John R. Ulanowski, 80

Plymouth, Mass.

John Richard Ulanowski was born in Boston on May 29, 1939, the son of John Ulanowski and Nellie Shereika. His father was a machinist at the Fore River Shipyard, and his mother a homemaker. When the family moved to Marshfield, Mass., boats and boating became father and son’s avocation.

John played football at Marshfield High School, from which he graduated in 1957. He attended Suffolk University, where he studied business administration, and graduated in 1961 from Burdett College in Boston with a business degree.

In 1964, he and Susan E. Carey married. They had two children before the marriage ended in divorce. Throughout the 1960s, he was one of the top grossing salesmen for Peabody Office Furniture Co. But when he was returning from a Caribbean vacation in 1972, he decided to visit the Miami Boat Show, where powerboat manufacturers had their newest models on display. It didn’t take long for John to determine that he knew as much about boats as many of the boat dealers. It was then that he decided to combine his work experience in sales and marketing with his first love, boats.

Eventually John started the Scituate Yacht Company, where for three decades he was one of the preeminent boat dealers in New England, and among the savviest. Year after year he instinctively knew which new boats on the market would sell – and which would not – which accounted for an inventory of new boats that moved swiftly from manufacturers to his boatyard to eager buyers.

To many of his friends around Scituate, John was known as “Waterman.” At home, his wife, Hannah, ordered him to remove a business phone line he kept in their bedroom in case a wealthy overseas customer called at 3 a.m. Some did – until, as instructed, he disconnected the phone.

When he married the Rev. P. Hannah Linnens, an Episcopal priest, in 1994, the couple honeymooned on one of John’s boats. On their wedding night, she recalled, they anchored in Provincetown, where John spent part of the night tinkering with the engine. In his retirement, John took to buying, restoring, trading and selling fabled British motor cars – MGBs, Austin-Healeys, and the like.

In addition to his wife, John leaves behind his former wife, Susan Fichtner of Scituate, and their two children, Karen and James, as well as two sisters, Frances Estin and Susan Sparks, and five grandchildren.