Entries associated with the tag "Pehr Bolling":

A while back I posted on the passing of Pehr Bolling, a Swedish immigrant and local resident who (among many remarkable things) after retiring built a functional replica of a viking ship. The obit is unfortunately deep in the Trib archives now, but the family was kind enough to send me a video of the ship's launch. It's particularly moving to me since my own grandfather has been building and restoring boats as a serious hobby/part-time job for most of his adult life*, mostly gorgeous mid-century power boats but also James River bateau, an old, distinctively Virginia shallow-water boat that was used for shipping on the James River.

*Couldn't find any boat pictures (they look like this), but here's some furniture made by either him or his father (scroll down to where it says Moser; not to be confused with Thos. Moser furniture). It was weird growing up in a totally standard middle class house with normal middle class furniture mixed in with incredibly beautiful handcrafted Southern furniture. This is why I'm amazed by craftsmen like Bolling, although I didn't inherit any craft skills of my own, which are in abundance on both sides of my family (my other grandfather was a diesel mechanic and newspaper press operator/mechanic/jack-of-all-trades), or at least I was dissuaded by family-dinner stories of epic power tool injuries. So I learned Photoshop and Quark, which are way less engaging but won't take off any fingers.

PS: The Craftsman, a new book by Richard Sennett, looks awfully interesting. Haven't read it yet but it's on my list. Here's a good rundown, and a review. Sennett, FYI, is a Chicago native and U. of C. grad.

Actually, I will be stunned if this is not the obit of the year. Swedish immigrant Pehr Bolling, who passed away Monday at the age of 88, lived well:

• jumped into the Chicago River (in March of 1939) to save a suicidal man, "slugged" him after he fought, and dragged him back to shore
• was a mapmaker in World War II
• turned an old lifeboat into a one-ton Viking ship as something to do in retirement.

Trevor Jensen has done some outstanding work on what can be a thankless beat, and it is a shame that I had to click through to News Obituaries (it's on the homepage, the second-to-last item under News on the nav bar) to find it when Mary Schmich's data-scrape got front-and-center placement yesterday. If, in the future, our histories will be written primarily from our social networking profiles, that is a future I do not want a part of.

My only complaint is that video for the launch of the Viking ship exists, yet neither it nor even a picture is on their Web site.