Memorial Monday: North Fork mourns the loss of Alvah ‘Skip’ Goldsmith
Of the many lessons Goldsmith’s Boat Shop owner Alvah “Skip” Goldsmith Jr. taught his sons Craig and Glenn throughout their lives, one of them really stuck.
“He’d say, ‘Your name is on the building. You are responsible. The buck stops with you,’ ” son Glenn said this week. “ ‘Somebody’s coming out for the weekend to use their boat. They’ve been busting their butt all week long … they want to come out, turn the key, use their boat and kind of forget about everything for a while. So you do everything you can to make sure you have that available for them.’
“A lot of times in the summer, after dinner, he’d go back to work to finish up a job, to try and get that boat ready for the customer the next morning.”
A lifelong North Forker and local legend whose family roots in the area date back to the founding of Southold, Mr. Goldsmith passed away at his home Nov. 9, at the age of 85, surrounded by his family.
“The values he instilled in myself, my brother and my entire family were to work hard, to have a good work ethic,” Glenn said. “He was always preaching responsibility and respect — from a life standpoint and from a business standpoint. He was an all-around salt-of-the-earth guy.”
What his father cherished the most, Glenn said, was the history of the century-old Goldsmith’s Boat Shop, the oldest continuously operating boat dealership in the United States.
“When somebody would come in and ask a question about history — like about building ships for the Navy in World War II — my dad would go into this file cabinet and bring out these two big, green binders that were full of old pictures of the marina, of his father, of the history, and he could just effortlessly flip through it and know the names of everybody, the dates, what the contents [of the pictures] were. He’d just sit there and flip through it and show it, and he’d be so proud. He was so proud of the history and legacy, and he wanted that to continue.”
The sons, who started working for their dad when both were under 10, were too young at the time to get it.
“Craig and I … would kind of roll our eyes like, ‘Geez, here we go again with these binders,’ ” Glenn recalled.
Brother Craig said their father was determined to build on and continue his own father’s legacy.
“He took great pride in the history of the old boats my grandfather used to build … the boats were mostly all wood then, so it was a lot of craftsmanship that went into the earlier years,” Craig said. “To take care of a wooden boat compared to a fiberglass boat was night and day, as far as the time it took to take care of a wooden boat.
“We have blueprints of the boats that were built for the Navy during World War II — all of that stuff is preserved, ”he added.
Mr. Goldsmith’s father, Alvah Goldsmith Sr. — a pioneer of boat building and recreational boating on the North Fork — founded the family business in the early 1920s, after buying an Evinrude outboard motor for his rowboat. He was so intrigued that he wrote to the company, praising the motor, and founder Ole Evinrude wrote back, offering to set the young man up as an Evinrude dealer. In 1923, Mr. Goldsmith Sr. quit his job as an auto mechanic and began selling boat motors from the front porch of his parents’ Peconic farm.
In the mid-1920s, as recreational boaters began to join commercial fishermen on Peconic Bay, business boomed, and by 1930, Mr. Goldsmith Sr. bought land at Founders Landing and launched a marina and boat-building service. The marina went on to build boats for the U.S. Navy in World War II. When Mr. Goldsmith Sr. died in 1980, his son, Alvah Jr., took over the business.
The younger Mr. Goldsmith graduated in 1957 from Southold High School after a busy four years, during which he excelled in basketball, baseball, ping pong and cross-country; acted in the senior play; and was a member of the French club, Latin club, glee club and band.
Two years later, he earned an associate degree in applied science from what is now Mohawk Valley Community College. After graduating, he joined the U.S. Air Force and was stationed at bases in North Carolina and New Hampshire, before serving as an Air Force mechanic in Vietnam. After his discharged in 1964, Mr. Goldsmith returned to his family’s boat business.
In addition to being a longtime member of Southold’s First Presbyterian Church, Mr. Goldsmith served for more than six decades with the Southold Fire Department — responding to fires well into his 70s — and was a member of American Legion Post 803 in Southold and Masonic Peconic Lodge 349 in Riverhead.
More than anything, his son Glenn said, Mr. Goldsmith enjoyed helping people.
“My dad would take the time,” he said. “He’d spend hours looking for an old part for an old engine, in a box somewhere. And he’d dig and dig and then find his part — and it would be like a $2 part — just so he could help that person.
“From a business perspective, that didn’t work out too well: spending six hours searching for a $2 part, right?” he continued. “But that’s how he was. It wasn’t about charging the customer. It was about helping people. And that, I think, more so than anything, defines him: his will to just help people.”
Glenn described his father as “the hardest working man I’ve ever met in my life,” who was slowed down in his final years only by the forced isolation of the pandemic.
“An object in motion stays in motion, and an object at rest stays at rest,” Glenn said, with a nod to Sir Isaac Newton. “So working seven days a week kept him young, kept him going, kept him doing the only thing he had ever known. Then to go from that to not being able to do anything, and kind of being stuck at home, I think that he kind of lost a step, maybe, and things just kind of snowballed from there.”
The sons said their father never had COVID but chose to stay home to avoid potentially bringing the virus home to his wife, Elizabeth “Betty” Goldsmith, who acted as her husband’s full-time caretaker in his final years.
“He was scared of my mom getting COVID,” Craig said. “That kind of shut him down. He was from that older generation that’s used to going to work every day, and [the isolation] had a negative impact on him.”
Still, Craig said, his father was in good shape for 2023’s centennial celebration of the 1923 founding of Goldsmith’s Boat Shop.
“It was great because he was in good health, and he was able to see it and celebrate it and be part of everything. That was a fantastic achievement for him. He could pass it off to the next generation. I think he was very proud of that fact.”
Craig said his father “kind of represented the best of Southold and what it really means to be a part of a community.”
These days, both sons are old enough to understand the value of all the memorabilia stuffed into those green binders, and Glenn regularly puts up “throwback Thursday” Goldsmith’s Boat Shop Facebook posts with historic photos from the many decades the family has been running the business.
“Glenn and I are now third-generation [owners],” Craig said. “[Dad] was so proud of that fact, that it carried on to another generation.”
Both brothers said it wasn’t yet clear whether Glenn’s two sons will carry on the family business — but they have plenty of time to think about it.
“I’m 50, and Glenn’s going to be 48 next week, so we’ve got a little bit of time left to continue it before they would have to make a decision.”
Glenn said he and his brother consider themselves deeply blessed.“ Craig and I literally got to work side by side with our dad for practically our entire lives. It was something that we wouldn’t trade for the world. You can’t get that time back.”
Alvah “Skip” Goldsmith is survived by his wife, Elizabeth; children Donna Bing of Riverhead, Craig, of Southold and Glenn, of Mattituck; grandchildren Jeffrey Laymon Jr., Landon Goldsmith and Reid Goldsmith; daughters-in-law Renee Goldsmith and Judy Goldsmith; and son-in-law Jonathan Bing.