Joseph E. Garland, journalist and prolific author, sailor, cantankerous citizen, irrepressible rebel and champion of workers' causes in the adopted hometown his ancestors helped settle, has died, a month short of his 89th birthday.
Among his 24 published books were two anthologies of Times' columns written between 1967 and 1997, and a dozen other titles that together create as informed and full a history of the old town as anyone is ever likely to deliver.
Garland's first Gloucester book, "Lone Voyager," an underwritten adventure story of Howard Blackburn, was published in 1963, and has hardly been out of print since — becoming a classic, and part of the essential Gloucester fisherman canon, together with Rudyard Kipling's "Captains Courageous" and Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm."
Meticulously researched, "Lone Voyager" is the true tale of a fisherman of nearly unimaginable grit and perseverance.
Separated from the mother ship by a winter storm and with his mate dead from exposure, Blackburn wrapped his own frozen hands around dory oars for a five-day row to safety in 1883, and then returned to Fishtown a hero for a long life of bartending, solo sailing epics and bonhomie.
Garland, who died Tuesday at his home (see related story), set the survival story against the backdrop of the times — the glorious and lethal era of the Gloucester schooner. The most beautiful and stylish American work boat of the Industrial Age took fishermen to their deaths in wholesale numbers — in the year of Blackburn's adventure alone, 209 lives were lost, a blunt point the author made his audience read as a prelude to the story.
He always explained that his soft spot for fishermen traced to what he considered a closely parallel experience of bonding in a war's platoon.
Blackburn was the first and most legendary hero to be found in Garland's writings, but working-class heroes abound in his columns and books — starting with the citizen-soldiers of Gloucester who trapped and scuttled a British sloop of war during the Revolution, and ending with his magnum opus extolling the quiet heroes and existential futility of World War II.
Indeed, "Unknown Soldiers," the un-Gloucester book — the challenge and travail of his entire adult life accounting for 65 years by the time it finally went on sale in 2009 — was a remarkable group memoir of the buddies he made and either left on the battlefields of Sicily, Italy and the European theater of World War II or kept for life.
Most less privileged than Garland, the son of a physician fixture in proper Boston and Massachusetts General Hospital, the editor-in-chief of no less than the New England Journal of Medicine, and an MGH nurse, the unknown soldiers of the title were the subjects that G.I. Joe pursued after the war for decades.
"The book evolved over the years as Joe traveled around with a bottle of bourbon and legal pads," interviewing every member of his Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon of "ironheads" he could find; he put their recollections on tape and then gave them distinct profiles and voices on the printed page, said the book's publisher, Laura Fillmore of Protean Press in Rockport.
Changing the world?
"He was masterful in capturing everyone's voice," said Fillmore, but she also acknowledged how difficult Garland, the perfectionist, could be to work with.
"He expected the book to come out and make the case against war and change the world," Fillmore said.
Instead, it sold 2,500 copies and failed to exorcise the demons from Garland's soul, she added.
In the introduction to "Unknown Soldiers," Garland wrote of the unpleasant pressure of being the son of a doctor in a line of doctors, expected as a child and adolescent to continue the Garland tradition.
He flunked organic chemistry at Harvard, to ensure that he wouldn't — then dropped out and enlisted in the Army.
Yearning to "mix with the people," the war gave him the chance. He felt himself a writer with nothing to write about, but the war took care of that problem, too.
Garland worked for the Associated Press — reporting and union organizing — and newspapers after the war before settling in Gloucester matched up with Helen, his partner, wife and muse.
Back here, where ancestors helped settle Eastern Point and served as mayor, Garland threw himself into causes and history, writing with humor and passion in the Times and books — while he slowly and painfully attempted worked out his emotional conflicts from the war which drove him to report more deeply but kept him from completing the group memoir.
Strong opinions
He championed the library, the Cape Ann Museum, the schools, the Lannon and the schooner Adventure, and wrote fiercely against war, especially Vietnam, concessions to commercialism and development that threatened the old town's uniqueness and authenticity.
Garland's crusades and crotchety mien made him a polarizing influence, earning him more than a few detractors. As a featured speaker at Mayor Carolyn Kirk's first inaugural in 2008, for example, he excoriated developer Sam Park for bringing into the community Gloucester Crossing, a priority project and sign of progress to his indulgent patron.
The momentary discomfort mattered not at all to Kirk, who said Wednesday of her late friend, "His abundant love for Gloucester made itself known by what he wrote, the causes he supported, the activism he displayed — it all arose from a love of Gloucester."
A consistent train of thought in the aftermath of the news of his death was the memory of Garland as a mentor — an encourager.
"He was like my coach, he helped me stay on the right path," said the schooner Lannon's Capt. Tom Ellis.
A taste of his writing
And beyond all that, boy, could Joe Garland write.
As a taste, here are two representative paragraphs from the thousands if not tens of thousands out there that he left behind as he wrote his way through a life of love for Gloucester and an abiding hope — if not faith — in the perseverance of its better instincts.
Taken from "Beam Reach," the second anthology of Times' columns, a self-effacing Garland recounted for the readers of Yankee Magazine in October 1984 how he lost to carelessness and a storm in 1980 in front of his Eastern Point home the 32-foot sloop that Howard Blackburn built with his own hands in 1929.
"Another few minutes and she lay over to port, way over, like some dying creature, crashing between rock and sea. As the tide rose, she capsized, her spars in the raging water, and her sails and a tangle of lines like the black carcass of a beached whale.
"Then she just came apart and spilled out her guts. The wind and the waves bore them ashore, hatches, dishrags, wooden spoons, life jackets, stove kindling, socks, coffee cans, sleeping bags, spare pants, paint cans, charts, a book or two, Union Jack, and there at my feet half a bottle of rum, courtesy of the recently deceased for the benefit of the wake. So we toasted the old girl, boots awash, right then and there."
Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3464, or at rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.
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