Though it is a ways off, Rev. Robert “Bobby” Ives, the well-known co-founder and director of the Carpenter’s Boat Shop in Pemaquid, is looking ahead to retiring “in a year-and-a-half.” With a grin, he said, “Well, I’ll be 66.”
Since Ives is an energetic man, it seems unlikely he’ll sit around. “I think we’ll go to Scotland, and I’ll help around here,” he said, referring to the boat shop.
Talking extensively with Ives, there seems little doubt in his mind the Carpenter’s Boat Shop will continue its unique mission of helping people in transition find peace and purpose.
An ordained minister, Ives, started the Carpenter’s Boat Shop in 1979 in an old chicken barn with his late wife, Ruth, creating an apprentice boat building program to help the young people living with them find their life calling.
On average, there are 10 apprentices that work for nine months building boats. After more than 30 years, the world is now sprinkled with boat shop graduates, many of whom have answered special callings.
Ives remembers so many successful past apprentices, and calls to mind the story of Kim Hoare, who’s had a relationship with the Carpenter’s Boat Shop for more than 25 years.
Ives said Hoare was a senior at Basking Ridge High School, in New Jersey, when through her Presbyterian church there, she traveled to Maine as a CHIP, Inc. volunteer, the organization started by Ruth Ives around 1984.
“There’s been a relationship between CHIP and the Presbyterian church there for more than 20 years,” Ives said.
Through that experience, Hoare learned of the Carpenter’s Boat Shop. Years later Ives said Hoare had been working for the U.S. Dept. of Census doing statistics when she applied for apprenticeship to the Carpenter’s Boat Shop.
After her nine-month apprenticeship, she stayed on to help boat shop instructors teach other apprentices. Her one-year extended stay turned into three years.
“She then went to Yale Divinity School, and became a UCC [United Church of Christ, Congregationalist] minister in Farmington, Conn., later becoming an interim minister in a Farmington, Maine church. She’s now on the [boat shop] board,” Ives said.
Throughout the conversation, Ives talks easily and praises his active board of directors. “They’ll have to find a new director,” is all he said about the years ahead without him at the helm.
It’s through the board, however, and the continuing worldwide support, and hard work of the Friends of the Boat Shop, along with sales of handmade watercraft, and furniture that is at the crux of the nonprofit’s sustainability.
The special Friends of the Boat Shop number about 15 volunteers who work at different times each week. Some lend a hand on boat building projects, build bandboxes, and others like Mariellen Whelan, of Newcastle, are building a toddler-sized sand-moving backhoe toy that’s popular with the beach set. Whelan is a “regular volunteer.”
“I’ve been volunteering for about seven years, and being a regular means, I’m there regularly every Friday morning and sometimes right now during winter on Wednesdays. If Habitat [For Humanity] is building, they build on Wednesdays, and I’m there, but when they aren’t building, I’m at the boat shop,” Whelan said.
When Whelan was a new Newcastle resident, she asked which organizations were working on social justice and, “many people said, ‘You need to speak to Bobby and Ruth [Ives],'” she said.
Whelan learned through her church, St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Newcastle, that volunteers were needed to help sheetrock the Carpenter’s Boat Shop red farmhouse. With past Habitat experience, “I knew how to cut and measure, and I went down and worked on sheetrocking, and segued into painting,” she said.
“Then Bobby wanted me to come up to the shop and work where the apprentices were. I went up there and did a few things, and Bobby decided he wanted to start the Adirondack chair business as a way to use the pieces of cedar…too marred to use for boat planking,” Whelan said.
She spearheaded the effort, creating templates from plans, “and then [I] built the first one with lots of advice and help and on we went.”
The first chair built was a classic Adirondack, but about three years ago, Whelan and her crew began building, “the Pemaquid,” with wider arms and a design allowing for ease in getting up.
“We build both and we have back-orders and we’ve had for years. We’ve never been able to build up an adequate inventory. I’ve moved from the Adirondack chairs to the toy,” she said.
Whelan is aware of Ives’ plans to retire. She would not be surprised if Ives comes back to help out. “I think he misses it [teaching],” said Whelan.
According to Whelan, last year Ives moved off teaching apprentices on the floor. Working as current instructors are son, Jonathan Ives, Kenneth Kortemeier and Darin Carlucci, but Ives is running the well-attended summer furniture and woodworking programs.
“I know Bobby misses the teaching. He did a lot of it this summer. Bobby is a teacher – an actual teacher. He’s a wonderful teacher,” Whelan said. “I suspect the search committee will look for someone ministerial, like Bobby. I think it is an important component – a spiritual dimension – that it be strong. That is what the apprentices lean heavily on.”
For more information on the Carpenter’s Boat Shop, visit www.carpentersboatshop.org, or call 677-2614.
