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James Rockefeller, a co-founder of the Owls Head Transportation Museum, died in his Camden home on Jan. 8, just a day after he turned 99, according to his obituary.
Rockefeller, who belongs to the famous family of the same last name, has left behind a legacy of learning, according to John Bottero, the current executive director of the transportation museum, which features many different vehicles in its exhibits.
In 1974, Rockefeller co-founded the midcoast institution with Steve Lang and Tom Watson Jr., reportedly as an excuse to fly old airplanes, according to the museum website.
Watson had his own airstrip next to his North Haven summer home, and mailed Rockefeller a handwritten note on the back of a graduation program that read: “Wouldn’t it be nice to have some old airplanes flying around Owls Head.” Watson, who was a CEO of IBM, didn’t use question marks.
Now, the museum has acquired more than 150 vehicles and tens of thousands of smaller artifacts, Bottero said.
“It’s really a community hub for anybody who really likes rolling their sleeves up and understanding how to satisfy that curiosity of how things work,” Bottero said.
Rockefeller was also a boatbuilder, a pilot and an adventurer in the most classic sense of the term, according to Bottero.
He was born in Manhattan in 1926 and raised in Greenwich, Connecticut. After serving in the Army AirCorps in World War II and graduating from Yale University, he spent years travelling the world — including through the canals and rivers of France in a small Viking boat — before settling down in Camden, according to his obituary.
Rockefeller was also a boatbuilder. He spent more than 20 years at Bald Mountain Boat Works in Camden building and restoring vessels, vintage cars and airplanes. His love for engines and vehicles is shared in the museum’s mission, Bottero said. Now, the museum is going through another expansion which will allow for educating youth in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
“He obviously was a first-class human being,” Bottero said.
