Robert "Rob" Pittaway

2/5/1941 - 8/11/2025

Mystic - Robert Alexander "Rob" Pittaway was born Feb. 5, 1941, in New York City to Adelaide Lathrop Ketchum and Rudolph Alexander Pittaway. He died Aug. 11, 2025, at the Lawrence + Memorial Hospital in New London.

Rob grew up in Cambridge, Mass. where he attended the Shady Hill School and the Cambridge School of Weston. As a child, he was known for his sunny temperament and very blond hair. The family spent summers in Old Saybrook, where his mother called him "shiner" after the shiner fish in the Connecticut River.

He graduated from Colorado College and then attended graduate school at the University of Michigan where, influenced by summers spent learning to sail at a camp in Maine and family vacations in Westport Point, Mass., he studied naval architecture. He married Louise Davis of New York and they settled in Stonington, where he worked for the Mystic Seaport, mentored by John Gardner. In addition, he volunteered at the New London Customs House – and was a member of the Wooden Boat Club and the Formosa Yacht Club, where he was known for having consumed three hamburgers in a row.

Rob's passion was to design and create boats in many forms. At once a stickler to the rules of traditional design, he loved to experiment, and once made a square rowboat in his sister's apartment in Cambridge. He made small models out of whatever material was at hand and produced half models of sailing ships, some of which are on exhibit at the New London Maritime Museum. He designed the seaworthy Stonington Pulling Boat, launched to much celebration from Don's Dock in Stonington April 20,1980.

Rob was known for his humor, exactitude in all things, rich vocabulary, curiosity in understanding how things work, and his resilience in the face of the many health challenges that came his way.

Friend to many in Stonington and Mystic, he is survived by his sisters, Helen McElroy of Nyack, N.Y. and Anne Hyde of Rockport, Mass.; and nieces, Rebecca Frezza, Caitlin McElroy-Cox, Lisa Falise and Rebecca von Barta; and nephew William Cluster.

In lieu of flowers donations in Rob's honor can be made to the Mystic Seaport Museum.