In East Boston, the last voyage of the Mimi

At the end of any boat’s life is that one man: the scrapper. This is the story of one boat’s final chapter and of the men who loved her till the end.

The boat is the Mimi. For over a year, it had been at death’s door in Ganter’s boatyard in East Boston.

Men painted the Mimi pink and green. She had two tall masts and was wide and substantive and solid. When they built her in 1934, men designed her with a sturdy, deep hull for the purpose of being a cargo barge, hauling goods and supplies up and down the Normandy coast. In World War II, German soldiers used the boat to ferry munitions. By the 1970s, someone sailed the Mimi across the Atlantic, 2,800 miles to New England. And in 1984, having changed owners several times, producers for the Bank Street College production studio and PBS thought her a perfect fit for a new children’s show.

“Voyage of the Mimi” starred a young man named Ben Affleck, whose fictional adventures with his grandfather and a crew off the New England coast occupy half of each episode; in the second half, Affleck narrated an informational tour of some environmental topic.

Curricula in middle schools complemented the show, which PBS and Bank Street sold as a set to schools. As the Mimi entered old age, millions of young men and women dreamed of setting off to sea on her weathered decks.

That included two recent University of Vermont grads: Joe Fraker and Dan Koopman. As young men, the two loved watching “Voyage of the Mimi.” On a trip to Boston last summer, one started humming the theme song. The other chimed in, then wondered aloud where the actual Mimi might be.

She was less than a mile away, they found out, on the other side of the harbor. They did a Google image search then used a phone app that matched an image to a satellite map, and they found it within the hour. They were stunned at the Mimi’s proximity to them, but they were even more stunned at its sorry state.

For several months, they did what they could to save the Mimi.