C. Dana Densmore papers

Charles Dana Densmore was born October 1, 1920 in Brookline, Massachusetts, to George Ellis and Florence Marshall Densmore. The youngest of three children, he grew up in Brookline and spent every summer with his family on the shores of Buzzards Bay. He attended the Fenn School in Concord, Massachusetts, and the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He returned to the east coast where, in 1940, he was hired by a New London lawyer who bought and sold yachts. "Quite by accident, the sea caught me." At the start of WWII he towed targets for the Coast Artillery at Sandy Hook, New Jersey. In 1943 he joined the Navy and served nearly three years in the South Pacific.

It was in New London, 1941, where he met his future wife, Jean Shipherd. Because of her sun-bleached hair, she was nicknamed "Whitie" by a one of the yacht skippers. After the war, Dana returned with Whitie to his childhood summer home of South Dartmouth. He worked as a carpenter and boat builder. With his "gallant wife raising a family single-handedly," Dana "pursued one lucky man's life of pelagic wanderings." Whitie died in September 2009. They were married for 66 years.

In 1956, his great friend, Jan Hahn, founding editor of Oceanus Magazine, introduced him to Columbus Iselin, then Director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He hired Dana to work as a liaison between the crews and the scientists on the WHOI ships. From there, he became involved in the Physical Oceanography department. He spent the next twenty years doing research on the world's oceans. He worked on 17 ships from five countries for a total of more than 30 cruises.

Dana kept meticulous logs of his voyages with the Oceanographic and assembled a large collection of photographs of those trips. In 1995, Dana wrote the first of two books, "A-Boat, Six Oceanographic Cruises in the World's Biggest Ketch". In 2000 "An Irregular Sort of Life" was published. It chronicled his fifty years in yachts, work-boats, fishermen and, finally, in oceanography. After leaving WHOI in 1976 he worked for the NOAA Fisheries Service from 1979 to 1993.

A lifetime of friendships made in cramped quarters at sea enriched life at the Densmore home on Blacksmith Shop Road. Dana presided over great dinners, outdoor feasts and musical evenings, always pretending to be a curmudgeon and correcting everyone's English. Whether he was out walking the dogs or meeting the "old sea captains" for lunch, he always relished a good chat. Never at a loss for words, Dana could tell a raucous tale about his travels then, just as easily, recite from Gilbert and Sullivan.

Charles Dana Densmore passed away on July 14, 2010 at his home in West Falmouth. He was 89.