Word: menhaden
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Writers of the sea, like war novelists, test their heroes by putting them through an ordeal. In his semi-documentary novel. Gulf Stream North, Author Earl Conrad pits a simple crew of Florida Negroes against schools of unpalatable fish called menhaden, and gives their humble ordeal moments of tragic dignity...
...crew of the Moona Waa Togue, menhaden is known as pogy, and catching pogy (for oils and fertilizer) is the hard work they do from April to November. The fishing day begins at 4 in the morning, when the mate, who tells the story, bangs on the weather-beaten shacks of a Florida port town and rounds up the men; sometimes it ends before dusk, sometimes later. Where the ship hunts for pogy is strictly the business of Captain Crother. a white man who rarely cracks a smile because the Moona Waa Togue is his last stop on a downhill...
When a boil of Gulf Stream finally points to pogy, and the men in the small boats close their quarter-mile ring of net to draw it in, the menhaden suddenly "thunder" (i.e., make a quivering mass surge) and split the net. Captain Crother follows another school too close to shore, promptly loses a second net when its base is sucked fast into the sandy ocean floor. Still another catch has to be let go when baby sharks begin to shred a third net. In final irony, the Moona Waa Togue is almost within hail of home port with...
...small (about 1 lb.), bony member of the herring family, the menhaden is the U.S.'s No. 1 commercial fish. Unpalatable, menhaden are valuable for oil (soap and paint), stock and poultry feeds, fertilizers. Massachusetts Indians showed the Pilgrims how to use them: plant a menhaden in every hill of corn...
...coast-to-coast hookup last week NBC broadcast what Chaplin had heard. To most listeners, the menhaden fishermen's chants, more religious than piscatorial in flavor, had a good deal in common with the best of Negro "spirituals," but they also had a fresh, saltwater tang all their own. Sample (the Barnegat's favorite chant...