Robert S. Douglas, Founder of the Black Dog Apparel Company, Dies at 93

Robert Douglas, who built the Black Dog Tavern in Martha’s Vineyard and transformed his logo of his Labrador Boxer mixture into an international emblem for the summer, died Wednesday at his family’s house on the island. I was 93 years old.

His son Jamie Douglas said the cause was prostate cancer.

Robert Douglas moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 1960 after growing up the summers on the island of Massachusetts with his family, falling in love with his maritime culture, and waiting for him to be the only one who adheres to summer back to the coast.

Mr. Douglas spent his first years on the island designing a Topsail schooner, called Shenondoah, which is still a fixed element on the Vineyard Haven coast. But later he directed his attention to build a restaurant, something that would be good and reliable at the head of the port, a place where people could gather during the year and obtain a cup of real New England soup.

His mixture of Labrador-Boxer, Black Dog, which bears the name of a pirate in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel “Treasure Island”, would be his pet.

The Black Dog tavern opened on the eve of the New Year in 1971, and the majestic Black Dog profile, drawn by Stephanie Phelan, would join the business in 1976, according to the Vineyard Gazette.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the Portrait of Black Dog was added to the color -colored shirts, thick sweatshirts, hats with stone washing, cups and cookie cans, stamped with the Black contour in the front and the purchase year on the back. The articles became instant collectibles for visitors who wanted to take a piece of their summer vacation house with the subject.

“The tail began to move the dog,” Douglas told Vineyard’s Gazette in 1997. “He starts like a restaurant and became a dried product business.”

Robert Stuart Douglas was born on March 18, 1932 in Chicago by Grace Farwell Douglas and James H. Douglas Jr. The couple was renting a house in the West Chop section of the island in 1947.

Mr. Douglas’s father served as Secretary of the Air Force and Defense Secretary of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Mr. Douglas graduated from Northwestern University and enlisted in the Air Force from 1956 to 1958. He was parked at the base of the Hanscom Air Force in Bedford, Massachusetts, which allowed him to re -connect with his love for New England.

In the summer of 1960, he signed to navigate as a partner aboard two ships of the nineteenth century and again a sailor aboard a replica of HMS Bounty, which had been built for a new version of “Mutiny on the Bounty”, a film starring Marlon Brando. He sailed from Nueva Scotia, through the Panama Canal, through the Pacific Ocean to Tahiti, where he worked for three months as a sailor in the film.

But he always wanted a ship or his. Without any formal training as a marine architect, Mr. Douglas designed the Shenondoah based on an original design of 1850 and launched the schooner in Vineyard Haven Harbor in 1964. Mr. Douglas captained the ship for more than 50 years, taking adults for Cruises and Schoolchilden to learn to be covered and colleagues.

Young people are “only great sponges, they can not have enough,” he told the Vineyard Gazette in 2013. “Each nation is new and interesting. I provide the platform, a different lifestyle, one that is very different.”

Alabama, another schooner, joined his fleet in 1967.

In 1970, he married Charlene Lapointe, a marine companion, who survives Mr. Douglas. His four children, Robert Jr., Jamie, Morgan and Brooke, also survive. The four children have their hand in the family business at various points, including work in retail stores, jump ships and manage the black dog clothing business.

In the vineyard, Mr. Douglas, or Captain Douglas, as he was known, defined his legacy for his commitment to maritime history. He decorated the tavern with museum quality pieces that he collected over the years, including boat models of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

But it was the image of the street dog, a rescue, which became a presentation card for Martha’s Vineyard and membership test to a summer club of Sum of Island.

The prison business by the end of the 1980s catapulted the business, with clothing pages sent to more than 200,000 customers. The company received an impulse in 1991 in Rolling Stone, when it took a photo of three women with long -peak black dog caps in the magazine, consolidating the great status of the brand.

Bill Clinton, a frequent visitor from the island duration of his presidency, was photographed in black dog team. His purchase of two t -shirts, a hat and a black dog dress were under the duration of his political trial investigation.

Black Dog, the laboratory mixture that started everything, died in 1983, but Douglas had other rescue dogs during his life, more recently Jack Russell Terriers.