Ten years ago Bill Crowe started a plain spoken, no-holds-barred monthlynewspaper called Fishermen’s Voice. He had no training or experience. He wasn’t a writer, an editor or a publisher. He didn’t write the purest English and didn’t always use the best grammar or punctuation, but every word he wrote came directly from his heart and mouth to the printed page. He didn’t owe anybody anything, he wasn’t in anybody’s pocket and wasn’t afraid of anyone. He wrote what he thought and felt, and he wrote it straight; and his readers, whether they were fishermen or not, appreciated that. As Winter Harbor lobsterman and Harbormaster DaleTorrey said, “I think it was the best fisheries paper on the market. It explained everything. Most of those papers, they tell you what’s going to happen, but they don’t explain it.”
Bill Crowe died at home Jan. 28 in Gouldsboro, surrounded by his brother, Mike, and several close friends, after a three-year struggle with cancer. A brother and sister, four stepchildren, a former wife and several former companions survive him.
Born in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1947, Bill graduated from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. This, according to Mike, “Was sort of his minor; his major was Social Life.” He was the coxswain of the crew and a hit with the ladies, who all remained friends.
When it came time to earn his living, he tried this and that before ending up in Gouldsboro, where he found a charming old fixer-upper farmhouse with a marvelous view of the water. The front room became his base of operations. Between the two front windows and above his desk hung a beautiful print of a lobster with Japanese characters. On one wall hung a reproduction of a Winslow Homer painting of fishermen and a dory. Over the mantel hung a picture by another Maine artist, Neil Welliver.
A natural salesman, Bill soon turned from fishing, which didn’t work — he got seasick — to selling seafood, which did. “He could talk to people,” his brother said, adding, “he would sell scallops unsoaked,” as opposed to some who soak the scallops in water so they weigh more and thus, cost more. In time, Mike said, Bill “developed a network of places that bought from him.”
He was always trying something new. He was a high-energy kind of guy. He thought he’d get a website and sell things on the Internet, so he bought a pile of old wooden lobster traps, put glass on top, and sold them as coffee tables.
Then ten years ago, Bill came across someone who suggested that he and Bill start a fisheries trade paper. Bill would be the salesman who got the ads and the other guy would be the writer and organizer. With the thousand dollars the partner borrowed, he and Bill launched Fishermen’s Voice. The first issue had only 16 pages, Mike recalled. The partner and Bill did everything themselves. Bill handled distribution by stopping at stores and asking if the owners would let him leave a stack of copies — about as simple an organization as one could imagine. But in the middle of putting together the second or third issue, the partner disappeared. He’s never been heard from since. On his own except for brother Mike, who’s been involved in writing, editing and promoting the newspaper from the beginning, Bill applied for a copyright on the name of the paper, and started running it himself with zip for financial backing.
“He liked fishermen, he liked the activity and talking to people,” his brother said.”He was a first-rate person,” recalled Deer Isle sternman Donna Bridges,who saw Bill a lot at Down East Fishermen’s Association meetings. “He was never negative to anybody, and as far as I know, nobody was ever negative about him.”
“When you called the newspaper, you got a message that said, `You have reached Bill Crowe and the Fishermen’s Voice,’ ” said Winter Harbor lobsterman and contributing writer Kittridge Johnson. “One was synonymous with the other. That was Billy’s whole life. He was bound to the water.”
Bill was determined to keep Fishermen’s Voice free. He did not want people to have to pay to read it. His only income came from advertisers.”It took him years to get a solid base of advertising,” his brother recalled. “Now he has national companies that advertise each month,” he said, pleased, though he added, “We still go after ads.”Even after the tension of publishing the first few issues, filling 32pages of articles, notices, ads and columns each month remained nerve-wracking.
For a long time writers would get frantic calls from Bill as the days grew close for sending the layouts to the printer. What did they have that he could use? Could they cover this or that meeting? And, of course, all he could afford to pay was what you might call minimum wage. He claimed he lived on cat food.To that point, Deer Isle lobsterman Leroy Bridges recalled, “At many meetings, often he wouldn’t have a cigarette on him. It appeared like he was trying to give them up, but in reality, he was just giving up buying them. The guy was awesome.”
But he did it. Tight as things were, Bill kept the newspaper going.Time after time he talked people into writing for him and before long he had established a 32-page paper that included in each issue a marine history piece, a food column, and one about the olden days, in addition to articles on fisheries news and notices of meetings. Many readers turned first to Bill’s pull-no-punches editorials, “From The Crowe’s Nest.”
As Bill’s illness progressed, Mike had to take increasing responsibility for each issue. By November, he’d moved in to help care for his brother and was with him at the end.
Mike plans to continue publishing Fishermen’s Voice and said, “The paper runs from Kittery to Eastport and now, Massachusetts. We get a lot of calls and e-mails from there and we have quite a few subscribers from the Cape and Gloucester and New Bedford. They like the paper and the straight talk, the range of information. They find articles of interest in each issue.”
By now almost as experienced as Bill, Mike wants to continue the paper without change except for streamlining and computerizing the bookkeeping. Still, he said, “Bill left some fairly fast-moving shoes to step into, so we’ll see. I plan to try.”Bill Crowe worked too hard and he died too soon, but he died having found his place in the world, having loved and believed in what he did, and having known that, as Samuel Beckett said, he’d left his stain. He not only left his mark on the world, he left something of value: Fishermen’s Voice.