William Austin Pinney, a seventh-generation summer resident of Chappaquiddick, died March 27, 2022, in Miami after a brief illness. He was 75 years old.
Bill was the beloved husband of Raquel Pinney and son of William Whitney Pinney Jr. and Louise Slocum Pinney.
He was born on May 28, 1946, in New York City and spent the first five years of his life (while his father managed the Martha’s Vineyard Cooperative Dairy) in Edgartown in the winter and Chappaquiddick in the summer.
His roots in Chappaquiddick run deep. On his father’s side, Bill was part of the Child (Bass, Pinney, Tilghman) and Gostenhoffer (Jones, Knights, Phinney, Pinney and Tilghman) families of Chappy, dating back to the late 1800s and 1920s respectively.
His maternal grandmother, Margaret Slocum Stevenson, also lived in Edgartown.
When Bill was six years old, he and his immediate family moved to Litchfield, Connecticut, but continued to spend summers in Chappy at the family home (purchased in the 1920s by Bill’s grandfather) on North Neck Road.
During June and August, Bill and his sister Peggy stayed at the Sweeten Water Farm owned by their grandparents, Margaret and Peter Pinney. Initially, Margaret and Peter invited their grandchildren to the farm to give their parents a break. However, staying on the farm ultimately provided Margaret and Peter’s grandchildren and various nephews with the opportunity to take summer jobs.
Bill attended elementary school in the Litchfield Public School System and high school at Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut, where he wrestled and rowed on the crew, graduating in 1964.
In 1969, he graduated from Columbia University, where he studied engineering and then changed his major to philosophy. He married his first wife, Sarah Hart, shortly after graduating from Columbia.
Then he and Sarah embarked on a grand adventure by driving to South America in a jeep. They made it as far as Colombia, where Bill and Sarah started an English-language newspaper. Eventually they sold the Columbia newspaper and moved to Toronto, where they started a publishing business.
After divorcing Sarah, Bill moved to Miami where he started a similar publication in Miami. Miami became his residence on the continent and remained so for the rest of his life.
Bill was intrigued by the adventures of Joshua Slocum, a distant cousin who was the first to circumnavigate the world. Bill’s early interest in ocean cruising involved sailing a 35-foot ketch up and down the East Coast from Miami. Eventually, however, he sold the company in Miami and designed the 50-foot schooner Rachael Slocum, which he built in Hong Kong. In 32 years he circumnavigated the world two and a half times. He navigated using a sextant (before GPS came along).
One of the key destinations he sailed to was the island of Florianopolis in southern Brazil, where he met the love of his life, Raquel De Souza. They got married in 2008. The wedding took place at St. Episcopal Church. Andrew in Edgartown, and the reception was held at the Pinney family home on Chappy. Together they circumnavigated the world, completing the journey when the boat reached Nevis in 2018.
Bill was very interested in the genealogy of his family, especially the Pinney and Slocum branches. As part of his genealogical research, he discovered a branch of the Pinneys who built a sugar plantation in Nevis. He bought the ruins of the old Pinney sugar plantations and worked to restore them. At the time of his death, he and Raquel had completed restoring part of the property to a livable condition.
In addition to the six volumes of Pinney’s genealogy, Bill authored two editions of Chappaquiddick Speaks, which examined what really happened when Ted Kennedy drove off Chappaquiddick’s Dyke Bridge. The book contains a scientific analysis by a renowned physicist and police consultant to determine whether an unusual assumption suggested by a witness observation is true or false.
He is survived by his wife, Raquel DeSouza Pinney of Miami; sister Margaret Pinney of Somerville; nephews Andrew Pinney of Somerville and Alex Weathers and his wife Lori and their two daughters, Gabriella and Cameron of Santa Barbara, California; his stepmother, Sarah Pinney of Sugar Hill, NJ and South Dartmouth; and three half-brothers, Breck Marshall and his wife Martha, their two children, Breck and Iliana, Geoffrey Marshall and his wife Kristen, their two children, Megan and Dylan, and David Marshall and his partner Christina Sewall, all of Dartmouth; and Chappy’s many cousins.
A memorial will be held later in the summer.
