John H. Gannett, the son of a former owner of the Portland Press Herald and a man who led a long and active life that often involved working on engines and machinery, died in July at his home in Florida, his family said Wednesday. He was 100.

Gannett had been general manager of printing for the Kennebec Journal and vice president of Guy Gannett Publishing Co. before the company was sold in 1998.

Guy Gannett Publishing owned the Portland Press Herald, Maine Sunday Telegram, the Portland Evening Express, the Kennebec Journal, the Waterville Morning Sentinel, and radio and TV stations before the family sold its holdings in 1998.

John Gannett loved machinery, his daughter, Genie Gannett, said in a phone interview Wednesday night. He had a small machine shop in the home where he and his wife, Pat, retired to in Conner, Florida, and while raising their three children in Maine a favorite outing involved taking his young daughter to a large commercial machine shop to show her how it operated, Genie Gannett said. Her father also was an avid boater and his boat in Florida was was designed to look like a tugboat, she said.

He also enjoyed trains, she said, and helped haul parts and equipment from out of state to the Narrow Gauge Railroad on Portland’s East End, where he was dedicated volunteer and an official conductor. He also volunteered at the Maine Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport.

“Trains and boats were his thing,” Genie Gannett said.

Gannett’s love of machines was a constant thread in his life, according to his obituary, from the time he transformed the family Volkswagen bus into a trolley for a Jaycees parade to the trip he made to the New York Boat Show in 1959 that led him to become a dealer for jet boats and develop Cobbossee Marina on Lake Cobbosseecontee in Manchester to the three years he and his wife came out of retirement in Florida to crisscross the country in a big rig with Lobo, the family dog, delivering goods as an independent trucker.

John Gannett grew up in Augusta and Cape Elizabeth and went to Wentworth Institute in Boston, where he studied printing and machining. He was in the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II and was assigned to Royal Air Force Station Mendlesham in England, where he supervised the arming of B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators, his obituary said. He was released from active duty in 1946 and he and his wife ran an inn on Moosehead Lake for one winter before he went back into the service and was assigned to Japan, where he was executive officer of the Pacific Stars and Stripes military newspaper.

He returned to civilian life in 1949 and ran the printing operations of the central Maine newspapers. His sister, Jean Gannett Hawley, was publisher of the Portland newspapers and chair of Guy Gannett Publishing. The papers were sold to the Seattle Times in 1998 and are currently owned by Reade Brower.

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