From collection Eastern Illustrating & Publishing Company Collection
Gene Tunney's House -- John's Bay -- Pemaquid Beach, Maine as seen from Cap'n Eliot Winslow's "ARGO" B281
View of Gene and Polly Tunney's summer home on John's Island, John's Bay, Maine from the tour boat ARGO (foreground) When boxing legend James Joseph "Gene" Tunney (1897-1978) needed to kick back and relax, he fled to John's Island in John's Bay, Maine. But Tunney, who twice dispatched Jack Dempsey to claim the world heavyweight title in the 1920s, didn't always go alone. In fact, there are claims that an even more famous historical personage spent some time on the island: President John F. Kennedy. If true, that's a mighty fine pedigree for this 28-acre summer paradise. Johns Island is home to a compound of historic structures, centered on a gambrel-roofed main house that dates to 1924 Mary "Polly" Lauder Tunney (1907-2008) of Greenwich, Connecticut and South Bristol, an heiress to the Carnegie Steel Co. fortune, was married to heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney in 1928 in Rome when she was 21. She kept the summer residence on John's Island in South Bristol after the death of her husband in 1978 until her death in 2008. ARGO Captain Eliot Winslow and his boat ARGO, was a member of a motley Boothbay Harbor tour boat fleet that included old familiar floating antiquities, a war surplus crash boat masquerading as a PT boat, and a salty seagoing Monhegan Island packet, all competing fiercely for tourist dollars. Before World War II, Winslow had been a paint salesman. During the war he found his true calling as the very able commander of the Coast Guard cutter ARGO. In the early 1950s he had a boat built at Friendship. A natural raconteur, his business flourished, and in the late 1950s he converted a 65-foot ex-Army T-boat into a larger tour boat, also named ARGO. In the winter Winslow picked up some odd work towing, which he enjoyed, and eventually a tugboat business replaced the tour boat business.
