One of Dad's traits I admired was:

He was smart. He grew up in Vinalhaven and went to grammar school there, and high school, then they moved up here and he finished his last year here. He was good building cabinets the old fashioned way, they offered him all kinds of money to be a cabinet maker, that was back when they used cedar and planks, not plywood.

I remember him telling me a story 'bout coming back from sea in the fog. They went aground on Ram Island, they had to wait so many hours to get off the island, I think the Coast Gaurd got them off. There's a lighthouse on there today, it might have been there then too, I don't know.

He used to tell me lots of stories about what happened on ships, on the kind of ships he went out on, the big twelve man draggers. He went as cook a few times, when they would come in and settle up for the money and all that, he would order their "grub", that's what they called food, and I would help him put it down in the galley on ice, they took tons of ice, they still do today. They didn't have any refridgerator, they still have to put fish on ice because refridgerators dehydrate it, the cold air. And they didn't have no radar, just a compass. No soundin' machines or nothin'.

I begged him to take me fishing, he didn't want to take me because if the boat went down then there would be two lost in the family. After my mom passed away he took me out off shore on a small boat for three days about three different times. And I got sea sick! Wicked sea sick! They laughed at me, made fun of me, they offered me salt pork and tobacco, chewing tobacco, of that made it worse. They used to chew tobacco a lot because it kept their mouth warm they said. And when they went on long trips in the winter he would grow a big beard. And when I went with him, three or four days at a time, when we got about 2000 pounds of fish in the gill nets, they went gill fishing, they hauled the gill nets back with a one lunger, that's an engine that hauled nets and trawls. I went trawling too. They did most of the work. I helped clean the fish and put it down the hatch and ice it. You had to take the insides out of the fish so that it didn't spoil.

I really didn't know him, because he was gone most of the time, I know he drank a lot, like most fisherman. He was loud, he was partly deaf. Most seamen are, with the engine running all the time, the vibration. They say deaf people don't get sea sick.

One of the things that he did for me that was good was this:

I met a girl named Pauline. Her father owned a little sandwich shop. She was French/Italian. I liked her very much. And I used to visit her almost every day for almost four or five months at her father's shop. Her father and mother liked me. So they asked me to invite my father and mother to come up for lunch and he did. I don't know what happened, but he did. It wasn't very far from the house, it was right around the corner. They didn't charge us anything, I liked Pauline very much but it didn't work out.