Robert Douglas, who founded The Black Dog on Martha’s Vineyard and transformed a tavern’s logo of his Labrador retriever mix into an international emblem for summertime, died on Wednesday at his family’s home on the island. He was 93.
His son Jamie Douglas said the cause was prostate cancer.
Robert Douglas moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 1960 after growing up spending summers on the Massachusetts island with his family, falling in love with its maritime culture — and hoping he would eventually be the one waving goodbye to summer visitors from the shoreline as they took the ferry back to the mainland.
Mr. Douglas spent his first years on the island designing a topsail schooner, named the Shenandoah, which is still a fixture on the Vineyard Haven waterfront. But he later turned his attention to building a restaurant, something that would be good and reliable at the head of the harbor, a place people could gather throughout the year and get a cup of real New England chowder.
His Labrador-boxer mix, Black Dog, named after a pirate in the Robert Louis Stevenson novel “Treasure Island,” would be its mascot.
The Black Dog Tavern opened on New Year’s Eve in 1971, and the stately profile of Black Dog, drawn by Stephanie Phalen, would be incorporated into the business in 1976, according to The Vineyard Gazette.
By the early 1980s, Black Dog’s portrait was added to apparel — colorful T-shirts, thick sweatshirts, stonewashed hats, mugs and cookie tins, stamped with Black Dog’s outline on the front and the year of purchase on the back. The items became instant collectibles for visitors who wanted to take a piece of their summer vacation home with them.
“The tail started wagging the dog,” Mr. Douglas told The Vineyard Gazette in 1997. “It started as a restaurant and it turned into a dry goods business.”
Robert Stuart Douglas was born on March 18, 1932, in Chicago to Grace Farwell Douglas and James H. Douglas Jr. The couple began renting a house in the West Chop section of the island in 1947.
Mr. Douglas’s father served as secretary of the Air Force and deputy secretary of defense under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Mr. Douglas graduated from Northwestern University and enlisted in the Air Force from 1956 to 1958. He was stationed at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford, Mass., enabling him to reconnect with his love for New England.
In the summer of 1960, he signed on to sail as a mate aboard two 19th-century vessels and again as a seaman aboard a replica of HMS Bounty, which had been built for a remake of “Mutiny on the Bounty,” a movie starring Marlon Brando, according to The Vineyard Gazette. He sailed from Nova Scotia, through the Panama Canal, across the Pacific Ocean to Tahiti, where he worked for three months as a sailor on the film.
But he always wanted a ship of his own. Without any formal training as a marine architect, Mr. Douglas designed the Shenandoah based on an original 1850 design and launched the schooner in Vineyard Haven harbor in 1964. Mr. Douglas captained the vessel for more than 50 years, taking out adults for cruises and schoolchildren to learn how to be deckhands and mates.
Young people are “just great big sponges, they can’t get enough,” he told The Vineyard Gazette in 2013. “Everything is new and interesting. I provide the platform, a different lifestyle, one that is entirely different from anything they have ever experienced.”
The Alabama, another schooner, joined his fleet in 1967.
In 1970, he married Charlene Lapointe, a fellow sailor, who survives Mr. Douglas. His four sons — Robert Jr., Jamie, Morgan and Brooke — also survive him. All four sons have had their hand in the family business at various points, including working at retail stores, skippering the ships and managing The Black Dog apparel business.
On the Vineyard, Mr. Douglas, or Captain Douglas as he was known, defined his legacy by his commitment to maritime history. He decorated the tavern with museum quality nautical pieces that he collected over the years, including 17th and 18th century boat models.
But it was the image of the mutt, a rescue, that became a calling card for Martha’s Vineyard and proof of membership to an island-size summer club.
The mail-order business in the late 1980s catapulted the business, with pages of apparel sent to more than 200,000 customers. The company got a boost in 1991 in Rolling Stone, when it ran a photo of three women in long-billed Black Dog caps in the magazine, cementing the brand’s cool status.
Bill Clinton, a frequent island visitor during his presidency, was photographed in Black Dog gear. His purchase of two T-shirts, a hat and a sundress from the Black Dog came under scrutiny during his impeachment inquiry.
Black Dog, the lab-mix who started it all, died in 1983, but Mr. Douglas had other rescue dogs throughout his life, most recently Jack Russell terriers.
