The in-demand boatyard

Hans Dickman came over from Germany and set up a boat repair business on the Rhine Channel at Lafayette Street in the early 1930s. A Newport Beach institution was born.

After the 1933 Long Beach earthquake destroyed a market in Compton, Dickman bought the old market’s archway, dragged it on makeshift wheels down Pacific Coast Highway, and tacked it up on a building that became his boat works. That arch became the building’s symbol, said Jean Skinner, 85, a longtime Newport resident who eventually bought the operation from Dickman.

The business’ crews built and repaired fishing and pleasure boats, including abalone divers’ crafts. Dickman always had more business than he could handle, Skinner said. She went to work for Dickman after her job building airplanes during World War II ended.

“Hans said, ‘Why don’t you come down here and work with me for a while,’ and 40 years later I was still there,” Skinner said.

Dickman retired and sold his business to Skinner and her husband, Frank, in 1955, but he would still come over and continue to work.

“I remember one New Year’s Day, no one worked, but Hans showed up and went to work,” she said.

He didn’t work alone. After the business changed hands, Jean Skinner operated the machinery herself, said Roger Eaton, a Newport Beach resident and former yard crewman at the boat works.

“It was one of the few yards that did only wooden boat repairs,” Eaton said.

“The boatyard was kind of like a community center,” said Leonard Thompson, a yard crewman in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Both the famous and nonfamous used the boat works.

Composer David Rose, husband of Judy Garland, kept a steamboat in the bay and was a customer of the Skinners. Rose lived in Encino but kept an apartment at the Balboa Bay Club, Thompson said. Skinner sold her business in 1984, when the owner of the property on which it stood sold it to someone else.

The boat repair places started to disappear in the 1980s as the price of property in the area skyrocketed. Also, the fisherman had stripped the bay of abalone, mackerel and oysters, leaving little to catch. And as fiberglass boats became the standard, wooden boat repair was less in demand.dpt.15-goodolddays-2-BPhotoInfoPK1OUUEL20060315iw5dg8kn(LA)The Dickman boatyard closed in 1984. Its original owner, Hans Dickman, dropped the second N from his surname after the sign was made. dpt.15-goodolddays-1-dl-CPhotoInfoPK1OUUTC20060315iw5gd5knDON LEACH / DAILY PILOT(LA)Jean Skinner, who bought the Dickman boatyard, talks about operating machinery at the repair shop that was in Newport Harbor’s Rhine Channel.