Meet Al Philips: A Former Naval Officer and Would-Be Astronaut Who Loves Giving Tours of his Diminutive Bainbridge Island Preserve

What kid hasn’t dreamed of wanting to become an astronaut? Al Philips, owner and operator of Dolphin Place, a small nature preserve on the north side of Little Manzanita Bay, where he conducts native walks and native plant tours during the summer months, was one of those kids.

During a decades long career in the Navy, as an enlisted man who worked his way through the ranks to become an officer, Philips remembers catching the astronaut bug while growing up in the 1960s. “I was always engaged in and enthused about science and science fiction,” he recalls while sitting on a stump in the backyard of his preserve under a magnificent Douglas Fir tree. “I watched the Mercury and Gemini flights go up and wished that (someday) I could be an astronaut. But there’s a difference between wishing and dreaming. …”

Philips’ quest to fly into space started one day while he was wrapping up a commission in the late 1980s aboard the USS Alaska, when a senior officer asked him, “what would you like to do with the rest of your tour?’ … I said, I’d like to be an astronaut,” Philips recalls spouting off.

His Naval superiors took him seriously and nominated him to apply for the world-renowned NASA program. He received letters of recommendation from the Navy, but also from some unlikely sources, namely a few famous Sci-Fi writers of the day, such as Arthur C. Clarke (“2001: A Space Odessey” among dozens), and Issac Asimov (“Foundation, I, Robot,” and many others).

So, you ask, how did an enlisted Navy officer begin rubbing shoulders with some of America’s elite authors? “I love art (and science) and started talking with (successful American artist) Kelley Freas, who knew them.”

The Navy accepted the celebrity recommendations, along with others, and Philips sent along his paperwork to NASA, but unfortunately, to no avail. “There’s like 2,000 people applying for one spot,” Philips says, a bit of disappointment in his voice after all these years. “I didn’t have a good school record; that probably disqualified me. I didn’t have a 4.0.”

Philips didn’t entirely give up on his dream of becoming an astronaut. The Navy later nominated him again for the honor, and he got a graduate degree in Oceanography from the University of Washington hoping that might open some doors, but he discovered that real life was getting in the way.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, Al Philips is something of a Renaissance Man. Besides being a Naval officer who went on to write curriculum and teach at the Trident Submarine Base at Kings Bay, GA. (and later at the Bangor Base in Silverdale), he’s an amateur naturalist, and schooled with Dale Chiluly in the art of glass making. He still tinkers in glass and once owned and operated a company called Dolphin Glass. Oh, and he is friends with Brian Herbert, a fellow islander, who’s Dad was the late Frank Herbert, author of Dune. Brian contributed to some of the sequels to his dad’s work and consulted on recent Dune movies, but that’s a story for another day.

Philips’ true love these days is his one-plus acre backyard preserve – known as Dolphin Place Open Space ( www.DolphinPlaceOpen.space) – that he claims has as many or more native tree species than Islandwood, Bloedel Reserve and the Park District combined.

He bought the property – which is semi-high bank waterfront on Little Manzanita Bay and sits across from some of the island’s more tonier looking homes – around 1973 while he was still in the Navy. He paid the ransom sum of $27,000 for it at the time.  “My goal when I bought the property was multi-faceted. I wanted a place with trees. They give me comfort. I spent two years looking for a place in the Puget Sound. … I was making $310 a month in the Navy (and) I found this place that was better than I hoped for.”

The land has stands of mature second growth “wet” forests of Cedar, Hemlock, Doug Fir, Alder, Maple, Pacific Yew and other species.

He and his wife built a house on the property in 1984, had two kids, and built another smaller house and other structures. Meantime, Philips got involved in the island’s Home Rule efforts, which resulted in Bainbridge being incorporated as a City in 1991.

“I was activist,” he recalls, “and I learned a whole lot about local politics.” If tending his garden and working with former elected officials such as Dwight Sutton and Norm Woolridge wasn’t enough action, Philips spent the decade from 1992 to 2002 working part-time for Chiluly, the famous glass artist based in Tacoma. By this time, he was fiddling with electrical engineering and was doing odd jobs when Chiluly stumbled upon him after he couldn’t find anyone to fix some chandeliers at Paul Allen’s house on the East side.

“A month later, I fixed them,” Philips remembers. So impressed was Chiluly with Phillips ingenuity that he hired him on the spot. “He told me, ‘I got a lot of artists, but only one engineer.’” The work with Chiluly later inspired him to become a Master Electrician and start yet another career. “I realized I couldn’t put two kids through college being a glass artist,” he says, a slight look of forlornness on his face.

While in the Navy, Phillips “sailed all over the world, all the seven seas, north and south of the equator and above the arctic circle.” Even though he was an enlisted man, he was tasked as a senior construction officer on major projects, including the construction of the USS Alaska, an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine commissioned in 1986.

“I was the Midnight Cowboy,” he recalls with a laugh. “I supervised 350 guys on the 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift. I took over from the captain and his rotating duty officer. The consequence of all that work is that we finished the job 94 days ahead of schedule and saved the taxpayer in excess of $60 million.”

Philips admits he’s not a good speller or a traditional academic, but in the Navy, he learned to be “good at multi-tasking and supervising complex industrial tasks. … It’s a skill set I always had, but you don’t (get) select(ed) for it. You (get) select(ed) for competency, precision and results. It means you paint inside the lines. They (NASA) don’t select (potential astronautical candidates) for people who juggle and paint outside the lines.”

Roaming around Phillips’ Dolphin Place Open Space, which is open for tours for a modest price, the now 74-year-old is wildly enthused as he talks about the more than 200 trees on his property, “quite a few” that are five feet wide in diameter or bigger. Walking on a path that he’s etched out of the wilderness, he points to Huckleberry plants, Indian Plum, Chestnut and Hazelnut trees.

Around a bend, you’ll see 10 different species of active ferns, Chiluly (and his own) glass art scattered about, Devil’s Club, Vine Maples, Western Red Cedar trees, Orchids, Wild Ginger and exotic plants. “I built the under story,” Philips says. “I brought in logs and moss. … We didn’t have Eagles or Osprey here when we started.”

One of the signature attractions of Dolphin Place is the “Deep Woods Pond” that contains the “Big Tree,” a combination of a Doug Fir and a Cedar that has a massive seven-foot-wide diameter. It’s absolutely huge. Walk further and you come upon a small estuary, filled with sand, mud, gravel and beach grass. The path eventually opens up to the preserve’s appropriately 300 feet of shoreline, where over the years Philips has experimented with any number of projects, such as creating Oyster beds or building aquariums.

While the outside work of tending his gardens and giving tours, certainly satisfies his soul, Philips is still pursuing other dreams. Ten years ago, he founded Continuing Education University, Washington CEU Washington – Electrical Continuing Education in Washington State aimed at assisting electricians, plumbers and others in the trades to get certified.  “A lot of them (students) are like me,” Philips says. “They struggled in school.”

He also is still doing glass work projects. He and another artist just recently completed and delivered a set of glass paddles to the famous Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, where Chiluly got his start. Where does all this energy come from? Philips likes to point to Seneca, the Roman Philosopher and the likely creator of Stoicism, who quipped words to this effect: “‘People with good luck are people who are prepared, meaning they see the opportunity,'” Philips says. “I guess that’s me.”

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