Matthew Stackpole and Nat Benjamin are entertaining raconteurs who delight in each other’s company. A full house of ready listeners filled the room at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum to hear the dear companions share their story of friendship intertwined with Island history and tales of the sea.
Laurel Redington, the M.V. Museum’s director of programming and audience engagement, moderated the continuously amusing discussion, which was filled with anecdotes. She began by asking how the two came to the Island.
Stackpole recalled working as a rigger one summer at Mystic Seaport to, he said, overcome his fear of heights. At the end of the season, he went to see the head rigger about returning the following summer. The rigger told Stackpole, “Why don’t you get a job on a boat that moves?” Familiar with the Shenandoah, Stackpole came here and signed up as a deck hand in 1966, working on her for five summers.
During the second summer, Stackpole happened to be with the ship in Newport, R.I., and this is when Benjamin sets the date of their first meeting. “I wasn’t on a boat,” Benjamin said, turning to Stackpole. “I was an underaged bartender and wasn’t checking IDs, so I probably served you a drink.”
The next time they met was in 1972, when Benjamin, his wife Pam Benjamin, and their young daughter navigated to our waters on Sorcerer of Asker, their 60-foot 1921 racing sloop. On a visit to New England to visit family, Benjamin likes to say, “We sailed into Vineyard Harbor, and the anchor held.”
While speaking about the 1970s, Redington asked for memories regarding the filming of “Jaws.” Stackpole recalled, “It was an interesting phenomenon that was supposed to be just a few weeks long and ended up being here for months. A lot of our friends were involved with chase boats and watching Bruce, the mechanical shark, who, basically, never worked. [Martha, Stackpole’s wife, and he] were chartering at the time, and when they were filming along State Beach in Oak Bluffs, we always tried to sail close by so we could be in the background. But they hired all these people with small boats [as extras], most of whom we knew, who would wave us to go away, so we never made it into the film.”
One of Benjamin’s memories from the period was a remarkable ice-skating adventure. “In late January in 1978, Stan Hart from the Gazette came up to me and said, ‘I’m on assignment and the paper wants me to skate from Gay Head to Edgartown along all the Great Ponds. I’m not a very good skater, but I know you are — do you want to do it?’ It took all day. We started in Squibnocket, cheated, hitchhiking to Chilmark Pond, but from there all the way to Edgartown Great Pond, we were on our own. It was a magnificent day.”
Benjamin spoke about starting Gannon and Benjamin with Ross Gannon in 1980; they still own the company along with Brad Abbott, now a third partner. Benjamin reflected, “We’re in the middle of a transformation in the harbor. We will expand the working waterfront and protect traditional boatbuilding and other maritime industries for generations to come. Shenandoah will be part of it, and we hope to offer Sail Martha’s Vineyard an office and classroom.”
Stackpole oriented us to the harbor’s historic importance, emphasizing that in the 19th century, Vineyard Haven Harbor was one of the busiest in the U.S. “Vineyard Sound was the second busiest waterway behind a little place called the English Channel. It was not unusual to have 200 big schooners anchored in between East Chop and West Chop. None of you complain about the traffic at Five Corners but think about sailing here in 1880, seeing 150 other vessels, and just trying to find a place to anchor.”
Benjamin told a story about when Ted Kennedy, who had previously bought Stackpole’s boat, the Maya, tied up to the Gannon and Benjamin dock, as the Kennedys often did over the years. This particular time, Benjamin, after having greeted Kennedy and his wife, returned to the office. Kennedy had asked if he could throw away his garbage in the dumpster. “I had told him, sure, no problem. We had a young intern working for us, and I saw Ted coming down the dock with two garbage bags. This eager young intern went marching out to see him, not knowing who Ted was. The intern asked if he could help. Ted replied, ‘No, no problem. I’m just going to throw this in the dumpster.’ And the young man said, ‘Well, we recycle here.’ Ted goes, ‘Of course.’ He didn’t say, ‘Yes, I passed the law.’ To Ted’s credit, he did recycle and did not say, ‘Do you know who I am?’”
There were a great many additional memorable anecdotes about their lives, boats, and life on the water. The consensus at the end of the often raucous conversation was the desire for part two of “An Evening with Nat and Matt.”
