To: Capt. Philip Norton and Capt. Leon Easterbooks

Dear Phil and Leon:

I wonder if you remember me. About 50 years ago, I worked at your boatyard in Edgartown. You were intimidating figures to a college kid, dressed in your khaki work clothes and heavy boots — always on the move, working as hard as any of your men.

Norton & Easterbrooks Boatyard was a busy place in mid-June 1967, when I showed up at eight one morning to begin my summer as a dock boy. “We start at seven,” a man told me as I glanced around the yard, wondering if I should just go home.

“Report in to Leon,” the man said, “when he comes down.”

Leon, you were up in a bosun’s chair that morning, repairing some rigging at the top of a sailboat’s mast. Thirty feet below you, several men were pulling a powerboat into position to be launched.

I grabbed a line, attempting to be useful.

The boat was heavy. “Pull like you mean it, Harmon!” a voice behind me barked. It was you, Phil. You were everywhere. How did you already know my name? Red-faced, I pulled like I’d never pulled before.

My summer on the dock had begun. I didn’t realize it at the time, but working at Norton & Easterbrooks was going to teach me some enduring life lessons.

Lesson one: “Pull like you mean it!” How many times have those words come back to me, Phil, as I’ve caught myself being hesitant or inattentive over the years?

The boatyard’s long dock, it turned out, was actually a bridge — from boyhood to manhood.

I tried to be a fast learner. I bought an alarm clock, and got to the yard at seven the next morning. Most of the men brought big lunch boxes to work, but I was down to half a package of Oreos. The alarm clock had wiped out my savings.

Somehow, I thought we would be paid every day. That’s how it had worked in my previous summer job, mowing lawns in my family’s suburban New York neighborhood. Waiting until Friday was going to be hard. “A week from Friday,” a man told me. “We get paid every two weeks.”

Lesson two: Sometimes, you just have to swallow your pride and ask for help. I phoned home, praying it would be my mother who answered. This was decades before electronic transfers, but she quickly mailed a check to the rooming house where I was staying.

Over the years, lesson two has come to my rescue more times than I like to admit. It’s not just 20-year-olds, I’ve discovered, who can find themselves in embarrassing situations. When I’ve ended up in the boss’s office, or in one of life’s other tight spots, I’ve tried to remember to swallow, take a breath, and let the truth spill out.

But it was you, Leon, who taught me the summer’s most profound lesson. You were the yard foreman, supervising a dozen men and in charge of the elevator dock, where we launched and hauled boats.

The elevator was powered by an old car engine. Whenever a boat was pulled onto the elevator dock for launching, you’d start that engine. Long steel cables would slowly lower the dock and the boat into the harbor.

The engine was loud, and you would lean out the door of the engine shed like the engineer on an old steam locomotive, watching a freshly-painted boat wet her bottom as she went down, or a tired-looking boat settle into her cradle as she came up.

By good luck, I was assigned to the late shift at the yard, which meant I was on the dock each evening when you came back from supper to lock up.

Do you remember our conversations? They were kind of brief.

You would park your green and white ’55 Chevrolet at the office, where Phil managed the yard’s business, and walk over to the engine shed. At 7:30 p.m. the yard was quiet. You’d pull the brim of your khaki cap down against the set ting sun, light a cigarette and survey the scene.

If I walked past you — to chop a block of ice for a cruising sailboat, perhaps — you would nod. I wouldn’t say a word, nervous that I had probably cut the ice too big and cost the yard money. Phil had warned me about that.

Sometime in July, you started to say, “Hi, Bub.”

“Hi,” I would say.

In August, I got up my nerve to say, “Hi, Leon.” We even talked a bit as we closed up.

Something was happening to me that summer. I was gaining confidence in myself, and it was largely thanks to you.

Each day on the dock, I had to struggle to hold my own with the other two dock boys. One was a varsity football player, and the other a wild young Norwegian. On sunny days we worked with our shirts off, and girls always came by in their whalers just to see these guys.

I was a different story. I was the skinny fellow worried that my glasses might get knocked into the water as my dockmates rough-housed — worried that I might get knocked in.

But one evening in August, as I came down the dock carrying two 50-pound blocks of ice, you saw something that had been invisible to me, Leon.

“You’re gettin’ some strong, Bub,” you said.

The words touch me, even today. I’ve taken them with me through the years, like a father’s blessing.

And so, lesson three: Affirm those around you. They may need it more than you know.

What I felt on those evenings on the dock with you, Leon, was an approving presence. Words didn’t matter. The older I get, the more I simply try to be an approving presence for people.

This fall I returned to the Vineyard for a visit, and I walked down to the boatyard one evening. It’s now called Edgartown Marine, but it hasn‘t changed too much. I could almost see your black, ‘49 Cadillac parked at the foot of Morse street, Phil.

The old elevator dock has been replaced with a huge blue hoisting machine, but I thought I could hear an engine running, Leon. And I’m sure I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke.

I’m writing this letter at my home in New Mexico, where we are about to celebrate the Day of the Dead. You New Englanders call it All Souls’ Day. Either way, our remembrances on Nov. 2 will honor all the loved ones who have cast off for deeper waters, far beyond Georges Bank. In this spirit, I want to say:

Capt. Norton and Capt. Easterbrooks, you are both still very much alive for those of us whose lives you touched, and enriched.

Thank you.

Tom Harmon is a writer and editor living in New Mexico.