John Putnam, the Melville of the South Street Seaport, Dies at 82

John Putnam, an expert on New York City’s maritime and commercial history whose impersonations of Herman Melville delighted visitors to the South Street Seaport Museum for decades, died Sept. 9 in Staten Island. He was 82.

His daughter Sara Putnam said the cause was cardiac arrest.

Putnam — Jack, as he liked to be called — joined the museum in 1982 as an office manager and cook for the Pioneer, the museum’s schooner. He later worked as the retail manager of Bowne & Co. Stationers, a small printing house owned by the museum, and then became the manager of the museum’s bookstore.

Putnam may have been one of the few modern New Yorkers who could say they lived aboard a square-rigged ship. For more than a decade he was the shipkeeper of the barque Peking, docked at Pier 16.

He was, as The New York Times put it in 2008, “the official historian and unofficial conscience of the South Street Seaport Museum.”

“Jack saw the roots of New York as we know it in the seaport,” Capt. Jonathan Boulware, the president and chief executive of the South Street Seaport Museum, said in a phone interview. “He saw the very literal and direct connection between South Street and Wall Street. Between South Street and Madison Avenue. Between South Street and Fifth Avenue. He told the history of South Street, Chapter One of the modern history of New York.”

Putnam first encountered Herman Melville through “Moby-Dick,” which was read to him when he was a boy. He became enamored of the author during a course at Harvard University taught by psychologist Henry Alexander Murray, who was also a “Moby-Dick” scholar. In the 1960s, Putnam wrote and illustrated a chapter on whaling for the Norton Critical Anthology edition of “Moby-Dick” and worked on the Northwestern-Newberry edition of “The Writings of Herman Melville.”

Putnam began performing a one-man show at the South Street Seaport Museum, dressed as Melville, in 1990, and developed it into a walking tour of lower Manhattan and the South Street Seaport, near Melville’s boyhood home, at 6 Pearl St.

For Putnam, impersonating Melville came naturally.

“After a certain age, as a member of this gene pool, if you keep your hair and grow a beard you begin to resemble Herman,” Putnam told The Times in 2001.

With a square beard and dressed in period garb, he was enough of a Melville doppelgänger to be physically convincing. But it was his expansive knowledge of maritime history, the South Street Seaport and “Moby-Dick” that made the illusion complete.

“He was able to bring to life what it was like to be at sea,” Boulware said. “Jack Putnam and Herman Melville shared a common love of the sea. Yes, he looked like Melville; yes, he could recite long passages of ‘Moby-Dick’ from memory. But it was that common love that brought the comparison to life.”

For the museum, Putnam was not just a link to the past; he was a lodestar during its tempestuous recent history.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the museum, in lower Manhattan not far from the World Trade Center, was closed for two years and lost money as tourism plummeted in New York. Just as the museum was beginning to right itself, the financial crisis of 2008 wiped out a number of promised donations. And in 2012, Hurricane Sandy flooded the museum’s lobby with 6 feet of water, destroying the building’s electrical systems along with its cafe, admission desk, computer system and gift shop.

After the hurricane, the staff continued to meet weekly, and Putnam, even without an official job at the museum, became a motivator.

“His presence as a sort of a wise old man, but who didn’t take himself too seriously, was a buoying force for the staff of the museum,” Boulware said.

John Bruce Putnam was born on July 2, 1936, in Boston to Philip Austin, a law librarian at Harvard Law School, and Thelma Madeleine (Arthur) Putnam, who worked at the Harvard development office. After graduating from Belmont Hill School, he attended Harvard, where he was a member of the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps. He graduated in 1958 with a degree in English, then served at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia and later as a lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve.

Putnam met Dianne Maxwell Coyle when they both had summer jobs in Nantucket, Massachusetts, he as a garbage collector, she as a chambermaid. They later married. He then spent many years working as an editor on college campuses. In 1971 he became the executive director of the Association of American University Presses.

Putnam was an Elderhostel guide to the maritime history of New York aboard a number of trans-Atlantic voyages on the Queen Elizabeth 2 and the Queen Mary 2. He was also a photographer and painter and built models of small rowing dories and sailing vessels from scratch.

His marriage to Coyle ended in divorce in the early 1980s. In addition to his daughter Sara, he is survived by his second wife, Saundra Smith; another daughter, Jennifer Putnam; a son, Nathaniel; and four grandchildren. For all Putnam’s recitations of Melville, there was one phrase for which family and friends remembered him best.

Taken from the first chapter of “Moby-Dick,” it goes: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet … then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”