Thank you Randy Elwell for visiting our classroom and talking to us about your experiences and memories about alewives and the fishing industry in our community when you were younger.
Randy told us about his school days and how you’d have to walk down to Mr. Philbrook’s shop class and… “Behind the Grace Institute, down where Phoebe Bly owns now…I can remember going down there in the water with a scale basket. You know what a scale basket is…they have holes in them to let the water out…they would go down there in the crick and they would dip alewives on the tide, the high tide. Everybody in town you’d see down there getting alewives…We used to do it and actually Mr. Philbrook used to let some of the students that were fishermen go out during class and catch alewives. That would have been in the late ’70’s. I went into 6th grade in ’81. …I don’t know if you guys have been to Damariscotta, but the amount of fish that come up, that seemed to be what the crick was like, the fish would come into the crick and go up into the marsh. You just went out into the water, waded out into the water, and dipped and did whatever you could to catch fish. And I’ve heard of guys back in the day, some of the older guys in town, used to run seine twine across the cove and wait for the tide to get high and run it across when the tide went, the fish would go against the (twine) and they’d go bail them out, which is highly illegal now.”
“The mentality was that the alewives weren’t going to go away; just like anything in the fishing industry or anything it’s going to be there forever, and the crick, especially. But it did, it went away and got less and less and less.”
“My family’s been in the fishing business for generations so I grew up around it…When I was a kid…going with my father in the bait truck, the big bait truck, to the alewives trap in Warren, filling the truck and going and delivering it and then coming back and getting more…Now…you have to go and get in line or sign up to get a tray of alewives, whereas then, it was, you just went and get as much as you wanted and then took it home.”
We asked about elvers…”Elvers really, back in the day, weren’t what it is (now)…American eels were big back then, catching them out of the quarries and selling them…for bait….people ate them…We used to go catch American eels and sell them for striper bait to make a little money to buy stuff.”
We asked Randy if he ever ate alewives. He said, “Oh yeah (making a face). My father-in-law smoked ’em for years. He had a smoke house. He’d go over to Warren and he had a friend… ’cause as a resident of Warren you could get so many…have so many free; he would get his alewives and he would smoke ’em and people would come from, I ain’t kidding ya’, all the way from like Presque I’sle, just to get ’em. He did it for years and years…Dried fish, salt fish, peel it off and eat it. Do the same thing with the smoked alewives. The older people really liked them. They would heat them up or some people would peel them off and eat them.”
“The older people I knew, are pretty much gone now…I grew up around the older people on the wharves. The old “Off-Island store now, but it used to be the “Island Store”…there was a pot-bellied stove and I used to go in there with my father and grandfather and the old guys would sit around and tell stories… Arthur Carter use to tell about back in the day…cod now, cod…it’s expensive…back then people wouldn’t eat it. It was trash. They wouldn’t even buy it. He would go out and what they call longline, right just out here in the harbor and he’d have a wheel barrow and go door to door and sell fish. And the cod, people couldn’t get rid of a cod.”
He talked a little about lobstering and how guys used to fish several thousand traps. Regulations were different back then. As far as lobster bait, pogies and redfish were big back then and pogies held up well in the traps. It was the oily bait that worked best. Redfish were big, hake-heads were big. Today, hake isn’t as plentiful as it used to be and hake and haddock have all been cut back. Now it’s limited as to what you can catch. The herring quota is down too. Talk turned to growing kelp and how the Island Institute is helping some fishermen look at other ways to have a product. Scallops can be grown on ropes too.
Other topics we learned about were the fish factories of Port Clyde, the sardine plant and the clam factory. He told us how women and girls weren’t out on lobster boats. “They would have been in the sardine factory…Women and girls worked the factories. There was men in there too, but the women and girls cut fish. What they did was they stood in the line along the conveyer with a pair of scissors and as fish went by they’d cut heads. They’d do this all day long…When there was fish, the horn blew. So, if you was living in Port Clyde, you’d hear the horn blow on the plant…There was a phone chain. So, you would call…it went up the line and you knew there was fish coming and you went to get ready to cut fish…My great Aunt, my grandmother’s sister, Jeanette Polky…used to live ‘side me where the cows are now…she had an old school bus. When she got the phone call, the horn blew, she drove that old school bus and picked the women up around town and she went and cut fish and she took them home….My cousin Tim Polky…him and his brothers used to tell me when they were young, young…if their mother was sick, they would drive the bus…You know, it was different back then…The trucks would come in, or the boats would come in and the men would start unloading the boats and the women would cut. They might cut for two days straight…It was extremely hard work but the women took pride in it. They took a lot of pride in it.”
“It was big business…Rockland had three (plants), a dogfish plant, they had two packing plants. The packing plant in Port Clyde…the older houses (in Port Clyde)…a lot of them houses around there were built by the factory for the workers. You guys know where here 10 Cold Storage is, where the public landing is in Port Clyde? There used to be a clam processing plant there, back in the day, way back. They would can clams. There was actually one where Lyman and Morse is now, Lyman and Morse’s varnish shop is the old Thompson clam factory that burned; same thing, they would process clams…The factory at Port Clyde burned. That was devastation for the town. It was town income that went away…Hupper’s store was on the corner where Monhegan Boat’s office is…People didn’t go anywhere. You’d work the factory and if you needed to buy milk, you’d go into the store, so the money went away.”
When the factory burned, “The barrels were blowing up. There was oil for the canning process…they were going so far in the air they that you couldn’t see them, they were just a speck. And there was a plane, I don’t know who was in the plane, it might have been Sonny Lehtinen, (he) said they were coming up by him, and the cans were like snow.”
As we closed out our time together, our last question was to ask Randy if he missed being on the water. Here’s what he said, “I do. I wholeheartedly do. If it weren’t for the insurance here, I’d probably still be fishing. There’s nothing like 3:30 in the morning, going out on the water and that smell, and it’s just, the salt smell, there’s nothing like it. Being off the Banks, you know, in a big boat, and that sun breaks the horizon …it gets in your blood.”
What was the memorable and important overall message about alewives that we heard from Randy?
Everyone thought the alewives would never disappear, they would always be there. Yesterday’s visit with Randy made me think more what will the fishing industry will be like in the future. Ella C.
Alewives didn’t stay even through people thought they would be there forever. Colby H.
“Sometimes you think things will be around forever but they won’t.” Natalie V. (quoting Randy)
Randy told us about when he was younger and how plentiful the alewives were and how people thought that they would never go away, that the alewives would always be plentiful. Evie T.
You could literally take a net, put it in the creek, and catch alewives. There was a time when there were a lot of alewives everywhere. A lot of things have changed between then and now. Hayzel P.
What stories will this generation tell their children and grandchildren?
Thank you again, Randy Elwell (April 3, 2019)