Everett Pearson: Fiberglass Pioneer, Boatbuilding Legend

Everett Pearson: Fiberglass Pioneer, Boatbuilding Legend

- Kim Kavin

Everett Pearson was a fiberglass boat-building pioneer who co-founded Pearson Yachts and helped to launch the J/Boats sailboat brand. Pearson died Dec. 24, 2017, at the Hope Hospice Center in Providence, Rhode Island. He was 84.

Born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1955 at Brown University, where he was captain of the football team. He and a cousin, Clinton Pearson, had a long history in business by then, having delivered groceries, sold Christmas trees and more during their younger entrepreneurial years. By the late 1950s, they were building fiberglass dinghies in a garage at a time when wooden hulls still ruled the day.

The pair got their official start in the boating business in 1959, after being approached to build a Carl Alberg design that would become known as the Triton 28. Everett Pearson borrowed $3,000 from a friend of his mother’s who owned a funeral home in Providence. “We took that money and paid $600 to get the boat into the New York Boat Show,” Pearson says in the 1999 book Heart of Glass: Fiberglass Boats and the Men Who Built Them.

Show-goers loved what they saw. On the strength of that show’s purchase orders — for 17 hulls — Pearson Yachts went public as a company a few months later, having turned the $3,000 loan into about $170,000 worth of revenue. The cousins bought the old Herreshoff yard in Bristol, Rhode Island, to start production. Cruising World magazine estimated sales for that year at $750,000 to $1 million, with virtually all of it based on the sheer volume of orders, as the Triton 28 sold to consumers for just $9,700.