John Winfield Harrington ’44 died on November 14, 2004, in Bangor, Maine.
Born on June 4, 1922, in Malden, MA, he prepared for college at Malden High School and became a member of Delta Upsilon Fraternity at Bowdoin, which he attended from 1940 to 1943 before entering the U.S. Merchant Marine Service during World War II. He graduated with distinction from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in September of 1944 and served with the Merchant Marine during World War II, attaining the rank of lieutenant junior grade. He returned to Bowdoin in 1946 and graduated in February of 1947 as a member of the Class of 1944. Between 1944 and 1960 he held various positions as a foreign securities analyst, a shipbroker, a ship agent, and at sea as a ship’s officer. He was associated with Bowring and Company in New York City from 1960 to 1964, when he became a vice president with the International Navigation Corporation in Washington, DC. Later on he formed his own companies, working as both a shipbroker and a developer of pollution recovery equipment. After his retirement from brokerage, he moved to the Maine town of Stonington, where he opened a nursery, Oceanville Gardens. He was for some years president and a director of Seven Seas Agency Corporation and Specialty Ships Unlimited, Inc. He was a member of the Masons and the Odd Fellows and in 1944 was the recipient of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy’s Boston Marine Society Prize for the Graduate Most Exemplifying the Qualities of Ship’s Master. He was the holder of two patents on a vacuum skimmer for cleaning up oil spills. Surviving are his wife, Jeanne Matthews Harrington, whom he married in 1944; two sons, John Harrington of Deer Isle and Steven Harrington of Oak Hill, VA; a daughter, Susan Windsor of Stanton, VA; nine grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.