Whether an activist, town official, or ‘just plain Jim,’ Linville left an indelible mark on Hull
/Appreciation, by Susan Ovans
Jim L. Linville, a former town official who served on many committees during four decades of public service, died at South Shore Hospital on Sunday, June 9. He was 87, and is believed to have collapsed at his Edgewater Road home the morning before his death. Found unresponsive by his friend Ray Jackman, Jim was taken to the hospital by Hull EMTs. He died in the early morning Sunday.
IN THE ZONE. Jim Linville was well known as a zoning expert and served on Hull’s select board and planning board, among other committees and subcommittees over the years. [Richard W. Green file photo]
The first child of Georgia M. (Murphy) and George H. Linville of Bethany, Missouri, the son they named Jimmy Lee changed his name to Jim after he finished military service in the U.S. Air Force in 1958. For the rest of his long life, he was known personally and professionally as Jim. (Only his friend Ray was permitted to call him Jimmy, and then only as part of a nickname, Jimmy Sailboats. The moniker was a reference to Jim’s enthusiasm for remote-controlled model sailboats, a hobby that spawned the 25-year friendship the two enjoyed.)
Jim earned undergraduate degrees in industrial technology and journalism from San Diego State University. He crafted a career writing and editing technical publications, then joined the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association in 1982. For 17 years, Jim was editor, managing editor, or product manager for fire-safety publications used globally by fire protection engineers, including several editions of “The Fire Protection Handbook,” “SFPE Handbook of Fire Protection Engineering,” and the “SFPE Engineering Guide to Performance-Based Fire Protection Analysis and Design of Buildings.”
Just prior to his retirement in 2000, the Society for Fire Protection Engineers named Jim the recipient of its Lund Award, bestowed to individuals deemed to have made “significant contributions to the advancement of the fire protection engineer.” In particular, the award committee said he was “integral to the creation of documents for [fire safety] promotional exams, professional engineering reference texts, and classroom texts in fire science and fire engineering.”
In a press release announcing the prestigious award, Jim’s NFPA colleagues dubbed him “matchless.”
Jim and his wife, Susan (Middleton), bought their waterfront home in 1980. Sue established Edgewater Graphics, a graphic-design business that served commercial clients and local nonprofits where she volunteered, like the Hull Lifesaving Museum and the Paragon Carousel. The Linvilles were active in Hull residents’ efforts to rein in rampant condo development in the mid-1980s, when the town lacked a cogent set of zoning bylaws to help guide building height and density across the peninsula. Jim’s involvement in citizen activism found long-term expression in his election to the Hull Board of Selectmen and Planning Board. Over the years, he became known as one of Hull’s experts on zoning and land- and harbor-use planning. Jim served as a member of the Hull Harbor Planning Committee in addition to other boards, committees, and subcommittees.
He and David Carlon served on several committees together, including the planning board.
“Jim was the consummate gentleman and dedicated to public service,” Carlon said last week. “He always tried to do the right thing. He was serious about his commitment to public service and dedicated to his community. He did it with integrity.”
As seriously as he took the work, Jim never took himself seriously.
“The public view of Jim may be different from the personal experience,” Carlon said. “Jim was a lot of fun to be with. We had a lot of laughs. I used to look forward to attending a meeting with Jim, even when I knew the agenda was going to be a slog.
“Jim had a Mahatma Gandhi mindset: ‘If you don’t ask for it, you don’t get it.’ He was always looking for ways to improve our community and to find a path forward. He would do his best to get you to follow along. That takes a lot of grit, to keep offering your ideas and solutions to the community for years and knowing that many of those efforts will be rejected. Jim never gave up.”
Jim was a familiar figure at town meeting, frequently taking to the floor to expound on a regulatory matter, both as a town official and as a private citizen. At one memorable town meeting session, Jim explained that when he was giving his opinion as a resident – “Just plain Jim” – he’d be wearing his California Angels baseball cap. While speaking in his official capacity as a board member, he’d have nothing on his head.
Throughout the long session, Jim bobbed up and down to take the microphone to speak on various warrant articles. Hat on, hat off, town meeting participants ate it up.
Hull Times Editor Christopher Haraden shared this anecdote on Facebook: “Jim was so smart and so patient. I learned much from him about zoning laws and town meeting procedure. My favorite memory of him is leading a discussion at town meeting about a zoning issue (the details of which escape me) that was discussed for hours, with motions amended and wording changed, but he realized that wording of the final approved motion didn’t say what the voters thought it did. He stood up, asked to be recognized, and slowly and carefully led us through the various changes to show the error, moved to reconsider, and then offered the correct wording. It’s kind of a nerdy memory, but there are very, very few people who would have the knowledge to realize what went wrong, know how to fix it, and then carry out the remedy.”
At heart, Jim was a teacher. No matter the subject matter, he wanted you to know what he’d learned. He wanted particularly for friends to share his enthusiasms with the same excitement he experienced.
Both Sue and Jim built and raced remote-controlled model yachts and traveled the East Coast for competitions. As news of Jim’s death circulated online, local resident Jack Pearson posted to Facebook, “What a wonderful man. I remember about 30 years ago my son and I building remote control sailboats at [Jim’s] home on Edgewater. He had the patience of a saint.”
His friends at the Minuteman Model Yacht Club posted an online obituary for Jim that included this passage: “Jim was a lifelong sailor who was passionate about his hobby of building and sailing model yachts. For almost 30 years, Jim maintained a prominent role in the Minuteman Model Yacht Club, teaching and mentoring members, both new and old. Jim also belonged to the American Model Yachting Association, a national model yachting organization. With this organization he served as regional director, as US1M class secretary, and in multiple publication support staff positions for their Model Yachting magazine.
“In 2008, in recognition of his many achievements, Jim was voted into the American Model Yachting Association’s Hall of Fame.
“Jim was also diligent in maintaining relationships he developed in life. Every year, after the passing of his wife Sue, Jim would pack up several books-on-tape and take driving trips across the country to visit friends and family along the way. His weeks-long adventures would eventually end in San Diego, where he had a friend from high school to visit. He would then turn around and zigzag back across the country to visit people he missed initially.”
Jim’s passion for remote-controlled boats and for kids led him to the Massachusetts Hospital School in Canton, which serves children and adults with physical and cognitive disabilities and where Ray Jackman worked in the Recreational Department.
Jackman said that after Jim retired in 2000, he volunteered at the school to teach kids about model sailboats and help them build and race their own creations.
The pair’s natural camaraderie from those sessions blossomed into a 25-year friendship, which deepened four years ago, when Jackman and his wife, Meesha, downsized from Westwood and moved into his late parents’ D Street home in Hull.
Each Saturday morning, Jim would text his friend to alert him that coffee was ready. Until recently, Jim would meet Ray at the door and they’d sit and read the latest edition of The Hull Times, talk a little politics, laugh a lot. Ray would attempt to do some household chores. Each spring, Jim would allow him to put the docks in at his waterfront home, but would protest when his friend talked about installing the air conditioners.
“I can do it,” Jim said recently.
“No, you can’t,” Ray retorted.
“Well, I can do the little ones,” Jim relented.
At 87, Jim realized he was failing. He wanted to make one more road trip to the West Coast. Jackman told him he might be able to accompany him, but that Jim couldn’t drive solo anymore.
Recently, Jim stopped meeting Ray at the door. Jim posted a computer-generated sign that directed visitors to “Bang Knocker Loudly And Walk In.”
Scrawled below that directive was “MAKE NOISE.”
Jackman said every Saturday he’d be “holding [his] breath as [Jim] turned the corner” into the kitchen in response to Ray’s calling out his name.
Jim and Sue Linville…
On June 8, Jim didn’t text that the coffee was ready. With trepidation, Jackman drove to Jim’s home and called out as he came through the door. There was no response. Jackman found Jim on the floor, semi-conscious but non-responsive. He summoned the EMTs, but realized he didn’t even know Jim’s address. A neighbor provided the missing information.
A week after Jim’s death, Jackman explained what their friendship meant to him. “I really miss our Saturday mornings. It was just really special. We were good to each other and we enjoyed each other’s company. He was older, and some people might have thought of it as a chore, but it wasn’t that at all.”
Jim and Sue had no children, and there are no local family members. Jim entrusted his longtime friend Kathy Linnehan to handle his affairs. A Scituate native and graphic designer by training, she worked with Sue Linville in the early ’80s. Linnehan was 23. Sue was 41. The two immediately hit it off, professionally and personally. Linnehan moved into the Linvilles’ downstairs apartment. She and the man she would marry while living there, Joel Rosenbaum, enjoyed sailing with the couple on their catboat dubbed, appropriately enough, “Hull Cat.” The Linvilles also had a day sailer, “Duck Sloop.”
Sometime after Sue died of breast cancer in 2000, Jim gave up his sailboats but expanded his fleet of model racers, an avocation he continued until his death. His dining table remains cluttered with boat parts and hand-annotated design plans.
Jim was cremated, and Linnehan will see that he and Sue are, at long last, reunited according to the terms of his will. Jim’s friends are planning a memorial reception to be held later this summer. We’ll swap stories and perhaps one of Jim’s far-flung relatives or old friends will be able to fill in the blanks of some of the more outlandish Linville tales. There was, for example, the time that two-year-old Jim pushed out the screen of an open window and fell 16 feet. “Howdy, Doc,” the local paper reported Jim said to the hospital doctor who examined him. “He had not a bruise,” the paper said.
Jim wasn’t as lucky the next time he took a fall. According to his Air Force discharge papers, Jim fell from a tree at Camp Cooke, California in 1958, and spent 71 days recovering from injuries that included fractures of his left arm, elbow, and a bone in his neck. He and the Air Force parted ways after the mishap.
We’d love to ask Jim what happened next, and hear again his robust laugh as he’d tell the story of his whirlwind courtship of Sue, a co-worker he took on a date in 1962, warning that if she got into his car, he was going to point the TR3 toward Tijuana and marry her.
“Cool,” she said, hopping in.
His friends at the NFPA got it exactly right a quarter-century ago: Jim Linville was matchless.
