Robb White Article

The search terms for this blog suggest that lots of people are looking for information on Robb White, boatbuilder, writer, and friend to many. He passed away suddenly, recently (see below). So, here's the text of his profile from WB No. 160, written after a visit with him in the winter of 2000-2001. This is among the most memorable encounters I've had during my time at WoodenBoat.  ~MPM

The Evolution of Robb White
Boats and free thinking in south Georgia

by Matthew P. Murphy

Evolutionary biologists love islands. When populations of plants or animals become separated from others of their kind, as happens when they find themselves transported to an island, all sorts of weird and wonderful things can happen over time. Consider, for example, the Galapagos archipelago. These islands are home to many species found no place else on Earth. They may have origins in common with cousins on the mainland, but having lived in a distinct environment for several thousand years, they've evolved techniques of doing things in their own ways.
    Now consider a boatbuilder. Consider a man who, because of some genetic predisposition or some force of early childhood development, must build boats. Put this man in Thomasville, Georgia. The place isn't an island in the geologic sense—quite the opposite, in fact—but for our purposes, it is. There are no other boatbuilders around here; ideas and inspiration will drift into the area on the pages of books and magazines, like a proto Galapagos iguana clinging to a log, but the day-to-day contact with boatbuilding masters and peers, typical of the apprentice, does not exist here.
    So what happens? If the combination of genetic predisposition and environment is favorable, the boatbuilder, like the species on the island, thrives. If there's a wrong gene, unfavorable surroundings, or lack of ingenuity on the part of the boatbuilder, then the venture fails.
    Thomasville's Robb White, the self-proclaimed “oldest boatbuilder in Georgia,” has been building small boats for the past 40 years. Most of them are lapstrake, and no two are alike, for Robb doesn't use molds. In fact, he uses hardly any of the conventional stuff found in most boatshops—from the wood he planks with to the tools that clamp his laps and the fastenings that secure them; from his procedures with epoxy to the way he fits his stems. He cuts and connects nearly everything in the boat by eye, in a process more like sculpting than boatbuilding.
    “I ain't never been in another man's shop,” Robb White claims. But he's read just about everything that's come down the highway over those four decades. He has struggled. He has adapted. And he has survived.

Robb White stands about 6' tall, and, even at 60 years old, has an infectious, boyish demeanor. He has tremendous energy, stops smiling only to think, and tells stories at a machine-gun pace. When something really amuses him, he slaps one knee and spins 360° on the ball of his foot. He is in perpetual motion.   
    He builds boats from wood he harvests himself: tulip poplar, primarily, virgin longleaf pine when the weather deals him some. He doesn't know how many he's built—eight hulls made 1997 a banner year—but one or two is not an uncommon annual output. At first the boats seem to fit classical forms—daysailers, outboard skiffs, rowboats—but close examination reveals unusual features and refined shapes and weights that move through the water with exceptional grace and speed. Invert one of his recent bright-finished lapstrake skiffs on a sunny day and crawl inside, and you'll be treated to a planetarium show; lift the sliding gunter rig out of the family daysailer, and you'll marvel at its 5-lb weight.
    Since no two of Robb White's boats are the same, it's a challenge to describe what's typical. The boat currently under construction in his shop is based on a William Atkin-designed air-sea rescue boat. It'll be powered by a 20-hp inboard motor driving a propeller in a tunnel molded into the bottom of the hull. The hull is strip planked, the whole thing formed by eye. The lines plan, printed in a book, lies nearby for guidance.
    A more characteristic Robb White boat will illustrate his style better: his favorite, called either the felucca (“feee-loo-ka”), or the Thanksgiving boat, after its annual holiday outing on thin water on a little creek near St. Mark's, Florida. It's a double-ended 12-footer (54" beam) that weighs a deceptive 40 lbs unrigged, and 45 lbs rigged. Here's how it came together: Its lines were drawn in Robb White's mind. Then they were lofted in the hot Georgia summer air that blows through his shop.
    The boat's first physical manifestation was a pair of tulip poplar garboards, and then bent 3/8" [?] copper tubing, spaced every now and then, describing, more or less, the sections. The copper tubes served as a rough aid to guide the precise shapes of the following planks—also of tulip poplar—which were cut, trimmed, and then resawn to form symmetrical bookmatched pairs. The thicknesses and shapes were worked even further: the middles of the planks are 1/4"; the ends were worked down to 1/8". Judiciously applied heat worked some cupping into the ends of the planks, which translated to hollow sections on the finished boat. Fiberglass applied to both sides of the planks stiffened them. And then things began to get really unconventional.
    Once the garboards were applied, the rest of the planks were shaped in a similar manner—which is to say, by eye, in a process that Robb White has worked to perfect over four decades. And the sheer plank? “I get Wes,” says Robb. Sons Wes and Sam used to work in the shop, but Wes is now the high-school band director and Sam is following his passion for technology. Both remain on the company masthead (“Robb White and Sons”), and Wes is on-call to eyeball sheerlines.
    The planks were not permanently fastened yet. Instead, they were tacked into place with superglue—cyanoacrylate—the stuff we use to repair our coffee mugs and eyeglasses. Then the heat in the shop was turned up to an almost unbearable 130°F, until the boat reached that temperature too, and the sweating builder killed the heat and turned on the air conditioner, then applied epoxy—lots of it; as much as the boat wanted—to everything. The room cooled rapidly, and the contraction of the wood cells, the biologist-boatbuilder surmises, drew the heat-thinned epoxy deep into every joint in the boat.
    I had a little trouble with that last bit when I first heard about it. I called J.R. Watson, a technical representative of Gougeon Brothers, manufacturers of WEST System epoxy. The phenomenon made perfect sense to him. “Usually,” he said, “people do the opposite. They glue up a piece and put it in the sun. It heats up and blows bubbles due to a phenomenon called outgassing.” Robb White's technique, he said, uses the same principle in reverse. I've seen a stem Robb made in just that way—laminates tacked together with superglue, the whole thing heated, and epoxy copiously applied to its edges—and cross-sectioning of the piece on the bandsaw revealed glue lines that looked as good as if they were made with a vacuum bag.
    Why do it this way? “I don't like working with epoxy,” says Robb. And so he contains the glue work to a single, exhausting procedure. In a letter to Betsy Powell, WoodenBoat's editorial assistant, Robb described the marathon session of assembling and epoxying (“Gougeonizing,” in the Robb White lexicon) the David Lebow boat, a 97-lb, xx' rowing skiff built in this manner: “This one took fourteen hours. After it was over, I drank three bottles of warm Guinness stout while I was in the bathtub and my wife and granddaughter had to help get me out.”
    After less-demanding glue operations, Robb usually eschews the Guinness for his laptop computer, which sits ever-ready just a few steps from the door that opens from his shop into his kitchen/living room. He'll sit on his couch, fire up the machine, and write, his thoughts spilling out at 125 words per minute. In eloquent, first-draft prose, he'll tell short stories of his life: memories of childhood small-boat experiments, treatises on the beauties of snowmobile suits, recollections of tugboating, essays on armadillos, longleaf pine, fiddler crabs (Robb is just steps away from a graduate degree in marine biology, but the knowledge is more important to him than the certificate). The armadillo story was recently published on the back page of Natural History magazine; two others have been published in Smithsonian; and WoodenBoat No. 142 carried his tribute to longleaf.
    I was skeptical when Robb sent WoodenBoat a manuscript last year entitled “The Instant End Grain Fastener.” It was a procedure for fastening plank ends to a transom, and it involved drilling a hole, in the usual manner, through the plank and into the transom's edge. But instead of driving a fastening into the hole, the hole is superheated with a heat gun, smeared with epoxy, and then stuffed with fiberglass threads, followed by more epoxy. Again, the pumping action of the wood cells draws the thin epoxy into the voids.
    I began to tell Robb my concerns about that technique when I visited him last winter. He was the only one doing it, I started to explain. What are the pitfalls...? Shouldn't we test it more...? A less-experienced builder might get into troub.... He smiled and reached for the ceiling of the shop before I could finish, saying, “We ain't doing it that way anymore; we found a better way.” He took from the ceiling a thin, 2' untapered stalactite of fiberglass and epoxy that was hanging from a wire: the new and improved end-grain and plank-lap fastening, easier to drive into the hole. It works for laps in a manner similar to the plank-to-transom technique: drill hole, insert epoxy and ’glass rod, inject more epoxy, and voilà! An ingenious fiberglass rivet—and a planetarium show, compliments of so many translucent fastenings-cum-stars twinkling against a sky of tulip poplar planking.
    You've never heard of tulip poplar planking? Don't despair, because its use as a planking wood is another one of Robb White's intuitive leaps—the result of years of thought on the topic. Robb sends a six-page paper to all of his prospective customers. Here's what he has to say about tulip poplar:

    Although as light as the white cedars, Northern pines, and spruces, tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulifpera) is deciduous hardwood in the primitive Magnolia family. The wood is extremely flexible when air dried and is much stronger than any conifer in its density range, particularly across the grain.

    That last statement about cross-grain strength is one that Robb would return to again and again during my visit. “Stronger than plywood!” he'd say, hammering a board of tulip poplar on his knee. The paper continues:

    This flexibility and resistance to splitting allows us to build shapes in lapstrake boats that are impossible with any other material. Though the old government reports rate the durability of tulip poplar in the same league with white pine, Douglas-fir, and other woods in that durability class, our own tests and research into the history of old tulip poplar structures tells quite a different story. Old-growth heartwood tulip poplar is not only very weather and rot resistant, it resists termites as well. Long ago, tulip poplar was a preferred wood for lining old hand-dug wells, building log cabins and bridges. The oldest covered bridge in the country is in Phillippi, West Virginia, and is built entirely from tulip poplar. It was the preferred wood for farm wagons, buggies, fancy carriages, and prairie schooners because of its strength, stability, and lightness (Studebaker was, at one time the largest consumer of tulip poplar in the world). All over the South, stock watering troughs, which stood directly on the ground, were made of tulip poplar.... Now, because of its strength, stability, machinability, and compatibility with glue and finishes, it is one of the most common woods in manufactured furniture. If all the poplar furniture in this country were to evaporate right now, most of us would be sitting on the floor. Europeans are importing tulip poplar in huge quantities to make plywood and veneer because of its unusual cross-grain toughness. Perhaps, with a little hype, it will soon become a popular boatbuilding wood in this country through the back door. Might displace okoume.

    “We use tulip poplar because it is the best thing for the boats we build,” says Robb White, “not because we can't get anything better.” He hand selects all of his trees from his own land—except for a recently purchased 900 bd ft of virgin Atlantic cedar that he couldn't bear seeing shipped to a siding mill. Otherwise, his shop has a “zero tolerance” policy against any wood that is “cut from trees that can't grow back in a man's lifetime.” He used to use plywood, years ago, but now uses none at all. “I think the acceptance of plywood as a boatbuilding material is just as responsible as the invention of fiberglass for the mistaken notion that wood is not the best material for building small boats.” Robb has used tulip poplar since the mid-1960s. Before that, his forestry ethics were not so rigid. But, like his boatbuilding techniques, those evolved.

“I made Momma uneasy,” Robb White says, recalling that he looked like his father, also Robb, who had left the family when young Robb was 15 or 16—the early 1950s—seeking his fame, which he found a measure of, as a writer in California. During the Depression, his father and mother had lived on Florida's Marina Key. “He wanted to be a writer,” Robb recalls. “You could live cheap there.” And during that stay, his father built small wood-and-canvas boats. Later, Robb would build some boats, small kit prams, with his father before the man left. “He built six or seven of 'em; gave 'em away when he was done.” And the level of craftsmanship? “He couldn't sharpen hand tools.”
    The uneasiness his mother felt as Robb grew up developed into what he describes as her “laissez-faire” attitude towards child-rearing—a license to run loose on the family's 1,200-acre longleaf pine forest. He wasn't just late for dinner. The boy would disappear into the woods for days at a time, eating birds and squirrels, making serendipitous discoveries of the longleaf pine ecosystem, and developing a rare appreciation for the unique ecology of the southeastern United States. “I've always wanted to be a wild man. I always wanted to live in the woods. I always wanted to be a Indian. My grandfather did that to me.”
    His grandfather “did that” to him by taking him on rides to the coast—the Gulf Coast of Florida—a trip that takes about an hour today, maybe two or three back then. Those early rides with grandfather took two-and-a-half days, because the patriarch liked to “stop and look at things”—like armadillos and birds, trees and insects. The destination was the “coast house,” which has since sold out of the family—replaced, appropriately, by one on a nearby island.
    Robb White is not a moneyed man. It may appear to be otherwise, given the coast house, the lack of conventional profession, the 1,200 acres of land. But there is no magic fountain supporting his lifestyle; his gifts are his geographical location, and his family (wife Jane, two sisters, two sons and their wives, three grandchildren, and cousins galore). “I done just about everything to support the boatbuilding business,” he told me. The jobs included long-distance truck driving, teaching high school, counseling at a scout camp, managing a furniture factory, and working on the J.R. FERGUSON, “a little outlaw tugboat that contracted to oil companies. When I got poor and broke in the wintertime, all I had to do was go up there and smile, and they'd give me a job.”
    There was once family money, but that's gone with the wind, as is the plantation where Robb spent his first six years, until 1946. “It was a 'communal situation,'" he says; his friends in those days were mostly the hired help on the plantation—old men and women as well as children his age. He was closest with Tom, a black man born in 1909, who stayed in the White family orbit for decades after the plantation was sold, until his death in 198x. Robb remembers him “as close to a father as anything I had.” He credits these friendships for his idiomatic grammar and accent, and recalls his great grandmother's dying attempt to teach him otherwise:
    "You can't talk like that," she told him.
    "Why can't I talk like that?," he asked.
    "Cuz you're an aristocrat."
    "Well what am I gonna do? You old folks all spunt up the big money." The plantation was on the verge of being sold out of the family.
    "You can be in the military. You can work in the trades. You can be an artist."
    "What if I want to build boats?"
    "You can build boats, but you can't advertise."
    The Navy appealed, and at age 17 Robb found himself stationed in Puerto Rico. His intelligence was noted early on, but his color blindness was not. “They didn't know what to do with me,” he says of the Navy's reaction to their late discovery. “I had all these clearances,” he recalls. He'd been through naval weaponry school, and had distinguished himself. He'd also married his sweetheart, Jane, and she'd moved to Puerto Rico.
    The Navy's solution was to put him in charge of a submarine simulator—a device he would program and launch from a ship for aerial target practice. It was a cushy assignment: “When I was off, I was off. I built boats in the living room. I ordered the designs from Weston Farmer's catalogs. Me and Jane screwed 'em together with a Yankee screwdriver.”
    His two-year tour of duty was finishing just as the Cuban missile crisis was beginning, and he was extended for another two year. Things didn't go so swimmingly toward the end of that stay. A disagreement with a superior led to a charge of insubordination. “They locked my ass up,” he said, shaking his head in disgust. Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy himself, was acquainted with the young man and arranged his release. “I went home after that,” Robb recalls. “Back to Georgia.”
    The former Navy-man-turned-builder-of-small-boats went into business for himself. “Right after I got out of the Navy, Kennedy was shot. I had just bought me a bandsaw. I cried and cried on the table. Rusted it up.” He bought other tools, too. “I had a bunch of government bonds. Cashed 'em in and bought a bunch of power tools. I was fool enough to think that would make me a better boatbuilder.”
    He was making money building his plywood skiffs, until one fateful day. “I went up to Clarke's Discount Store—the first discount store in Florida. They had a bunch of aluminum skiffs for $59.95. Put me out of the plywood skiff business.” But that was a positive turn, ultimately, because his ideas about responsible forestry were primitive then; plywood eventually would lose favor in the Robb White philosophy.
    “I didn't think about it back then,” he says of the plywood he was using. “I didn't realize they were cuttin' down trees that were growin' when the conquistadors were here. I'm pretty spotty on religion, but I'm pretty sure it's a sin to kill something that old.”

I visited Robb White last December for a week of boat talk and outings, chasing down his customers and dusting off some of the boats he's kept for himself. I met Frank Jarrell, owner of last winter's skiff, which he keeps on Lake Blackshear, 100 miles north of Thomasville. I met David Lebow, owner of the most recent Robb White completion, a light and lovely rowing skiff, at a state park on Lake Hall in Tallahassee. One day, Robb and I drove to Apalachicola and sailed the little schooner GOVERNOR STONE, whose new longleaf pine masts, freshly milled from lightning-killed trees from the White family forest, lie seasoning in a building. We paddled his sister June's Robb White-built pirogue (“pee-rogue”) on the Wacissa River. (“Don't worry,” June had deadpanned to a friend on the telephone as we departed. “They're experienced boatmen. If they go over, they won't tell anyone.”) We talked shop in the shop, sailed the Thanksgiving boat, and visited the old coast house.
    While in transit Robb would expound—not pedantically, but with passion and color—on his family, fiddler crabs, clams, genetics, refrigeration, diesel engines.... I remember the landscape falling away while listening to him speak about paleontology. I should've seen a stop sign and a church at one point, but I swear I saw only a mastodon when he told me that we'd just climbed to the top of a Pleistocene ridge.
    We swung through downtown Thomasville one afternoon in search of the two urologists, who don't know each other, who independently both commissioned Robb White boats. Neither was home, but Joe McGraw, the county prosecutor, the “strugglin' country lawyer who doesn't charge nothin'” according to Robb, was at his office when we dropped by. He told us where his boat was and to go have a look.
    All of the Robb White boats are named for their owners: “The Frank Jarrell Boat.” “The David Lebow Boat.” “The Manfred Boat” for the German customer who lives in Spain, whom Robb had once confused for the Spanish customer who lived in Germany: “I got all crossed up and built the wrong boat.” The Joe McGraw Boat was the first of what Robb calls his “Tumblehome Skiff” type—a planing lapstrake outboard boat. Launched in 1995, it provided a nice contrast to the current ’glass-rod-fastened stage of Robb's evolution. Its plank laps are copper fastened, and the fastening lines are scored, like a Scandinavian boat. There'd be no planetarium show here. But the 1/4" planking was 'glassed on both sides, yielding the signature stiff, lightweight hull. And, of course, it was built of tulip poplar.
    A few days before I saw The Joe McGraw Boat, Robb and I had driven to Lake Blackshear to see The Frank Jarrell Boat. Frank had found Robb through an advertisement in the newsletter Open Water Rowing, and, after thoroughly researching the man's legitimacy as a boatbuilder, had signed a contract. Lake Blackshear fit into Robb White's marketing strategy of putting his boats into new places in order to drum up further interest—a technique that had so far failed with his boat on pricey Rabun Lake, just a little to the north of Blackshear. But that's of no immediate consequence, because the Robb White waiting list is currently three years long (customers must now bid for a spot on the list).
    The Frank Jarrell boat would be the first Robb White creation I'd ever been in. I'd first met Robb six years earlier at a show in Madisonville, Louisiana, but his was a dry-land exhibit. We'd become further acquainted through letters—Robb has hundreds of correspondents, and sends an average of six or seven letters per day. I'd camped in his longleaf pine forest a few years after that, but there had been no outings on the water.
    The Frank Jarrell boat is big and wide. It's 16', has a 6' beam, and weighs 125 lbs—elegantly light and strong, like a bird. The thwarts are 7/16" thick, and are sprung upward to resist the weight of the rower. “Don't stand on 'em,” Robb White warned me as I took the boat for a spin; the seats were light and strong, but they weren't designed to be point-loaded. The boat moved exceptionally fast, barely disrupting the calm lake. It tracked dead straight but floated like a leaf and steered without fuss. When I'd had my fill, I turned the boat over to Bob Jarrell, son of Frank.
    The man took off like a jackrabbit. He rose from and fell to the seat as he rowed, and with each descent he hit those oars hard. From a distance, he looked like a toy truck with a little wooden man geared to the wheels, who pops up and down with each revolution. The aggressive technique got the attention of the builder: “Hey! The rails aren't part of the guarantee,” he shouted through a smile.
    “The guarantee” is standard issue on all boats: Failures are repaired for free, though Robb will “take a donation if it's offered.” And if an owner is not satisfied with a boat upon delivery, Robb will buy it back. He hasn't had to do that yet, but I think he wishes he had.
    “I begrudge them each and every boat,” he said of his owners as we drove away from Frank Jarrell's, Robb speaking above the loud and rhythmic grinding of the Cummins diesel under the hood of his 1989 Dodge pickup truck. “Frank Jarrell don't deserve that boat.” In the half-light, I saw he had a thousand-mile stare, like a little boy who's just realized he's been separated from his parents in a big store. “I build every durn boat for me. When they come get 'em, my heart is broke.”
    It was clear that the remark wan't directed at Frank Jarrell. Nor was it directed at customers in general. Rather, it was an expression of frustration with the cosmos; with the realities of doing business that force Robb White give up a piece of himself—a stage of his evolution—with each boat that goes to Lake Blackshear, Tallahassee, Germany, or Spain.
    But an epiphany accompanied that frustration: the lessons from each boat would stay with him, and the next one would be better. The sale of a boat would provide money, space, and time for improvement. The cab of the truck wasn't bright enough to discern a twinkle in his eye as he despaired, but the moment passed quickly anyhow, with Robb saying, “Frank Jarrell's a good man.” And then, laughing hard: “Frank Jarrell don't know it, but I'm settin' him up. Almost all of my customers have two boats!”

Comments

[Dave Tew]

Thanks for reprinting that. When I lived in Savannah I saw Rusty Fleetwood build a Whitehall (under Robb's 'tutelage') out of tulip polar. That stuff was sum tuff!

[Gina]

Thank you for sharing this. I have friends in Thomasville, Joe and Peg McGraw, and have spent a lot of time there with them. Joe grew up with the Robb and his sisters, and when he helped Robb out with a legal matter a few years back, Robb (or Benji as Joe knows him) built Joe a boat. I never met Robb, but I loved the "Joe-Boat." Loved Robb's memoirs, as well.

What a loss.

[Frank Jarrell]

Rereading Matt Murphy's article caused a wave of nostalgia and brought a tear or two to my eye. My boat was the last boat Robb built for anyone else for several years. It seems that while he was building mine,January-June of 2000) one of his sisters figured out how much each boat costing him to build,so he was trying to arrive at a new method of pricing. this proved to be so frustrating that he decided to build the Rescue Minor for himself.

This project took several years to reach full fruition,in the meantime providing him with material for numerous articles in "Messing About in Boats" He also finished his book and got it published during this time. Robb's prose tended to border on the scatological, but his editor did an excellent job in maintaining the character and originality of his writing, and still keeping it printable. The book is available on CD from Blackstone, read by Robb himself. I heartily recommend it.

After boatbuilding and his family, his first love was corresponding. He informed me early on that he was his high school class' champion typist and proceded to prove it. In the six months that my boat was being built, I must have received a hundred or more letters describing the progress of the boat,relating anecdotes from the distant and recent past, and expounding his views on a wide variety of subjects.

He got along particularly well with my youngest son, a soulmate, who is mentioned in the preceding article.

He was a delightful fellow, and a good friend. I am sorry he couldn't stick around to build the next Frank Jarrell Boat.(A 19' felluca, his favorite.