Nantucket museum honors lifesavers

Nantucket’s rich history is by its maritime nature one fraught with disaster, given that the waters sailors love to ply around the island are, in stormy weather, some of the most deadly in the Atlantic.

Paying homage to that danger – and to the spirit of mankind that flies in the face of that danger to rescue those gripped in it – is the newly renovated Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum, benefitting from a $3.1 million expansion and opening in 2009 for its first full season, having been closed part of 2008 for the work that more than tripled its size and put the museum’s holdings into a more cohesive display.

In 1968, island resident Bob Caldwell built a boathouse to store his growing cache of lifesaving and shipwreck memorabilia and there it stayed for decades, stuffed and stacked here and there, until the museum merged with the Egan Maritime Institute in 2004, which raised money through donations for the expansion.

The finished project is a fascinating display of things like antique breech buoys that saved sailors from grounded wrecks, a large collection of photographs showing the daily life of the island’s light station keepers and surf men, and one of the most compelling displays, a lighted relief map showing some of the more than 700 documented shipwrecks around the island.
“The wrecks are from 1870-1910, the peak of maritime transportation,” says curator James Lansing. “Some said it was like the ocean version of Route 95.”

Displayed here are the stories of five of those wrecks: The Nantucket Lightship 117 in 1934; the Mary Anna in 1871; the T.B. Witherspoon in 1886; the H.P. Kirkham in 1892; and the W.F. Marshall in 1877.

Making the museum appealing to children is the story of Marshall, a black Newfie rescued from the Marshall, and whose image in little doghouses throughout the museum guide kids through it. Also popular is a hand-cranked miniature breech buoy system, so kids can see exactly how the system worked: A basket and rope-and-pulley system plucked people off grounded vessels.
Very popular was one display, “Madeket Millie,” an exhibit honoring the life of Mildred “Madeket Millie” Jewett, an unofficial coast watcher for the Coast Guard who was so valued for her devotion that the U.S. Coast Guard made her an honorary commissioned warrant officer, and scattered her ashes from a helicopter when she died in 1992.

And not to be missed is a continuously playing video about the historic rescue of the Kirkham crew by the Coskata Lifesaving Station surf men, a grueling rescue involving a row of some 15 miles through storm-tossed waters and taking 26 hours to complete. Not a single life was lost. The film’s title is the Coast Guard motto: “You have to go out, but you don’t have to come back,” dedicated to the brave men of the U.S. Life-Saving Service – which became the modern Coast Guard.

“These were very proud men, they were all about values,” Lansing says. “This is what people did to help others.”

Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum, 158 Polpis Road, 508-228-1885, www.nantucketshipwreck.org; admission free for members, $5 for non-member adults, $3 for non-member children, fee includes admission to historic Coffin House in downtown Nantucket.

CAlifornia Dream Built Tuscan Castle on a Hill

This is a story I did a couple years ago on a great winery in the Napa Valley, we'd happened across this giant, genuine castle and there was a story in the making. I pitched it to the Globe back home, they said do it, and that's that, it appeared about a month later. Fascinating story of a man of extreme passion and boundless vision who made his dream come true.

CALISTOGA, Calif. – As Daryl Sattui bent his lanky, 6-foot-5-inch frame to fit through an arched stone doorway in his just-opened Napa Valley “Castello di Amorosa” (castle of love), a metaphor could not help but spring to mind: Is this guy in way over his head?

Sattui, 65, owner of the very successful V. Sattui Winery just down Route 29 in St. Helena, leveraged himself up to his bright blue eyes to get this monster built, a magnificent castle atop a hill overlooking a terraced, Tuscan-style vineyard. It is a massive stone structure that replicates castle design from the 11^th to 16^th century and is much homage to his love of ancient architecture as to his passion for creating award-winning wine.

Consider: The place set him back $30 million, consists of 107 rooms (including an honest-to-goodness torture chamber complete with a genuine antique Iron Maiden and a replica rack), seven levels (four of them underground) and took 14 years to build. His V. Sattui Winery, begun by his great-grandfather Vittorio, closed during Prohibition and reopened by Daryl Sattui in 1976 with borrowed labor and money from friends, helped pay for most of the castle; V. Sattui’s 400,000 visitors a year make it one of Napa’s busiest wineries. But in the last couple years of meticulous castle construction, Sattui’s budget was blown and he started borrowing.

“I had a budget but threw it out, now I’m all in,” Sattui smiled as he walked me through and around his castle which opened to the public April 9 for tours and wine tasting. “Except for my retirement, I’ve sunk every dime I had and then some into this.”

That ‘this’ is pretty substantial. The castle is part of the overall 171-acre winery, is 121,000-square-feet big, and was designed to be look like what a castle was supposed to be: A defensive fortification. Its architectural design purposely spans the centuries because European castles always underwent modifications, expansions and renovations over their lifetimes. And being made of stone, they tended to last a very long time.

Unless they were blown apart by attackers. Sattui even has that covered: One of the towers was created to look like it was shattered by cannon fire.

The design was expensive, no detail overlooked to make it as authentic as possible. Much of the 8,000 tons of stone, most of it basalt, was hand squared on site. The castle consists of five towers with battlements, a church, a gigantic drawbridge, a dry moat, and a monstrous great hall with double doors held together by 2,000 nails handmade in Italy.

The great hall is majestic – 22-feet high, 72-feet long and 30-feet wide – able to host 180 people, boasting a 500-year-old fireplace and floor-to-ceiling wall frescoes hand painted by Italian artisans that took a Michelangeloan-like year and a half to complete. Ancient-looking wrought iron throughout the castle was made to look that way by dousing it with acid. Hand-carved sandstone gargoyles keep garish sentry on walls and towers.

Below ground are a labyrinth of wine chambers –900 feet long in all - smelling sweetly of the casks bearing the fruits of the vines from the rich earth above. Escape tunnels are here as well, as are dead ends. At one point in our walk, the impish Sattui sent me into a hallway that got smaller and went nowhere.

“I sent Gov. (Arnold) Schwarzenegger up there,” he said with a laugh about a reception attended by the actor-turned-governor who took a tour with Sattui that included a trip to the terminated hallway. “He hit his head.”

Something this large might seem to indicate a rich guy’s out-of-whack ego, but Sattui is as immensely likeable, soft spoken and low key as they come. Take the tour of the castle, you may well run into him as he tidies up after a tasting, and he’ll be happy to regale you with the nuts and bolts of how the castle was designed and built, but more importantly about the wine that is made there.

“I have a real passion in my life for all things Italian, the architecture, the art, and especially the wines,” he said, his large hands cutting the air as he spoke. “This is partly homage to my ancestry.

“And,” he admitted sheepishly, “it’s partly I just don’t know why. I just wanted to do it.”

He’d never designed anything bigger than a doghouse in his life, he said, calling himself a closet architect. He built the castle mostly to showcase his quality wine, and he seems to know whereof he speaks: His V. Sattui Winery has been named the state’s top winery in two of the last three years, and over the years the wines produced there have won more than 75 gold medals in various worldwide competitions.

Designing the castle came after numerous trips to Italy to get ideas, and poring over thousands of photos and blueprints of other castles to make sure he got it right. After a year of making his own designs, he turned them over to an architect. Fourteen years later, the dream was realized.

“I didn’t care to rush it, I enjoyed the project and I certainly didn’t do it for the money, though I’d hate to go broke,” he said, then admitted “no prudent businessman would ever do this.”

He may not be prudent, but he’s decidedly different. The San Jose State University graduate started up V. Sattui in 1976, opening a deli to sell meats and cheese as well, something no other winery was doing. Others thought him crazy, he said. Now most do and it’s a huge part of the winery business.

Sattui always had the business bug, he said. During his college days, he sold college t-shirts and other merchandise to students. He even sold clogs before clogs were popular, including through Filene’s in Boston.

“I thought it would make me rich,” he shrugged. “But I didn’t know the shoe business. I was trying to make a buck a pair and I really should have been making more. But I just wanted people to have these shoes.”

He feels that way about his wine. Castello di Amorosa wine is not sold in stores, only onsite and online, and is reasonably priced, from $19 for the Rosato di Sangiovese 2005 to $68 for the Il Barone Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2003.

The castle does about 8,000 cases a year, V. Sattui five times as much. He’ll have to sell a lot of wine and hold a lot of tours here to pay off the $30 million he’s sunk into the place. But that’s history as ancient looking as the castle he built.

“I’m at the point in my life where I want to do the things I want to do,” he said with a shrug. People might say I’m nuts, but I don’t care. I’ll be dead in 15 or 20 years, but this will be around a lot longer.”

He knows the allure of visiting the castle might be more theme-park than wine-loving, but downplays the angle of the former, stressing the latter, all the while realizing that a $30-million, 107-room castle with a torture chamber just might be something of a curiosity. That’s fine by Sattui, long as it gets people here to sample the fruits of his labor.

“I want people who are serious about wines to come here,” he said. “I thought if I built something beautiful to showcase it, they would.”

(Castello di Amorosa, 4045 North Saint Helena Highway, 707-942-8200. For information, visit castellodiamorosa.com)

Musings of a traveling mind..

Greetings, one and all, which at this point is comprised of me. This is my first foray into the blog-writing world, given that I'm 56, horribly inept at most-things cyber and too lazy to learn to boot. That said, I want to give this a whirl, especially since I love to travel and can post many such traveling musings and photos here.

My name is Paul Kandarian, born in Rhode Island, raised and living in Massachusetts. I'm a freelance writer/photographer (more the former, but being the latter helps immeasurably in selling results of being the former) and have been for the past 13 years. For 12 years prior to that, I was an ink-stained wretch, as old journalists like myself like to call old journalists like myself. I toiled in poverty at the Taunton Daily Gazette, leaving in 1997 to freelance full time - and still toil in poverty. Freelancing is freedom. Freelancing is not profitable. Unless I'm doing it totally wrong.

For the last few years, I've taken to travel writing in that I love traveling and love writing (and photographing) and combing all that seemed about right. I've been to the Caribbean a fair amount, and write a lot for the Caribbean portion of about.com, a whopping site, that, in that it's about...everything. Go, see, explore, and check out the Caribbean part (www.gocaribbean.about.com). I also write a lot for the Boston Globe, have for 12 years, and most recently for the Globe's travel section and blog. It's a good paper, was rumored to be dying for a bit there but seems to have righted itself. I also write for Cape Air's inflight magazine, the lovely named Birds Eye View, and it's a fine magazine and terrific airline. They fly nine-seat Cessnas (think they are anyway..nine seats for sure, Cessnas I'm reasonably certain) all over the Caribbean, Florida, they have a route in the Midwest, a bunch from Boston to upstate New York, Vermont, Maine and, if you can believe it, Saipan-Tinian, out that way. Interesting company and it's doing well, so more power to them.

I've traveled a lot with people who say I need a travel blog, so here I am. This blog will be, as stated, musings on my travels; there will be straight travel posts, likely lifted from the publications/sites that ran them originally, but also straight travel musings from a mind as prone to wandering as its body is. I like to muse, I like saying the word 'muse', it's a good word and I'm sticking with it.

There'll be essays here, humorous (hopefully) and perhaps occasionally poignant. For example, I recently took a trip to Stonewater Cove Resort (www.stonewatercoveresort.com) in beautiful southern Missouri (yeah, I said that too.."Missouri?" Trust me, it's beautiful) with my 21-year-old "baby," my son, who's joined the Army and as of today, about to leave for Fort Benning, Georgia. It was a fantastic father-son bonding experience; hell we rode ATVs, did zip lines, shot guns, all great manly-man stuff custom made for fathers and sons. And we had an absolute blast. And I'll write about it. Probably for the Globe, and shamelessly lift it to use here. I'm attempting to put a photo of my son and I here, let's see if this works..


Son of a gun, it worked! The old guy is me, in case you wondered. No idea how I ended up looking that old..oh, yeah, the person to my right, THAT'S how...

But anyway, that's enough for now, I have to figure out how to format this stuff, what to put in, how to start a photo section if possible, all that good stuff. And if anyone knows how to turn blogs into money-making entities, let me know. But not if you're going to ask me for money. I want to be the money-making entity, not you!

Later.