He kept hope afloat at Lowell

AMESBURY -- In many of Winslow Homer's haunting seascapes, Grand Banks fishermen from Massachusetts are depicted rowing in harrowing conditions, in boats once called ''wherries" and in the last century ''dories." The double-ended, hard-chine vessels are sleek and seaworthy, meant to help men with their labors and keep them alive.

In Amesbury tomorrow, a memorial service will be held to honor the man credited with keeping alive the Lowell Boat Shop, the oldest wooden boat-maker in the country. The shop invented the classic New England dory and produced thousands of them.

Malcolm Jamison ''Jim" Odell died Sept. 3 in Exeter, N.H. A memorial celebration at the Lowell Boat Shop will begin at 3 p.m. tomorrow. Though he lived 93 years, that was less than half of the lifespan the boat shop he and his wife Peg saved for posterity.

Despite the modern image of boats as luxury items, in New England's early days of bad roads and unsure transportation, most people needed boats to get around and the tradition of small-boat building flourished on the coast. Along the Merrimack River, a number of boat builders established shops, including, in 1793, the Lowell Boat Shop in Amesbury.

In the economic depression following the Revolutionary War, one of the mainstays for coastal New England was the sacred cod, which was fished offshore in 50-ton schooners, which themselves needed the support of small, seaworthy boats. Enter the flatbottom, lapstrake hull that would become known over two centuries as ''Lowell dories."

For most of those years, the shop was prosperous as boat builders turned out as many as 25 dories weekly for the fishing trade, military service, lifesaving -- for any reason a boat was needed. Ralph Lowell, the seventh-generation descendant of Simeon Lowell, who sold the yard to Jim and Peg Odell in 1976, assessed the creation of his forbear, Simeon, in a history of the boat shop.

It was, Ralph Lowell said, ''a good, safe boat, safe to use in surf, at the bar, and the saying was that the nice thing about the dory was that you'd never get drowned in one. It might scare you to death, but they always told the fishermen, 'If you get caught in a storm away from your ship in a dory, lie down and ride it out because the chances that it will swamp and capsize are almost nil."

But as the 20th century developed, particularly the years of the Great Depression, the boat business fell on hard times. By the 1950s, when new building materials of aluminum and fiberglass appeared, most of the wooden boat shops on the Merrimack went out of business. As craftsmen disappeared, Lowell was having a hard time delivering the boats for which he had orders. In 1976, Lowell sold the business to Odell, a retired Weyerhauser engineer, and his wife, Peg.

The shop was sold after some failed attempts to save it, one of them an improbable effort in 1973 to take the entire boat shop by barge to the Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. The Odells believed that the dory, proven for her seaworthiness, and with a classic, aesthetic line, would appeal to yachtsmen and, especially, wooden boat connoisseurs.

Odell did make some concessions to the new age by using epoxy to seal bottoms and some fiberglass resins for reinforcement. But essentially, the Lowell Dory was the same as it had been when Simeon Lowell began producing them in the 18th century, and the Odells were credited with having saved the Lowell Boat Shop, at least for a while.

Jim Odell, a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, built, sailed, and raced boats for 80 years, according to his son, Mac. He built his first boat at age 13 and then developed a series of hydroplanes, all called Hellbent, one of which suffered an undignified sinking in Lake Michigan. And despite his service as an Army captain, Jim and Peg, whom he married in 1937, also devoted most of their later years to the Beyond War movement, dedicated to the notion that warfare is obsolete in modern times.

''The importance of what Jim and Peg saved here was more the process of wooden boat building as the boats themselves," said Ben Labaree, one of the country's foremost nautical historians and author of ''America at Sea" and ''New England at Sea." ''There are only a few places -- Mystic Seaport, Sturbridge -- where you can go see men working with hand tools to build a useful product. That's the heart of the artisan in America, and the artisan has almost disappeared. That's the importance of what they did."

The Odells struggled to keep the shop going when they reached their 70s, said Mac. ''At one point, it looked as if the shop was not going to make it, and there was a lot of pressure on to sell it," he said. ''My mother took a job working at the Haverhill Council on Aging, and came home and told my father that she was caring for people 10 years younger than she was."

To save money, they lived in a one-room apartment in Exeter -- ''thrifty Yankees," said Mac -- and finally the Boat Shop was saved again as it gained status as a National Historical Landmark, and received support from the state Historic Commission, Trust for Public Lands, National Park Service, and the Newburyport Maritime Museum.

When Peggy died in 2001, Jim carried on his sailing and working around the shop. According to Mac, he took a sail on his Pearson Triton less than two weeks before his death. And therein, said Mac, lies one of Jim Odell's secret truths. A Triton is a 28-foot fiberglass boat.

''He always said, 'You can have a wooden boat shop, and you can have a wooden boat. But there isn't time to have both."

Always a Dixieland jazz buff who liked to remember that he met Benny Goodman in the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, Jim Odell will be remembered tomorrow by a jazz band that plans to play a rendition of ''When the Saints Go Marching In" as the procession returns from an ash ceremony to the Boat House celebration.