Alison Bishop, from Birch Harbor, who was born into a fishing family, went out lobster fishing with his father, became a stern man and started on his own after serving in World War II, remembers the days when people hauled freight across the ice in Frenchmen’s Bay. “In those days, lobstermen would have to fight the ice to go out and to get back to their moorings,” he says. “You had to be careful in a wooden boat. The ice could rough up and tear the caulking from the seams.”
Miriam Colwell, from Prospect Harbor, remembers when no one would eat a shedder lobster. She still prefers hard shell. She says her grandfather told her when he was a boy, “haddock was considered a trash fish. In those days, cod was most desirable, and people would fish off the town wharf for flounder and harbor pollock. Colwell, author of Wind off the Water and two other novels, can tell about the days when her paternal grandparent, George Colwell, built the first lobster pound in Maine, perhaps in the Northeast, she believes, and how he would transport lobsters to Gloucester in a lobster smack. “They carried the lobsters in the hold in salt water,” she says. “If it rained and the water became too diluted, they could lose the whole smack full.”
Ed Blackmore of Stonington recalls buying his first skiff for $1, then watching the planks fly off it as he transported it back home in a truck.
These and a myriad of other stories about the old days are the sort of historical tidbits Robert Bayer, director of The Lobster Institute at University of Maine at Orono, has dreamt of preserving on tape. Last year, the Institute received a $2,583 grant from the Maine Community Foundation to set the dream in motion with the Oral History Project. So far, Bayer and Cathy Billings, Assistant Director for Communications and Development at the Institute, have videotaped interviews with eight people from Downeast coastal communities. They have a list of additional people to talk with and plan to expand into southern communities. “We keep getting e-mails and calls from people who’ve heard about the project,” Billings says. “Often the callers are younger family members who want us to talk with their parents or grandparents. They hope to see their family history preserved.”
These interviews cover a broad range of topics like family anecdotes, community customs, lobster stocks and regulations, old timers’ skill in navigating and the evolution of lobster gear and boats. “We’re not trying to find out anything specific,” Billings says. “We just want to hear old timers’ stories and gain from their knowledge and experience.”
Eventually, the Institute plans to work with the university’s Folklife Center and with students from campus media programs to edit the tapes and store them in an orderly fashion. “Our long range goal is to take excerpts from the tapes and create a production video with a mixture of video excerpts and still shots and a voice-over narrative,” says Billings. The Lobster Institute wants to put the video on its web site and make it available to public schools as a part of the curriculum on the study of lobsters and the lobster industry. But, Billings adds, “Funding is always a challenge.”
The Lobster Institute has an extensive web site at www.lobster.um.maine.edu. For further information about the Oral History Project, contact Cathy Billings at 581-2751.