This website complements the book The Trumbly Show: A Narrative of Training Under Legendary Boatbuilder Joe Trumbly, which was first published electronically as an Amazon Kindle ebook in October 2013. The purpose of this site is to make available numerous photographs I took of the Bates Boat Building program and the boatbuilding scene in and around Tacoma in the late 1970s, as well as other relevant material such as video clips.
The photographs are organized by topic under “PHOTO GALLERY” in the top menu.
The Trumbly Show is now AVAILABLE IN PRINT in a revised version published in June 2022 and can be obtained at:
Revisions in the print edition include three new paragraphs in Chapter 6; elimination of the previous Chapter 10 because it was extraneous; some corrections and new text in newly numbered Chapter 15; updating of Chapter 16; the correction of several glaring errors in the Glossary; the correction of scattered misspelled, omitted, duplicated, or misused words; streamlining of the text here and there; and the inclusion of additional photographs. The bulk of the text remains unchanged.
The photographs included on this site are among the approximately 700 black-and-white images I took when I attended the Bates Boat Building program from fall 1977 to spring 1979. In 2022, I donated all my boatbuilding photographs (negatives, contact proof sheets, a positive digital scan of each negative, and an edited, lower-resolution version of each image) to the Tacoma Public Library and transferred the copyright of all images to that institution, which at present has a “free use” policy.
While my website will not be maintained indefinitely, the images will be available online on a permanent basis through the ORCA (Online Records and Collections Access) web link maintained by the Library’s Northwest Room:
The Trumbly Show: Contents and Illustrations
