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Jonesport-Beals Students Conduct First-in-the-Nation Project to Record Local Fishing History
Youngsters Video Older Fishermen, Transcribe Audio for World-wide Web by Nancy Beal
The goal of the project was to document changes in fisheries down through the years and, after transcribing and digitalizing the information, to make it available worldwide through NOAA’s website. The first hurdle of the project came two years ago when students needed to convince interview subjects that they were interestedwere interested only in collecting information about the fishermen’s profession—not ferreting out their best fishing spots, according to Jim Roberts who assists with the project through the Washington County Consortium and who also comes from a long line of Eastport fishermen. During the first year of the program (2004), students—mostly seniors (one headed for the New England School of Communication)—collected interviews with three elderly Moosabec fishermen and the wife of a former lighthouse keeper. They presented the interviews to the Jonesportthe Jonesport Historical Society. In one interview, Adelmar “Tuddy” Urquhart was shown in his home, speaking of 60-cent lobsters, herring weirs and boatloads of codfish that fetched three or four cents per pound. One of what he called his most thrilling experiences was hand-lining for cod eight miles offshore and being in the middle of a school of whales.
The octogenarian, who lobster fished in Englishman’s Bay east of Jonesport, reported catching one to three cod a day in his traps. The law required him to throw them back. “I think they’re coming back,” he said of the popular species, blaming their decline on draggers and new technology. Technology has also changed lobster fishing, Urquhart observed. He used to spend his winters building wooden traps, fashioning wooden buoys and knitting trap heads and bait pockets from cotton thread. Today, he buys traps made of wire, rope and ready-made heading of nylon that lasts years. Even paint goes father on today’s plastic buoys than on the old dry wooden ones, he said. Charles Beal of Beals, a contemporary of Urquhart, echoed his across-the-Reach colleague in the litany of changes down through the years. Beal, who retiredwho retired in 2004, still enjoys the nickname “Captain Midnight” because of the legendary early hour at which he left his mooring to go to haul. Sixty-three-year-old Beals fisherman John Faulkingham was considerably younger than Urquhart and Beal at the time of his interview, but old enough to recall growing up on Beals Island before the bridge to the mainland was completed in 1958. He was filmed in his wife’s fishing supply shop in Alley’s Bay near the home where he grew up, and talked of changes on the land where he has lived all of his life. He spoke of a cooperative store in Alley’s Bay (part of Great Wass Island) where members got limited credit. (The store changed hands several times, last offering wares as “Alley’s Bay Grocery” about 10 years ago.) Faulkingham said that there were several stores on the head of Beals Island (the other island that makes up the town of Beals) owned and run by Oscar Alley, Jerome Alley, Uriah Beal and Oscar Carver. (The last of those was owned and operated by Oscar Carver’s son Richard, and is now the office of Carver Oil.) He also remembered going Christmas shopping at a gift shop maintained by Clifton and Octavia Alley.
Faulkingham was on the Beals High School basketball team during his high school years (Beals did not consolidate with Jonesport until 1968). When the ball team returned from an away game, the players were ferried across Moosabec Reach from Jonesport to Beals, but no bus picked them up and delivered them home. Those who lived in Alley’s Bay still had a half-hour walk home, often in very cold weather. In 1954, four years before the bridge was built, Faulkingham had to go to Bangor for a hip operation. On his return home, the crew loading his stretcher onto the ferry nearly tipped him into the Reach, he recalled. The bridge was “a blessing,” he said, because islanders didn’t have to rely on the ferry anymore. Ruby Dobbins was an educator who grew up in a fishing family and spent many years on island outposts with her lighthouse keeper husband. She writes about her family and her life in her books Sheep Island Chronicles and The Additional Keeper. In the video clip made by the J-BHS with the NOAA-funded equipment, she was captured speaking of Jonesport in the early 1900s. She recalled the main street lined with general stores, two drugstores, a shoe store, barbershops and a bowling alley. There were four or five sardine factories offering what she called “plenty of work for everybody.” “It was a disgrace to ask for welfare,” she said. “Now you can’t even get a spool of Aunt Liddy thread or cloth to make a dress. You have to go to Bangor for everything,” she said. Dobbins remembers having her tonsils and adenoids out at the age of seven. Her mother took her to the town dentist who, with the assistance of a trained nurse and some ether, removed the infected tissues.
In 2005, the second year of the oral history preservation program, J-BHS students recorded interviews with two couples and fisherman Raymond Smith—a solon of lobster fishing in West Jonesport. Smith was born into a lobster fishing family (his father was Leon Smith Sr.) and is the father of three fishermen: William “Killer” Smith, Herbert and Ralph. (Ralph is Jonesport’s First Selectman.) Calvert and Rosalie Carver and Ernest and Marilyn Kelley are all parents of kids who have grown up to be fishermen. Carver began fishing in Prospect Harbor in 1947 and continued out of West Jonesport from 1957 until he broke his hip at age 69. He spoke for all fishermen whose health forces them to retire when he said, “It’s some hard to stay ashore and watch the boats go up the [Moosabec] Reach.” His wife Rosalie recalled that each neighborhood had its own school and students walked to school in all weather. Sometimes a friendly janitor would open the basement windows so that the early birds could thrust their cold hands inside. The Kelleys spoke of the town’s many sardine factories in the early 1900s. In this school year, the number of enrollees in the oral history class has increased, testifying to the popularity of the program, but the ages of the student participants has changed; the seven enrolled come from the three under classes. Church explained that because of the relatively young age of the enrollees the class has been focused less on interviewingandinterviewing and more on interviewing skills—such as listening techniques. The students practice these skills on student and faculty fishermen. At the April meeting of the Jonesport Historical Society, the students will present their one interview of this year—veteran sardine packer and clam shop shucker, Mertie Alley—and perhaps some clips of the student and faculty videotapes. Contributing To NOAA’s Website The students in this program meet three times a week (two classes are double sessions) and spend approximately three-quarters of their class time on oral history-related activities. One of the most important of these activities, and the one that gets them worldwide coverage, is transcription of the interviews they have videotaped. The audio portion of the tape is transferred from the laptop on which it is recorded onto a compact disk. Students then use Cool Edit software—bought with NOAA money—to transcribe the audio portion word-for-word. The software includes the ability to highlight a portion of sound waves on the computer monitor and activate a “loop” button, which causes the dialogue in the highlighted portion to be played continuously until the transcriber has keyed that portion. Church says this feature is especially handy when the interview subject uses old-fashioned terms not familiar to the young transcriber who needs to pause the tape and get help from a teacher/supervisor. The feature enables the youngster to accurately transcribe—and preserve—language that might be lost otherwise. As transcriptions of the interviews are completed, they are forwarded to NOAA’s website, where they can be accessed around the world by anyone with a computer. To date, the audio portion of the interviews with Tuddy Urquhart and John Faulkingham are complete and available at www.noaa.gov (click on the link to Local Fisheries and Knowledge Project). They can also be found—perhaps more quickly—on the school’s website: www.union103.org (click on the link to NOAA project). The initial grant of money from NOAA to purchase electronic equipment met the basic financial hurdle of the oral history project, and that money was ample to purchase supplies, such as camera batteries and videotape, for the foreseeable future. To pay for incidentals and additional equipment, the videographers are embarking on still another project—a 2007 calendar of photos taken during interviews and in the two-town area. The calendar will be offered for sale in the fall. |
