Businessman, pilot was security chief for Howard Hughes

LEWISTON – Jeff Chouinard left Lisbon as a boy seeking big adventure all over the world. He got that adventure and more – as a Navy pilot, a private investigator for eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, a contributor to the founding of clothing giant Patagonia.

But his heart never left his birthplace.

Chouinard, who returned to Maine every year of his life, died last week in Thousand Oaks, Calif. Family members said he died of heart and kidney failure. He was 84.

“He was incredible,” said his sister, Doris Blackey, of Thousand Oaks. “He was never boring, I’ll tell you that.”

Perhaps an understatement.

Chouinard left Lisbon as a young man to train as a pilot during World War II. In 1946, he moved his entire family to the West Coast and then the real action began.

Between 1950 and 1958, Chouinard worked as a private investigator, primarily for Hughes, for whom he served as head of personal security. A person had to be creative to take on such a role with such an increasingly paranoid boss.

The San Jose Mercury newspaper in 1972 wrote a story detailing some of the exploits orchestrated by Chouinard as he sought to manage his boss’ life. In one such tale, Chouinard admitted that he once hired an actor to serve as Hughes’ body double to draw journalists away from the illustrious millionaire.

“I did this on my own incentive because I was afraid to ask Hughes’ permission,” Chouinard told the Mercury. “We fooled the press. We fooled everybody. We never had to say, ‘This is Howard Hughes’ anywhere we went. We never mentioned that name to anyone. We let people draw their own conclusions.”

Throughout his time with Hughes, Chouinard used a lot of family members to help him with the job. His brother Yvon, who would later found Patagonia, was once hired by his brother to guard a boat Hughes wanted to buy.

“Hughes wanted family,” Blackey said. “He liked it when Jeff hired members of his own family. “

Yvon Chouinard, a noted mountain climber, who was described by his sister as equally adventurous if not more so than Jeff, was on a fishing trip to Russia on Tuesday and could not be reached for comment.

After Hughes died in 1976, Chouinard became a key voice in biographies written about the man. By then, Chouinard was onto other adventures, working for Yvon on business ventures related to Patagonia.

Blackey said she and her brothers had fond memories of growing up in Lisbon, but their mother wanted them to move away when they were still children. She did not want her kids to resign themselves to working in the mills.

“In those days, that’s all you could do,” Blackey said.

As the story goes, in January 1946, from a Navy base in San Diego, Chouinard mailed his family a box of oranges with a letter encouraging them to move west. By March of that year they had sold their house and auctioned off their furniture. Chouinard obtained leave to fly back and drive them out.

According to Blackey, however, Chouinard had developed a fondness for Maine that never went away. In 1991, he purchased a cottage on the water in Cundys Harbor, a 40-minute drive from his childhood home.

“He was still very devoted to Maine,” Blackey said. “He went back every year. He went every single summer.”

Just two weeks ago, Chouinard’s home in Cundys Harbor was sold. Other family members said almost until the end, he tried to get his whole family to move back there with him.

“For the last 30 years he has been trying to get us all back to Maine,” said sister-in-law Malinda Chouinard.

Funeral arrangements had not been finalized by Tuesday night. Those who knew Chouinard the best seemed to be struggling between pragmatism and what were assumed to be an adventurous man’s final wishes.

“The family is sure,” Malinda Chouinard said, “that he’d prefer his ashes shot out of his cannon there on his porch in Cundys Harbor.”

Which, of course, leads to another Jeff Chouinard story.

It seems that he had a cannon installed on the dock at his cottage. A few years ago, he fired off a shot and was quickly scolded by a neighbor, who felt it was too soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks for such a display.

“So, he went out and fired it again,” said nephew Vincent Stanley. “That was the kind of guy he was, always the trickster. As it turned out, he and the neighbor became good friends.”

As for the idea of blasting Chouinard’s ashes from the cannon?

“It’s a thought,” Stanley said.