By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer
The longtime shipbuilder died Saturday at 89.

AUBURN – Flags above Bath Iron Works will be flown at half-staff today in remembrance of an Auburn man who helped build ships for 60 years.

Leroy Stewart, known to generations of shipbuilders as “The Colonel,” died Saturday after a long illness. He was 89.

Though Stewart retired in 1997, people at Bath Iron Works still recalled him Tuesday.

“It’s certainly a huge loss,” said Mike Keenan, the president of the shipyard’s largest union, Local S/6. “He was a great guy, the kind of guy who’d say, Hi’ to you and cheer you up if you were in a bad mood.”

Keenan figured that a majority of the union’s 4,000 workers still remembered Stewart, who picked up the nickname as a result of his Vandyke beard and mustache, which resembled Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Col. Harland Sanders.

Like the chicken seller, Stewart worked well past the average retirement age.

In a profile of Stewart published in 1997, he talked about his decision to work long after most people have slowed. For the last two decades of his work life, people tried to persuade him to retire.

Stewart couldn’t understand anybody giving up a good job, he said.

He began working as a shipbuilder in 1937. As the country suffered the Great Depression, he began work in a Quincy, Mass., shipyard.

He spent the next two decades moving from yard to yard. In 1968, at the age of 52, he began at Bath Iron Works. He stayed for 29 years.

When he retired in 1997, he shared the stage with the secretary of the Navy at the Bath launch of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, the USS Higgins.

In the years that followed, he spent his time collecting coins and toys in his Auburn home, granddaughter Daveline Francis said Tuesday.

He died Saturday at his home, with his wife, Dorothy, and family at his bedside.

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