“Cecil is one of those people with whom you instantly become comfortable. Out of respect, I called him Mr. Benson, and he said, ‘Oh, call me Cecil.  Everybody does.’ He takes great pride in the blacksmith shop he helped design in 2005 for the Kennebunkport Historical Society, because it is a reproduction of the one his grandfather and great-grandfather once worked in near Dock Square from the 1890s to the 1940s. I photographed him there, where he still gives blacksmithing demonstrations."

Cecil Benson can trace his family at least as far back to Arundel in the late 1700s. He himself was born and raised in Kennebunkport, attending the local village schools and graduating from Kennebunkport High School in 1944. He went into the Navy as a lieutenant after graduating from the Maine Maritime Academy in 1946. He attended college for a couple of years at the University of Maine at Orono and ultimately returned to sea. His career spanned 32 years, during which he transported bananas for the United Fruit Company, freighted tanks and guns to Europe, and served for six years on the nuclear ship Savannah. He was licensed by the U. S. Coast Guard to captain vessels of “any tonnage on any sea.” Indeed, he sailed in every ocean, but most of his work kept him in the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and the North Sea. Benson is a member of the Portland Marine Society, Boston Marine Society, past board member of the Kennebunkport Historical Society, current president of the Arundel Cemetery and vice president of Atlantic Hall in Cape Porpoise.

Accompanying Benson’s portrait is his original sextant. Cecil Benson purchased this celestial navigational instrument in New Orleans for $75 in 1949, when he was a young deck officer. He used it in all his years at sea. Today, global positioning systems have supplanted sextants.  Benson also loaned photos of the ships he captained, plus a copy of his Coast Guard license.

“The Kennebunks represent. . . my home.  There's a little story that when seamen get together for coffee, they always discuss where they plan on retiring. When they’d ask me where I’d go when I retired, I always responded, ‘Home.  Kennebunkport.  That's my home.  It always has been and always will be.’”