It started with a conversation between Peter and Kelly Richards of Atlanta, Georgia, and a lobsterman friend on Vinalhaven. “We were talking on the phone, saying that this was the best time you could ever buy lobsters, because they’d be so cheap,” Kelly said. “But we didn’t think that anybody here would be that excited.”
But when the Richards gauged interest in placing a modest group order by putting up a sign at the school where they both teach, they got more than a few responses.
The Richards, who have summered Vinalhaven for 18 years, got in touch with Norah Warren at the Vinalhaven Fisherman’s Co-Op, where their daughter worked last summer writing catch slips. The co-op in turn got in touch with Hank Rimkewicz, the owner of North Atlantic Lobster in Danvers, Massachusetts, which is one of the co-op’s major buyers. Rimkewicz, whose wife, Kathy, has family ties to Vinalhaven, was apparently so tickled by all the connections that he offered to ship an order of lobsters to Atlanta for free if the profits went to charity.
And that’s how it came to be that 174 lobsters traveled from Vinalhaven to Danvers to Atlanta – so that a $1,000 check could travel from Atlanta back to Vinalhaven to become part of the Partners in Island Education (PIE) fund for the new school here.
“People just loved the idea of getting lobster so cheap and helping out another school at the same time,” Kelly Richards said. About 10 of her colleagues from the Paideia School teamed up to buy the 200-plus pounds of lobster, including one person alone who bought 80 lobsters, and another who bought 43, both for big southern family get-togethers. “Every person here said they were the best lobsters they ever had,” said Kelly Richards.
The lobsters, which Richards said were all “beautifully shipped and all healthy,” were distributed on the Saturday before New Year’s.
Heather Reidy of PIE said the donation put the new school fund up to a total of $1,960,000, after a year and a half of fundraising. “I’m amazed at people’s generosity,” she said. “We’re almost at two million and when we started we had a hard time even saying one million. Some people have donated twice, or even three times when they knew that we were so close to our goals.”