Jarvis Ward Newman, 84

Southwest Harbor, Maine

Jarvis Ward Newman, 84, died peacefully September 1, 2019, at Birch Bay Village in Bar Harbor. He was born July 6, 1935, the son of Laurence and Eleanor (Jarvis) Newman in New Haven, Conn. Jarvis graduated from Pemetic High School, Southwest Harbor, in 1954. Through junior and high school, he lobstered and fished with his father and grandfather, worked at the Gordon & White Garage, and had what became a life-long interest of restoring cars. He graduated from Wentworth Institute in Boston in 1956 from the aircraft-maintenance program. His first job was with General Electric (GE) in Cincinnati, Ohio, testing jet engines. After two years there, including six months of basic training in the U.S. Army, he moved to Massachusetts to work for GE in Lynn. He found an apartment in Marblehead and worked for the Eastern Yacht Club summer nights and weekends.

Early in 1961 Jarvis called Susan Bunker, a Southwest Harbor girl who was attending school in Boston, and later that year they were married in the same church they had both attended in Southwest Harbor. In 1962, after their first daughter, Kathe, was born, Jarvis went to work with the Stanley Elevator Company of Nashua, New Hampshire, installing elevators throughout northern New England. Six months after the birth of their second daughter, Kim, in 1964, they returned to Southwest Harbor when Bob Hinckley offered Jarvis a job in the fiberglass department of the Henry Hinckley Company. After learning the fiberglass process, Jarvis saw a need for a rowboat or yacht tender to sell sailboat owners. He began building them at home and sold his first one in 1966. In 1968 Jarvis and Sue purchased The Village Washtub in town, and Jarvis left Hinckley to build rowboats while Sue ran the laundromat. At that time he thought he would build a classic Maine boat, a Friendship Sloop, in fiberglass, so he used a wooden 25’ sloop to build a hull and deck mold. In 1969, 50 years ago this month, Jarvis launched his first fiberglass Friendship Sloop; the boat continues to sail out of Southwest Harbor today. In 1970, Jarvis Newman Boats was formed, and the family moved to Manset, Maine, where he built a larger shop behind his grandparents’ house and expanded to include powerboats and a larger Friendship Sloop. The demand for his hulls became so great that he made the decision to build, with three employees, just the hull and deck, with engine installed, and to then ship the boats elsewhere to be finished. During the ’70s, Jarvis also restored two original wooden Friendship Sloops, Venture and Dictator, selling the first and keeping the second as the family boat. The Dictator restoration was chronicled in a Time-Life book called The Classic Boat. He sailed her in races at Friendship Harbor every summer as well as locally with friends and family. In 1978 he sold the boatyard, and in 1980 started Newman Marine Brokerage, spending the next 35 years selling boats, and working on his own. Jarvis was eventually awarded the Maine Governor’s lifetime achievement award for promoting Maine’s boat-building industry.