Dick Ryder Looks Back On His Time With The CG36500

ORLEANS – As the son of a Chatham fisherman, Dick Ryder grew to love boats from a young age. He remembers rowing along with the tide out to the Chatham Lighthouse as a kid, where he would wait until the tide would turn to take him back to the fish pier. 

Then one day while out on the water, he came across a Coast Guard boat.

“It made this huge wake, you know? I said ‘Oh, OK,’” he said.

The CG36500 lifesaving boat first came to Chatham in 1946, and Ryder developed a connection with the famed boat from an early age. He had just turned 12 when he learned on the radio of the boat’s deployment as part of the tanker Pendleton rescue in 1952. But little did he know then the role that he himself would have in the iconic vessel’s future.

For almost 25 years, Ryder had a direct hand in preserving and maintaining the boat as a volunteer with the Centers for Culture and History in Orleans (CHO). For many of those years, he served as the boat’s operations manager, a role that involved coordinating volunteers and scheduling off-season maintenance for the vessel. The job also allowed him the opportunity to learn to navigate it.

“I could put that boat most anywhere once I got familiar with it,” Ryder said. “At first I was intimidated because it was so big and heavy. You have to anticipate. If you’re going to stop it, you have to assume that it’s going to keep going. It’s not like a car where it stops immediately, you know?”

But for someone who’s spent much of his life around wooden boats, Ryder said he was more than up for the challenge.

“The beauty for me is I got to run this boat and I didn’t have to pay for it,” he said with a laugh.

In conversation, memories of the CG36500 flow from Ryder, who this fall moved from his longtime home of Eastham to Fort Myers, Fla. After retiring from the U.S. Navy in 1979, he spent about a decade working on wooden boats in Mystic, Conn. He and his wife then moved to Eastham in 1993. 

Upon returning to the Cape, Ryder learned that the fabled CG36500 was being stored behind the Orleans police station.

“In the back, it was underneath a bunch of trees,” he recalled. “The harbormaster’s office was there as well. That was about 1996 or so. But I thought, ‘my God, these guys don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”

Soon after, Ryder began volunteering with the CHO, which had custody and stewardship of the lifeboat. In 2002, he and other volunteers began efforts to restore the lifeboat in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of the Pendleton rescue. A major restoration followed in 2009, and in 2010, Ryder stepped into his role overseeing the vessel alongside Bob Summersgill. Ryder would continue to oversee the boat until 2020.

Ryder said approximately 10 volunteers work on the boat at any given time. And if there’s an interest from somebody to help in the effort, there’s a job for them.

“Anybody who showed up, I figured out a way to make them useful,” he said. “If I knew something that they’d be comfortable doing, I put them in charge of it.”

But at 85, Ryder said it’s become harder of late to work on the boat hands-on. Fortunately, he said, a crew of other CHO volunteers including Bill Amaru, John Sinopoli and John Norton have stepped up since his move to coordinate volunteers and the boat’s maintenance.

Meanwhile, he and his wife are working to acclimate to life in Florida. For Ryder, that means finding new ways to volunteer. He’s looking into helping out with his local Coast Guard auxiliary, and has also begun volunteering at a local hospital. But while he’s settling into a new routine, he still looks back on the active role he played in preserving the CG36500 with pride.

“I don’t know, there’s a mystique about the boat,” he said. “Anybody who has worked on it that has any sensitivity at all will say ‘Yeah, I get it.’ Because this thing talks to you. It really does.”