His name was Dave Philips, but in the sports corner of the newsroom we called him The Admiral, and for good reason. He served aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific during World War II, and for 36 years he was all things nautical in the pages of The Providence Journal.
If you raced sailboats on Narragansett Bay from the 1960s to the 1990s you knew Dave Philips. If you rowed on the Seekonk River from the Narragansett Boat Club in Providence, you knew Dave Philips. If you pulled an oar for Brown in the Eastern Sprints, you knew Dave Philips. If you skippered a 12-meter yacht on Rhode Island Sound during the hey-day of America’s Cup racing in Newport, you knew Dave Philips. If you crewed aboard a boat in the Newport-Bermuda race, you knew Dave Philips.
One of the many writers who made The Journal, The Evening Bulletin and The Sunday Journal, great newspapers back in the day, Dave Philips died on Nov. 27, the day after Thanksgiving. His obituary appeared in the December 6 edition of the Sunday Journal. He was 94.
Standing ramrod straight with square shoulders pushed back, Dave looked like former military. He usually wore a cap of some kind and spoke in a deep, measured voice. He carried his notebooks, pens, recorder, laptop and other paraphernalia that were the tools of his trade in a large canvas boat bag instead of a brief case or backpack.
According to his obituary, Dave enlisted in the Navy after graduating from high school in 1944. He was a meteorologist assigned to a carrier stationed off the coast of Japan preparing for the invasion that never occurred because the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war.
Dave continued to nurture his interest in weather long after he left the Navy. Every year during the January thaw or a mild day or two in February, he would announce that “we had broken the back of winter.” A week or two later we would have to dig out from a nor’easter.
Upon his discharge in 1946, he attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn, on the GI Bill. He earned his degree in 1951 and began his newspaper career, working for small papers in Arizona, Idaho, and Connecticut before arriving in Providence.
In addition to sailing and rowing, Dave covered college sports and pinch-hit on the the pro sports teams in Boston. His was a familiar face at Brown and Providence College hockey games, and he relished the opportunity to cover a small-college or Ivy League football game.
The Journal no longer covers sailing and rowing, which is probably just as well because nobody could write about regattas the way Dave Philips did.
