating writer, said — and Mr. Bolger acknowledged as much. But if you wanted to be able to build your own 12-foot boat and have some fun with it, the Bolger box was it.
Among Mr. Bolger’s nearly 700 designs were power boats, rowboats, fishing boats and sailboats, including many of the long, narrow, flat-bottomed sailboats known as sharpies. He designed, on the one hand, what has been called the world’s smallest dinghy, a novelty boat that actually folded up. On the other hand, he designed a replica of the H.M.S. Rose, an 18th-century British frigate, that was used in the 2003 film “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” which starred Russell Crowe. The replica is now at the San Diego Maritime Museum.
Mr. Bolger was an iconoclast, a designer willing — eager, actually — to part with tradition, especially if it meant solving a practical problem. He had no loyalty to symmetry, for example; if necessary, he would move the mast, or even the centerboard, from the center of the boat. Indeed, instead of modifying existing boats, which is how boat design has largely evolved, Mr. Bolger liked to design on the basis of problem solving.
“If you said to him, ‘I want an inexpensive cruising boat for two people that I can put on a trailer,’ he’d design around the criteria,” said Mr. Segal, the former managing editor of the magazines Small Boat Journal and The Yacht. “He was, as far as I know, unique in this approach.”
That is not to say Mr. Bolger didn’t have a fine eye for a boat’s lines. In fact, he created several boats considered beauties, if not masterpieces — his Gloucester light dory, for example.
“His influence was gigantic,” said Sam Devlin, a boat designer and builder in Olympia, Wash., who as a young man some 25 years ago made a pilgrimage to Gloucester just to meet Mr. Bolger. “There were not many segments of the market he didn’t touch.”
Philip Cunningham Bolger was born on Dec. 3, 1927, in Gloucester, where he grew up whittling boats and watching real ones being built in a harbor boatyard. His older brother gave him his first boat when he was 7. His father died when he was a boy, and he was raised largely by his mother, Ruth, who encouraged independent thinking and guided him to books. (Mr. Bolger was a voracious reader.)
As an adult, he lived with his mother until her death in the late 1980s, after which he moved onto a boat. He and Ms. Altenburger were married in 1994. She is his only survivor.
Mr. Bolger’s grandfather had been an inventor who specialized in sheet metal and whose business, the Success Manufacturing Company, made its reputation producing steel iceboxes. When Philip was young, his grandfather lost his mental faculties, Ms. Altenburger said, leading not only to his company’s demise and changing what Philip thought would be his future, but also making an impression on him that affected the way he ultimately chose to die.
Mr. Bolger served in the Army just after World War II and graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where he studied history. He then turned to boat building as a career, serving apprenticeships with Lindsay Lord, a premier designer of recreational power boats, and John Hacker, a leading designer of racing boats.
Mr. Bolger wrote about boat design as well. Of his many books, the best known is “Boats With an Open Mind” (1994), an explication of 75 different boat designs, written in precise, personal prose. “The sides are too high to row comfortably, but she’ll carry four men and a big, frightened dog,” he wrote of a boat called Brick, one of his inelegant but practical boxes, “with plenty of buoyancy left, still able to sail though with lots of noisy waves.”
That insouciance was typical of Mr. Bolger.
“He was not held by any strings to conventional wisdom,” Mr. Devlin said. “He broke the boundaries. He allowed us to believe nothing was heresy.”
A version of this article appeared in print on June 1, 2009, on page B8 of the New York edition.
*******
The Peillet-Long Family
Tunis, Tunisia
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Published: May 31, 2009
Philip C. Bolger, whose hundreds of boat designs, from classic schooners to sportfishing yachts to simple dories and dinghies, ranked him among the most prolific and versatile recreational boat designers in the world, died on Sunday in Gloucester, Mass., where he had lived nearly all his life. He was 81.
Susanne Altenburger
Philip C. Bolger experimented and did not mind failing.
Susan Davis
Mr. Bolger's Gloucester light dory.
Enlarge This Image
Peillet-Long Family
His Brick sailboat.
The cause was a self-inflicted gunshot, his wife, Susanne Altenburger, said. His mind had slipped in the last several months, and he wanted to control the end of his life while he was still able, she said. They had discussed the matter of his death, she added, but he had not told her of his intention. “He wanted to make sure to leave me out of the loop,” Ms. Altenburger said.
Carrie Kimball Monahan, a spokeswoman for the Essex County district attorney, said on Friday that the medical examiner had not yet determined the cause of death.
Mr. Bolger, something of a cult figure in the world of recreational boating, was a bit of a mad scientist, an experimenter who did not mind trying things and failing and then acknowledging his failures. Though he thought a boat could be perfect, he never thought a boat needed to be perfect to be useful or fun.
One of Mr. Bolger’s foremost interests was making boating easier and more accessible for people who were not full-time enthusiasts. For them he created the so-called instant boats, plywood craft that an amateur could build in a matter of hours. Often referred to as Bolger boxes, many were criticized as being out-and-out ugly — “They looked like floating packing crates,” Dan Segal, a boating writer, said — and Mr. Bolger acknowledged as much. But if you wanted to be able to build your own 12-foot boat and have some fun with it, the Bolger box was it.
Among Mr. Bolger’s nearly 700 designs were power boats, rowboats, fishing boats and sailboats, including many of the long, narrow, flat-bottomed sailboats known as sharpies. He designed, on the one hand, what has been called the world’s smallest dinghy, a novelty boat that actually folded up. On the other hand, he designed a replica of the H.M.S. Rose, an 18th-century British frigate, that was used in the 2003 film “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” which starred Russell Crowe. The replica is now at the San Diego Maritime Museum.
Mr. Bolger was an iconoclast, a designer willing — eager, actually — to part with tradition, especially if it meant solving a practical problem. He had no loyalty to symmetry, for example; if necessary, he would move the mast, or even the centerboard, from the center of the boat. Indeed, instead of modifying existing boats, which is how boat design has largely evolved, Mr. Bolger liked to design on the basis of problem solving.
“If you said to him, ‘I want an inexpensive cruising boat for two people that I can put on a trailer,’ he’d design around the criteria,” said Mr. Segal, the former managing editor of the magazines Small Boat Journal and The Yacht. “He was, as far as I know, unique in this approach.”
That is not to say Mr. Bolger didn’t have a fine eye for a boat’s lines. In fact, he created several boats considered beauties, if not masterpieces — his Gloucester light dory, for example.
“His influence was gigantic,” said Sam Devlin, a boat designer and builder in Olympia, Wash., who as a young man some 25 years ago made a pilgrimage to Gloucester just to meet Mr. Bolger. “There were not many segments of the market he didn’t touch.”
Philip Cunningham Bolger was born on Dec. 3, 1927, in Gloucester, where he grew up whittling boats and watching real ones being built in a harbor boatyard. His older brother gave him his first boat when he was 7. His father died when he was a boy, and he was raised largely by his mother, Ruth, who encouraged independent thinking and guided him to books. (Mr. Bolger was a voracious reader.)
As an adult, he lived with his mother until her death in the late 1980s, after which he moved onto a boat. He and Ms. Altenburger were married in 1994. She is his only survivor.
Mr. Bolger’s grandfather had been an inventor who specialized in sheet metal and whose business, the Success Manufacturing Company, made its reputation producing steel iceboxes. When Philip was young, his grandfather lost his mental faculties, Ms. Altenburger said, leading not only to his company’s demise and changing what Philip thought would be his future, but also making an impression on him that affected the way he ultimately chose to die.
Mr. Bolger served in the Army just after World War II and graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where he studied history. He then turned to boat building as a career, serving apprenticeships with Lindsay Lord, a premier designer of recreational power boats, and John Hacker, a leading designer of racing boats.
Mr. Bolger wrote about boat design as well. Of his many books, the best known is “Boats With an Open Mind” (1994), an explication of 75 different boat designs, written in precise, personal prose. “The sides are too high to row comfortably, but she’ll carry four men and a big, frightened dog,” he wrote of a boat called Brick, one of his inelegant but practical boxes, “with plenty of buoyancy left, still able to sail though with lots of noisy waves.”
That insouciance was typical of Mr. Bolger.
“He was not held by any strings to conventional wisdom,” Mr. Devlin said. “He broke the boundaries. He allowed us to believe nothing was heresy.”
A version of this article appeared in print on June 1, 2009, on page B8 of the New York edition.
*******
The Peillet-Long Family
Tunis, Tunisia
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]