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Robert Peary Jr., 90, Arctic Explorer's Son
Published: March 12, 1994
Robert E. Peary Jr., an engineer and outdoorsman, died on Wednesday in Sarasota, Fla., at the home of his daughter, Josephine.Mr. Peary, who lived in Augusta, Me., was 90.
He died of cancer, said his son, Robert E. Peary 3d of Augusta.
The elder Mr. Peary was a son of Robert E. Peary, the Arctic explorer who, in April 1909, became the first to reach the North Pole.
Robert Peary Jr. was a civil engineer for 40 years whose career often took him to the Arctic regions of Greenland and Canada, as well as to Iceland, where he helped design and build military bases and radar systems.
He also worked as an engineering inspector for the State of California during the construction of the Oakland Bay Bridge.
And he worked for 15 years for the State of Maine, designing bridges and fish ladders, which allow salmon and other species of fish to pass over dams and waterfalls as they try to reach spawning sites upstream.
Mr. Peary was a graduate of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., and Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.
He and his late sister, Marie Peary, donated Eagle Island in Casco Bay, the Peary family's summer home, to the State of Maine as a memorial to their father, who retired from the Navy as a rear admiral in 1911 and died in 1920.
Besides his son and daughter, Mr. Peary is survived by a half brother, Kali Peary of Qaanaq, Greenland, and two grandchildren.
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