So: my grandfather died on Saturday night. We kind of had some warning and I was able to get to Massachusetts on Friday to see him, and I’m really grateful for that. As you can imagine I am feeling glum and not very talkative, so I’m just going to share the obituary that ran in our local paper:
Dana Adams Story, historian, shipbuilder and chronicler of Essex, Massachusetts delighted in the rich daily life and characters of small-town New England.
Dana loved people, loved to talk with people - especially the older people with stories to pass on - and loved to write down and share their humor, colloquialisms, and endearing eccentricities with others.
Without ever seeming rushed, he managed to pack into his 85 years all of the traditional commitments and satisfactions of small-town life: the hard work of running a shipyard and later a yacht yard; the deep involvement in church and town affairs as vestryman, churchwarden, selectman, planning board member, and chief of the auxiliary fire department; the raising of three children with his wife Margaret, and still have time to write books, become an accomplished photographer, musician, lecturer, and raconteur.
As he grew older, his daily progress through the center of town to the post office served as a reminder to younger residents of Essex of all that was dying away in small town life, where stopping to chat with friends and neighbors was a civility that deepened one’s connection to and affection for the community.
He was the son of Arthur Dana Story, builder of the iconic Gloucester fishing schooners Columbia, Gertrude Thebaud, and Henry Ford, and the most prolific shipbuilder in a long line of Essex builders. Dana, as the 6th generation Story to run a shipyard in the historic shipyard location now occupied by the Essex Shipbuilding Museum, told the stories of his family’s and town’s work in Frame Up!, Hail Columbia!, and Growing Up in a Shipyard, focusing on the days when the “gang” still worked outside six days a week sun-up to sunset all year round, with breaks for grog and some story-telling, no doubt.
Even as quite a young man, he recognized that the Essex shipyards of his youth were something special - never to be seen again in this country - and resolved to document them. He began taking a notebook on his visits to the men who had worked at the Story and James shipyards and started a life-long quest to catalog the vessels, the technology, and the people of the 300-year shipbuilding history. The Shipbuilders of Essex, Building the Blackfish, and The Building of a Wooden Ship followed.
He graduated from Essex High School in 1936 and studied naval architecture at MIT. During the Second World War he worked as a naval draughtsman at the W.A. Robinson Shipyard in Ipswich where landing craft, wooden minesweepers, and tugboats were built, but where no trace remains of the shipyard today. He also worked at Sun Shipbuilding and Drydock Company in Wilmington, Delaware. Returning to Essex after the war, he built wooden fishing draggers for the Gloucester fishery at the old family yard until post-war inflation and the decline of wooden shipbuilding eventually led to his turning it into a yacht yard. He built some boats there in the 1950s, but didn’t resume full-time boatbbuilding until 1971. With his son, Brad, he built boats there until his retirement in 1984.
During the tough economic times for wooden shipbuilding he worked as a professional photographer, as a laborer with the town DPW, and as sexton at the Essex Congregational Church, where he was proud to ring the Paul Revere bell. In the early 1960s he took a night job at the Bethlehem Steel drydock to keep his boatbuilders paid through the lean months.
After the Essex Shipbuilding Museum opened he was pleased to donate many shipyard tools and artifacts as well as his collection of thousands of shipyard photographs. He had an encyclopedic mind for historical detail and enjoyed serving as consultant to Mystic Seaport in the restoration of the schooner L.A. Dunton, and from time to time, assisting curators at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. In recent years he advised Harold Burnham, scion of another ancient Essex shipbuilding family, when Burnham built the schooner Thomas E. Lannon outdoors, in the traditional way, on the old shipyard property.
His mother, Ruby Adams Story, came from a family with as rich a history with trains as the Storys had with shipbuilding. In the last few years Story edited his grandfather Philip Tyler Adams’s diaries and published them in December, 2004: Daily except Sundays: The Diaries of a Nineteenth Century Locomotive Engineer.
He took great pleasure in so many things: in his walks through Essex; in trucks and fire engines of all sorts; in his music - he played the B flat bass horn, the piano accordian, the organ, and the piano, and sang in the Ascension Church choir; and especially, in his family. He is survived by his wife of 63 years, Margaret, his son Brad Story, a sculptor in Essex, Massachusetts, his daughter Christine Story Day, of Ipswich, Massachusetts, and four grandchildren, Peter Day of Addison, Vermont, Edith Day of Big Bear, California, and Emma Story and Isaac Taylor, both of New York City. He was predesceased by his nine half brothers and sisters and his son, Richard Story, of Geneseo New York.
