Robert Douglas, who based the Black Canine on Martha’s Winery and reworked a tavern’s brand of his Labrador retriever blend into a world brand for summertime, died on Wednesday at his circle of relatives’s house at the island. He used to be 93.
His son Jamie Douglas stated the motive used to be prostate most cancers.
Robert Douglas moved to Martha’s Winery in 1960 after rising up spending summers at the Massachusetts island together with his circle of relatives, falling in love with its maritime tradition — and hoping he would in the end be the only waving good-bye to summer season guests from the coastline as they took the ferry again to the mainland.
Mr. Douglas spent his first years at the island designing a topsail schooner, named the Shenandoah, which continues to be a fixture at the Winery Haven waterfront. However he later grew to become his consideration to development a cafe, one thing that may be just right and dependable on the head of the harbor, a spot other people may just collect all the way through the yr and get a cup of actual New England chowder.
His Labrador-boxer blend, Black Canine, named after a pirate within the Robert Louis Stevenson novel “Treasure Island,” could be its mascot.
The Black Canine Tavern opened on New Yr’s Eve in 1971, and the stately profile of Black Canine, drawn by way of Stephanie Phelan, could be included into the industry in 1976, according to The Vineyard Gazette.
By way of the early Nineteen Eighties, Black Canine’s portrait used to be added to attire — colourful T-shirts, thick sweatshirts, stonewashed hats, mugs and cookie tins, stamped with Black Canine’s define at the entrance and the yr of acquire at the again. The pieces changed into immediate collectibles for guests who sought after to take a work in their summer season holiday house with them.
“The tail began wagging the canine,” Mr. Douglas informed The Winery Gazette in 1997. “It began as a cafe and it changed into a dry items industry.”
Robert Stuart Douglas used to be born on March 18, 1932, in Chicago to Grace Farwell Douglas and James H. Douglas Jr. The couple started renting a area within the West Chop phase of the island in 1947.
Mr. Douglas’s father served as secretary of the Air Power and deputy secretary of protection beneath President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Mr. Douglas graduated from Northwestern College and enlisted within the Air Power from 1956 to 1958. He used to be stationed at Hanscom Air Power Base in Bedford, Mass., enabling him to reconnect together with his love for New England.
In the summertime of 1960, he signed directly to sail as a mate aboard two Nineteenth-century vessels and once more as a seaman aboard a reproduction of HMS Bounty, which were constructed for a remake of “Mutiny at the Bounty,” a film starring Marlon Brando, in line with The Winery Gazette. He sailed from Nova Scotia, in the course of the Panama Canal, around the Pacific Ocean to Tahiti, the place he labored for 3 months as a sailor at the movie.
However he at all times sought after a boat of his personal. With none formal coaching as a marine architect, Mr. Douglas designed the Shenandoah in response to an unique 1850 design and introduced the schooner in Winery Haven harbor in 1964. Mr. Douglas captained the vessel for greater than 50 years, disposing of adults for cruises and schoolchildren to discover ways to be deckhands and friends.
Younger individuals are “simply nice giant sponges, they are able to’t get sufficient,” he informed The Winery Gazette in 2013. “The whole thing is new and engaging. I give you the platform, a special way of life, one this is completely other from the rest they’ve ever skilled.”
The Alabama, every other schooner, joined his fleet in 1967.
In 1970, he married Charlene Lapointe, a fellow sailor, who survives Mr. Douglas. His 4 sons — Robert Jr., Jamie, Morgan and Brooke — additionally live on him. All 4 sons have had their hand within the circle of relatives industry at more than a few issues, together with running at retail shops, skippering the ships and managing the Black Canine attire industry.
At the Winery, Mr. Douglas, or Captain Douglas as he used to be recognized, outlined his legacy by way of his dedication to maritime historical past. He embellished the tavern with museum high quality nautical items that he gathered over time, together with seventeenth and 18th century boat fashions.
But it surely used to be the picture of the mutt, a rescue, that changed into a calling card for Martha’s Winery and evidence of club to an island-size summer season membership.
The mail-order industry within the overdue Nineteen Eighties catapulted the industry, with pages of attire despatched to greater than 200,000 customers. The corporate were given a spice up in 1991 in Rolling Stone, when it ran a photograph of 3 ladies in long-billed Black Canine caps within the mag, cementing the logo’s cool standing.
Invoice Clinton, a common island customer all over his presidency, used to be photographed in Black Canine tools. His acquire of 2 T-shirts, a hat and a sundress from the Black Canine came under scrutiny all over his impeachment inquiry.
Black Canine, the lab-mix who began all of it, died in 1983, however Mr. Douglas had different rescue canine all the way through his lifestyles, maximum lately Jack Russell terriers.
