Robert E. Lee, a state ferry captain who lived at Fort Seward, died April 7 of lung disease.

Lee lived in Haines about a decade, into the 1990s. He was a member of the Elks Lodge, owned a home on Officers’ Row, and was active in Alcoholics Anonymous. He was also a captain on the ferry Columbia, and served as an officer on several ferries throughout the Alaska Marine Highway System fleet, and as port captain.

Able seaman Mark Kistler worked alongside Lee on the ferry Matanuska when Lee was serving as a marine pilot.

“He had a photographic memory,” Kistler said. “I felt very comfortable on the bridge with him because of that. Steaming through the night you can’t see anything, you rely on the radar, charts and the pilot’s memory.”

Lee’s intelligence extended beyond waterways, Kistler said. “He would start talking sports and he could name a baseball game, a day, a year and who was at bat in the ninth inning. I never double-checked, but he’d say it with a straight face, and I believed him. There was no reason not to.”

In an on-line tribute at the Port Townsend, Wash. Peninsula Daily News, Lee was remembered as a life-long seaman and welcome shipmate who liked to swap sea stories and play practical jokes. “How likable was he? Even his ex-wives wanted to stay in touch with him,” Mark Sundt wrote.

Lee came to Haines after meeting the founder of the Alaska Marine Highway system, Steve Homer, and renting an apartment in Homer’s Officers’ Row home. Joan Snyder and Lee were neighbors.

When Homer died in 1989, Snyder inherited the large, historic building and sold it to Lee, who owned it a year or two before selling it to hotelier Arne Olson.

Snyder said Lee was a good neighbor. “The most outstanding thing he did was his work with Alcoholics Anonymous. He had had an alcohol problem, and he joined A.A. and became a real crusader with it,” she said.

Lee was born April 11, 1938 and began his career at sea at age nine, selling papers on the ferries his father, Captain Oscar Lee, owned and operated between Port Townsend, Keystone and Whidbey Island, according to the Peninsula Daily News.

He earned his merchant seaman’s document and later credentials from Kildall Navigation School and worked on Olympic Ferries and Black Ball Transport.

In 1973 he replaced his father as port captain for the Alaska ferry system. He left that desk job to work as an officer in the Alaska ferry fleet in 1976 and retired as a marine pilot in 1997.

His father, and mother Rose Sofie Lee, as well as two brothers and two sisters preceded him in death. Lee is survived by two daughters, a son, and five grandchildren.

Donations may be made to the American Lung Association.