I remember being a kid no more than six or seven years old, digging up sea worms and clams at low tide in the flats behind our house at 4 Ashland Avenue, overlooking the inner harbor. Rubber boots, a bucket, and a shovel were all I needed.
Off I went to Knight’s Hardware with a brother or two (as the middle of 14 children, I had plenty) for a 50-cent dropline, a few sinkers and tiny snelled hooks. Then, running past Al’s Cafe on Central Street to the docks behind Manchester Town Hall to drop a line. If the door to Al’s was open, we’d yell “Got any beer!?” and run like hell. The guys at the bar at Al’s got a kick out of that.
Kids from all around town hung at the docks. We never failed to catch flounder back then. It was as if the bottom of the harbor was carpeted with them. Mostly none too big, but the occasional doormat! Then in mid-summer, the mackerel and pollock would choke Manchester harbor. For those, we used a cheap spinning reel with clams and sea worms or shiny metal jigs.
In the fall, the old men would show up on the docks and set down milk crates for seats. They’d bait their bamboo poles with sand shrimp, each guy dropping four or five lines just below to fill their buckets with smelt. They’d sit on their crates talking old man stuff, but they were always willing to let us kids man a pole or two.
The smelt flooded the harbor as they schooled up on their way to the ocean — all this after hatching and growing in the channel and the “River Brook,” as Coach Ed Field named it. Ounce for ounce, smelts were a great fighting fish! Nothing like a plate of fried smelt and thin cut potatoes for lunch, cooked up in the kitchen on Ashland Ave. by Mom in her big iron skillet.
Then, we graduated to the drawbridge, the townies’ playground. Oh, the fish we would jig as they channeled into the inner harbor! There was a one-legged gull we named Gertrude. She’d swoop in when we called her to grab whatever catch we would throw to her. Under the bridge was a little gap that served as an aquarium. Little fish swam between pilings covered with barnacles, starfish, and periwinkles, all tinted green by the shadow of the bridge.
Under the sort-of-watchful eye of bridge tenders George Kemp and John DeMarino, we’d spend all day jumping off the bridge, playing chase all over the infrastructure and smoking the occasional unfiltered Chesterfield we lifted off my poor parents. We could climb to the top of the great cement counterweight through the steel ribbing, to stand among the dirt, weeds, and pigeon droppings. A few boys much braver and more foolish than me actually jumped off the block into the harbor.
At 14, I scored a job at Manchester Seafoods, run by Bob and Vi Flanders from Hamilton. What a great couple to learn from. For $1.15 per hour, which was more than I could spend, I learned how to boil and pick lobsters, skin fillets, chip blocks of ice, and set up the showcase just so. Bob made sure if you had nothing else to do, you were scraping scales off of the woodwork and counters or scrubbing the sinks with a stiff brush.
Back then there seemed to be no possible end to the beautiful fish that came into the market. Brassy-colored metal boxes filled with gray sole, haddock, and cod fillets all fresh from Gloucester. Salmon, halibut, and swordfish would come in wooden crates packed in ice.
A 25-lb halibut was called a chicken in those days. One time Bruce Leseine threw a big hook behind his lobster boat a few miles offshore and hauled in a halibut so big we had to saw it in half to get it in the back door. As I recollect, it was well over 250 lbs.
According to an article in The Cricket, Bruce ended up in Manchester when he lost his job as a private Pullman porter during the Great Depression. He used his severance from Albert J. Burrage to buy a rowboat and started fishing with a handline. Later he bought his boat, the Dirty Shame, and started lobstering and selling his catch at his shop called Captain Dusty’s (now our local ice cream shop). And then he’d sell whatever lobsters he couldn’t move at his shop to Bob.
Bruce would let us borrow his dinghy to row around the harbor when he wasn’t out lobstering. One day he brought two lobsters on leashes into Jimmy Lynch’s coffee shop as if they were his pets.
Another character who sold lobsters to Bob was Connie Driemond, a tiny man from Latvia who had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. He built his own little smokehouse at his place on Summer Street and would bring in nibbles of smoked eel and other treats. Together, he and his wife didn’t measure 10 feet.
Two or three times a day we would pull out the baskets of lobsters covered with seaweed to sort out the least peppy for the next boil. After the boil, we’d throw the lobsters into a sink full of water to cool, and I’d pull off the tails to crack and devein them, break off the little legs and roll the meat out of them four at a time with a mayonnaise jar. Bob would crack the claws for me to pick with a butter knife and make two expert cuts in the bodies for me to pick out the bits of meat.
The leg and body meat we sold as broken lobster meat at a fair price, while the tails, knuckles, and claws we saved for the carriage trade. The tomalley (green lobster “liver”) and coral (the red eggs that hadn’t yet made it to the tail) would go into little half-pint cartons. If you’ve never had tomalley on crackers, you’ve never known the quintessence of lobster flavor!
Little bits and pieces of haddock and cod went into the freezer in cartons that we’d draw a cat on the side of and label “catfish.” A nice lady named Eva Gertrude Stoops would come in every week for a carton or two for her cats. Broken steamer clams were sold for pennies to kids looking for bait. Fish was wrapped in Kraft paper and went into paper bags—no plastic. Not much went to waste. There was a 26 lb. lobster mounted over the storefront and a little framed picture of a flatfish on an inside wall captioned “Our Flounder.”
The register was so old, the highest amount on it was one dollar. It was a struggle keeping count ringing up a $20 sale, but Vi always checked the little tape for screw-ups. The radio was always on WHDH, Jess Cain in the morning and all the latest hits with little skits and news in between.
Bob ran a tight ship and there was always work to do, but he and Vi always made sure I got my 15-minute break in the afternoon. I’d run next door to Allen’s Pharmacy to ask Betsy Gauthier or Gail Burgess to whip up a mocha frappe or a vanilla root beer float with coffee ice cream. Oh yeah!
Each day at closing, I’d empty the showcase and all the fish would go back into boxes we’d bury in ice in the big chest up three stairs where Bob manned the helm behind a chest-high counter.
Every day, Norm Crombie would come by and chip ice for Bob. The ice was tonged in by Ernie Tucker, big blocks from, I suppose, Cape Pond Ice. Norm wasn’t drinking by then, having dried out in the hospital after nearly freezing to death in his shack in the woods during a blizzard.
Norm was every kid’s favorite, standing in front of the fish market decked out in his teamsters dungaree overalls and a squarish denim cap, dripping chewing tobacco and tickling kids under the chin while spouting some sort of gibberish only the kids seemed to understand.
Inside the market he was a little gruffer: Always “Rain, snow, shit and blow,” or “bullshit, horseshit, cowshit, who gives a shit?” He was a real teamster, too. Earlier in life, he drove a team of horses to the train in Gloucester, loaded it with hanging meat, and delivered it to all the butchers and grocers in town for Swift Packing.
Like every working man back then, Bob would need a few swigs in the afternoon to help him get through the day. He’d occasionally send Norm across the street to Bullock’s for a pint of Caldwell's vodka. He worked long and hard, so who could begrudge him that?
Most everyone who came into the market was cordial — even the millionaires! Mrs. Odman was my favorite. She’d park her black T-Bird convertible coupe, come into the market, and throw her Pekinese on the counter while she chatted with Bob and Vi as if they were her best friends.
Some of the well-heeled were not so nice. There was always some lady who would charge in on July 3 when we were buried in orders for salmon and lobster meat.
The monied lady would look dumbfounded at being treated like “the help” and skulk away. Sometimes it’s healthier not to turn the other cheek.
During this time came the first indications that we had succeeded — with the help of Russian, Spanish, and East German mega-trawlers — in fishing out the greatest source of protein in the world, the North Atlantic Cod. In his book, The Cod, Albert C. Jensen describes Soviet fleets of over 100 vessels landing an average of “200 metric tons per day of high-quality cod.”
For Bob and Vi, the trouble started with salmon. Bob almost cried when he had to take big crates of West Coast salmon to fill all the orders. Then the sole fillets started getting smaller. Every afternoon I’d go through a few cans to find 50 to 60 big enough for an entree for me to run down to JP’s Harbourside. Then it got harder to get shad roe in the spring, a delicacy that Bob and Vi would take home for supper, and which I couldn’t imagine eating. The shad have since recovered somewhat. Not so, the salmon. Once running up every major river north of the Hudson, U.S. Atlantic salmon are now present in only two rivers in Maine.
My two summers there were my first job on the clock. I would go on to plenty of other occupations — parking lot attendant at Singing Beach, working the Singing Beach Club, dishwashing at JP’s Harbourside — but by far the best job was with Bob and Vi Flanders at Manchester Seafoods.
Pete Willwerth grew up in Manchester as the eighth of 14 children of Walter and Eleanor WIllwerth. He sent this authentic, honest and utterly enjoyable personal essay from his home in Beverly. Thanks much to Lee Gates for helping source some critical images.
