Boat Builder's Craft Is His `Glory' -- Schooner Crowns A Lifetime's Work For Seattle Man, 88

When Frank Prothero began building wooden boats, Woodrow Wilson was in the White House, the electric range was touted as the latest kitchen miracle and pot roast sold for a nickel a pound.

Today Prothero is 88. And though his joints are stiffened by arthritis, he still rises by 4 a.m. six days a week, drives from his Lake City home to a Lake Union dock, and toils away on his latest wooden boat.

"I don't know any different," he said. "My father was a boat builder, my grandfather was a boat builder and my great-grandfather opened his (boat) shop here in 1870."

In the course of his career, Prothero has built or repaired literally hundreds of boats: tiny rowboats, graceful yachts, brawny tugboats and full-size fishing boats built to withstand Alaska's stormy seas.

But it's Prothero's current project that continues to amaze people: the 65-foot schooner Glory of the Seas, taking shape alongside a dock off Fairview Avenue East.

Prothero designed every aspect of the vessel, from the massive frame made of two layers of 4-inch-thick white oak to the intricate carving on the golden teak trim.

When finished, the two-piece masts, hewn from solid fir, will tower nearly 80 feet above the Glory's deck.

Don't ask Prothero how long he's been working on the Glory. "I can't remember. . . . I don't want to remember," he says, before grudgingly calling up the fact that he started work on the boat in 1965 in between other projects.

Year by year, the boat took shape inside the 110-foot former Army ammunition barge he bought and modified for the project.

In 1982, a writer from Maine-based Wooden Boat magazine visited his shed and called the Glory a monument to everything Prothero had learned in a lifetime of boat building and repair.

That experience began when Frank was 10, the age he believes all children should start working. "At that age," he said, "kids want to work; they want to do things adults are doing."

Frank and his late brother, Robert, learned their early skills in a woodworking shop and machine shop their father set up for them at home.

School never seemed that important to Prothero, especially when his high-school principal regularly chastised him for not turning out for the football team. "I was building a boat," he said. "I didn't want to waste time playing football." He left school a few credits shy of graduation.

For decades, the Prothero brothers ran one of the busiest boat-building yards on Lake Union, with dozens of men in their employ.

In 1959, they closed the business and took a crack at retirement; Frank lasted just eight months before the idleness got to him. "If you don't keep moving, you're dead, boy," he concluded. "It's that simple."

As much as he loves building wooden boats, Prothero said he saw years ago that its days were numbered. He curses the U.S. government for allowing timber to be exported, reducing the supply of wood here and raising the price so high that building and maintaining wooden boats is financially prohibitive.

Prothero encouraged his son and grandsons not to follow the previous generations into the trade. "It seems a shame to give up boat-building, but it's foolish to say there's any future in it."

These days, Prothero rises early to get his 1977 Chrysler Cordoba down to Lake Union at 5 a.m., before the few parking spaces near his dock disappear. Gladys, his wife of 66 years, gets up early too, to send him off with a good breakfast.

In a folding chair near a cast-iron stove in his barge, Prothero works for hours cutting and taping the small sections of cotton line that will be part of the boat's rigging.

To the unskilled eye, the Glory looks to be in its final stages of construction. But there is still much to be done, Prothero insists. The engine isn't in; the interior paneling and furnishings haven't been added; the sails have been cut but not stitched.

Prothero, whose stiff legs make it difficult to hop on and off the boat, has contracted a younger boat-builder, Todd Blakely, to help with the more physical tasks. Other people have volunteered their time just to be involved in the project, but Prothero turns them down, saying, "I don't like to see people work for nothing."

As one season passes into another, leaving Prothero wondering where the time has gone, he now says he does not expect to live to see the Glory completed.

To many, that idea may seem sad, the notion that decades of labor and craftsmanship on this project may not culminate in a moment of triumph and accomplishment.

But that sentiment shows a lack of understanding of who this man is and what makes him tick. Finishing the boat isn't the point; working on it is.

"Every day I'm down here I get something done," he said. "How could I be happier than that?"