Leonard William Peck

COTUIT - Leonard William Peck, 88, sailor, boat builder, teacher, writer and Cotuit businessman died on Saturday, July 14, 2007, after a brief illness.

Mr. Peck, who loved Cotuit and made it his home with his wife, Betty, started Pecks Boats, which remains today under his son's management. In addition to Cotuit, Mr. Peck's passions included a love of literature and language, ideas and politics, teaching and entertaining. Throughout his life, he stayed close to the shoreline, the space encompassing sea and land where he made his livelihood and whose beauty and personalities inspired his writing and his political interests.

Peck fell in love with Cotuit on his first visit in 1923 at the age of five as a guest of the Coolidge family. He learned to sail and to race in the local craft, the Cotuit Skiff, in which he taught sailing to subsequent generations, and which he learned to build himself in the business he founded. He married Betty Snover in 1942 and relocated her to Cotuit, where they raised a family. Generations since remember his training and his stewardship of the Cotuit yacht club as committee boat operator in the 1950s and 1960s. A strong presence and personality in Cotuit through the decades, Peck also taught and called square dancing at summer parties until changing sensibilities and crowding ended the tradition. Peck wrote colorfully about his life in Cotuit from childhood on in a recent self-published memoir, ''For Golden Friends I Had.”

Peck was also a scholar of English literature. He was blessed with the ability (he called it his ''trick memory”) to recite from memory literary passages and poetry ranging from Shakespeare, Bacon and Keats, to limericks and bawdy sea chanteys, which he loved to sing despite his near total lack of pitch. His memory was never catalogued, but surely encompassed thousands of hours of verse, according to family and friends. He named his three sons after the great canonic icons of English language: William Shakespeare, John Milton and Geoffrey Chaucer. He passed on his love of words and verse to classes he taught at Newton and Harwich high schools in the early 1950s and at Cape Cod Prep and Cape Cod Community College in the 1960s.

Peck put aside his teaching for other interests, founding a business based on building and maintaining the Cotuit Skiff. The enterprise he founded on Route 28 outside Cotuit is there still, though it no longer builds skiffs. He retired several times, the first when he sold the boat business in the early 1970s to pursue another dream, an internal circumnavigation of the eastern U.S., through Lake Champlain, down the Mississippi River and back to Cotuit along the intra-coastal waterway. He described the voyage in an introspective narrative that was never published. The second retirement came in the late 1980s when his son John took over the business.

Peck's idealism and politics defied the usual categories. His vision was broad yet reductive, attributing the world's problems to overpopulation and Western materialism. He distrusted all government but resented modern conservatives even more. He recalled the Cape Cod of his childhood but opposed the reflexive sentimentality of environmentalists and supported the wind power project on Nantucket Sound. He cared deeply about civil rights and opposed the Iraq war. In his writing he was less concerned with solutions than he was describing problems with humor, passion, and a sense of history. Above all, he enjoyed being an iconoclast in all his undertakings, and cared little for whom he offended in the process.

Leonard Peck is survived by his wife of 65 years, Betty; sons John and Geoff; grandchildren Nathan, Morgan, Jasmine, Charles, Angelina, Genevieve and Lillie, along with nieces Nancy and Betsy and nephews David, Keith, Robert, Michael, Ben and Andrew.

A memorial service for the public is planned for Wednesday, July 18, at 2 p.m. at the Cotuit Center for the Arts, 4400 Falmouth Ave., in Cotuit.