Harry Pidgeon interviews, part 1

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Notes on Harry Pidgeon Joshua Slocum Society files based on interviews of Marilou Percival Page 1

In the beginning……


In the early 1990’s I was contacted by Mr. Don Holm, then General Secretary of the Joshua Slocum Society, to contribute an article for his follow on book to The Circumnavigators. I had not kept a running narrative of my efforts, and the photo’s and drawings that were made had been solely for my own enjoyment and never intended for publication. Additionally, I was never a “Yachtsman” in that sense, but solely someone that had learned to sail as a recreation, and was island hopping for the most part. All my boats had been amateur built of plywood, except the last, which was strip planked and cold molded over in fashion at the time in New Zealand. My early navigation was based on the noon sight method, until recently spending some time at Coast Navigation School in Santa Barbara, California under the tutelage of Capt. Svend T. Simonson. Mr. Holm was also interested in my drawings, paintings and sketches done while in the south seas. He used several in issues of the Spray Magazine, the newsletter of the Slocum Society. Eventually, I wrote a few short articles for the newsletter.
Mr. Holm was in advancing years and ill health. He had attempted to get someone to take over the Society, but his efforts had no results over a two years span, then, he published his last appeal, threatening to take the entire archives to the dump if someone didn’t take over. The Society was bankrupt. There was waning interest in such activities and he could find no one to support the Society, a legally formed 501( c) corp. Although I did not feel in a position to resurrect the Society, I didn’t believe that all that had been done should be destroyed. I purchased the entire assets of the corporation and all records, photos and publication rights to the material for the princely sum of twenty dollars U.S.
The packing and shipping costs alone for all the files turned into a couple of thousand dollars effort.
At the time of the transfer, several projects were underway. Mr. Holm had started the outlines for the second book. He had been contacted by a person researching the adventures of Harry Pidgeon, and was in the process of finding and interviewing those persons as part of a program for an internship in art at the University of California, Riverside. Of particular interest was any information to assist in the archiving of photos made by Harry Pidgeon.
Ms. Marilou Percival began her research in 1989 for the purpose of cataloging the collection. She also recorded the first person interviews of the persons in this report, which have been edited only for brevity. She was responsible for the sorting, resleeving and cataloging of the photo collection and in the process discovered photos made by A.E. Stanfield. The oral interviews were not originally part of the plan for the outlined project, but gave a personal insight to Harry Pidgeon as a person, as a husband, and as a friend.
The objective resulted in the first report, made in three sections: first, the negative collection; second, the oral history interviews; and third, the research methods and data collected.
1. The Harry Pidgeon negative collection had been donated to the California Museum of Photography in 1986 by Commander Robert Mohle of Manhattan Beach, California. As a small boy he had accompanied his father to visit Harry Pidgeon while rowing around San Pedro. The negatives were left with his father when Pidgeon went sailing. When Mr. Pidgeon died, the negatives remained with his father, until he inherited them.
2. The first interviewee was Mr. William Oleson of the Los Angeles Maritime Museum. The interview was conducted on May 27, 1989.

Mr. Oleson, responding to a querie about the sails…..

“The small sail in the aft end is called a jigger or the mizzen, so if they called it a mizzen, they would have to call the jib the foresail, and this would be the mainsail, and that would be the mizzen.
(Harry Pidgeon) was a very modest and unassuming sort of chap. He spoke in a matter of fact fashion. I had the pleasure of having dinner with him aboard the Carleda, another yawl, that belonged to some good friends of ours. When Harry got back from his second voyage, our friends Carl and Eda Moller invited him over for dinner because they were both anchored over at the Los Angeles Yacht Club in the outer Fish Harbor, East San Pedro. We had a pleasant afternoon. Harry went over some of his exploits, pretty much like reading the book, but in very matter of fact fashion. He had a varied experience. He Came from, I believe, From Iowa.
And like a lot of Iowans, they somehow or other, have that instinct to seek salt water. Lots of good sailor’s come from Iowa.
So he came to the west coast. He was telling us about his first trip to Alaska. He went up there during the gold rush of 1898 and he didn’t, I believe, find any gold, but he did take his camera along. I guess he got quite a treasure of photographs which, I presume, profited him to some extent. But, interestingly, he went north in the three-masted sailing schooner called the W. F. Jewett which was just simply a cargo vessel designed especially for lumber, and this particular cargo that they took to Alaska was a bunch of would be miners and the entire cargo hold was fitted with bunks, (laughs), and I suppose they might have taken a certain amount of merchandise along for trade goods or something, for ballast because otherwise you would be pretty empty to carry a load of potential miners. It was quite interesting to hear him tell about the trip on the Jewett and that is something that I hadn’t heard before. And it was, incidentally, rated as the largest three masted schooner on the Pacific Coast. Some schooners of the same size had four masts instead of three. Somebody was economizing, I guess, and made do with three gaff sails, but extremely large ones, which made them pretty hard to handle for furling, hoisting, and so forth.”
He mentioned his experiences. Some of his group built a flat boat, and boated down some river, it’s somewhere in his books.”
“He was a very gentle man, very soft spoken, very unassuming. He made friends everywhere, and was welcome everywhere.
“I met his wife, I guess it was his third venture that they were going on and they unfortunately lost the Islander down somewheres in the South Pacific. They were ashore visiting. I think a gale came up and blew the ship against the shore. So, they came back here. Someone had started to build a 26 foot Seabird, I think. And

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one of the local yacht clubs decided that they would present him with the partially finished Seabird, which “Harry completed and then lived aboard. They never sailed it around, Harry was wanting to, but it never came to pass. It was small, twenty six feet, two thirds the length of the original Islander. I was intending to do an article for our newsletter but I have never done that.”
“Harry originally wrote the article “Around the World in Islander” for National Geographic, I think and was published in February 1928.
You might me interested in contacting Commander Robert Mohle. I think he has the old lantern, not magic lantern, but a projector where you put a picture in and project it on the wall. It was the one Harry used in his lectures. I forget whether it use film, that is individual glass plates, or else photos and projected them. I forget what they call the picture projector that you put a postcard into. There was a special name for them. A simple looking thing, an ordinary light bulb in it, some reflectors and a lens and it projected, like a crude slide projector today. You could almost project with a kerosene lamp or candle (chuckles), the basic slide projector. The primitive slide projector.”
“Did Harry make this model of the Islander (indicating one on the shelf)….”
“No, it was made by a Mr. Hines. I don’t know the year it was made, but Harry was still living. It’s extremely well detailed, very accurate. I don’t believe that Harry contemplated originally going around the world. But what happened was that he was interested in making a voyage in a small boat and became acquainted with some people that had Fellows and Stweart, one of the leading boat builders at the time, build them a 38 foot Seagoer, which they called the Seamore. The people had decided to make a voyage to Hawaii and back, quite an adventure. Everthing was all set to go and in the last minute, somehow or another, something collapsed and they called the trip off. So, that was when Harry decided that he would build a duplicate of the Seamore or the Seagoer and go sailing himself. And so he set to work, single handedly, and built the boat, and made the trip. And when he got to Hawaii, he decided to maybe he would go down to the South Pacific, and when he got there, he figured that he would go to Australia, and when he got that far he thought he might as well go (chuckles) the rest of the way. Several people have found that expedient rather than backtrack.
It’s a good way to do it, though a little bit rugged. It has been said that old sailors have said, or one originated the statement: that anyone could go to sea for pleasure, would go to hell for pastime(chuckles). It can be pretty uncomfortable getting tossed around in a small boat in bad weather. It is no fun”
“Sometimes they get swallowed up and are never heard from again. Quite a few adventurers come to grief, and there are others who make it. When did I launch that boat> In 1953, I guess. I built a 40 foot auxiliary schooner, but designed for commercial fishing. It was only intended for local use, along the coast and maybe down to Mexico and possibly up to Point Conception, but not much beyond that. And, for goodness sakes, through a set of circumstances and different owners, when my father got a little bit too elderly to safely take him to sea I decided we better dispose of that boat and get something else. The man who bought it, the first thing he did was to convert it to a yacht and enter the race to Hawaii. Well, it was of such proportions that were never intended for a racing boat or never intended for an ocean voyage.. He got tired of it and wanted something bigger. The man that bought it took the boat up to Alaska and went salmon
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fishing, and while it was up in the Puget Sound a young fellow saw it and fell in love with that boat. He completed an around the world voyage about two years ago…..in my boat. Isn’t that something., and I never would have dreamed. I would have designed a different boat for an around the world voyage. But they made it. I got some letters that made my hair stand on end. They got out in the “roaring forties” (40 degrees South Latitude) going around the Cape of Good Hope and I really don’t know how they made it, by the grace of God, I’d say. These small boats that complete a voyage successfully, that’s gotta be….that has to be by the Grace of God, and nothing else, because I tell you the waves get big and ugly and the current is running against them, they topple over and break Such waves can take a small boat and roll it over and over, just like a little piece of driftwood, or cork.”
“Of course that thing that induces anyone to round the Cape of Good Hope, and it can be very treacherous, is running with a fair wind. It is not always a very safe proposition because the wind can become so strong that it’s dangerous to run before it. A fair wind is behind you. But enough people make it so it encourages others to try it too. (chuckle) They cross the Atlantic in everything from a bathtub to a fishing dory.”

On the maritime Museum..

“We started the maritime museum in 1976, and by a fortunate set of circumstances got this ferry building which was slated for demolition. We managed to get our foot in the doorway, and here we are. We opened on January 1, 1980. We didn’t have much in it, but now it’s too small for all the things we have. We are planning on enlarging. Personally I would preder that it doesn’t get too much bigger because a big museum can be very tiring. There are lots of opportunities for going through with a fine tooth comb and upgrading. I really don’t know about museums, I just know what I like and I know about ships. We have a professional director now. It was put together by a bunch of us amateurs to begin with and it has been a very interesting experience. Well, what I was going to say about the size, we get a lot of voluntary complements, so some of them certainly must be sincere. A lot of people are simply kind, but when they pause at the desk on the way out and say how much they enjoyed the museum, they must mean it. The best of all, in my estimation, I thought was so comical. An old gentleman came by and said “this is even better than the Smithsonian”. Well of course the Smithsonian is one of the world’s largest museums. What he meant was that this one was so much easier on the feet.”
“ We have a lot of tours by school children. Some are interested and some are not. But it’s nice to have some of the children absorb some of this, and a great many come down here who have never been around a harbor before. I always figure that somewhere’s among the kiddies who visit maritime museums, who knows, in the future maybe someone will get the divine spark to reviatalize the American Merchant Marine. Because ours is in such poor shape now, unfortunately. And I hope that something is done about that because we have, really have, a great maritime heritage. And the fact that our flag has almost vanished from the sea, that is something that does not sit very well with me, and a lot of other people, too. It seems like in the beginning we would move

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everything by ship up and down the coast. That’s how all Americans first came over here was on a ship.”
“We continue to collect items for the museum. When we were in the opening, one of the first things we got was a model of the Titanic. Which I, when it was proposed we get that, I laughed. The Titanic, you’re kidding? What’s the Titanic to do with the Pacific Coast. Today it is still the top attraction. That marvelous model is on the main deck. It is an 18 foot model built entirely of cardboard and is cut away to show the interior. I believe it is the only cutaway model of the Titanic in the world. It was started by a school boy and he stuck with it five years. Think of it, a fourteen year old kid starting a project like that. I have models that I started as a kid and I still haven’t them finished. I am 85 now (laughs). A determined young man. He recently completed the Lusitania for us. Now he is working on the Normandie. And in the meantime, he studied for the priesthood and has been ordained in the Catholic Church.”

He leaves the room to search for a photo of Harry Pidgeon.

And returns (with photo in hand) “That’s Harry. This colored photograph has changed shade a little. He didn’t look like he had been taking quinine (laughs). This is a good typical view of Harry, a very nice man. That’s the way his mouth was most of the time, shut. He let other people do the talking. He would talk and didn’t dominate the conversation, he just contributed a nice balance. San Pedro’s own. We kind of adopted Harry here.”
“The library may have more information because he was quite well known here. He spent his last days in San Pedro, so it is possible the library does have a file on him. And, by the grace of God, again, maybe, who knows they may have his letters.”
“Harry was a confirmed bachelor most of his life. He may have relatives here, perhaps a nephew or niece. It seems to me that I heard something like that. Bob Mohle might know as he was quite well acquainted with Harry.. What I think was unique, he was over 50 years old before he started doing this from what I’ve heard so far. When he built the boat he was not exactly a youngster. I guess, he could have been around 50. I don’t know what he did in his earlier life, perhaps a little of everything. A little chicken ranching, and he became well versed in Photagraphy.

End of first interview.