Word: oystermen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...peacetime ranks (8,000) of the veteran models. Though pernickety and anachronistic, their comfortably high doors and maneuverable wheelbases were admirably suited to their purpose. Wheezing their way through two World Wars, they have been as much a part of London as St. Paul's or the oystermen of Billingsgate. With their passing London will be a little less London...
...hundreds of bays and inlets along the upper Atlantic Coast this week there was a splash of activity: the oyster season had opened.* Oystermen clambered into their tug-like boats, chug-chugged to the beds, used big dredges to pull bivalves from the bottom, came home gunwales deep with shellfish. To landlubbers everything looked the same. But veteran oystermen knew better...
...oystermen worry more about labor than about volume. From Long Island (where 25% of U.S. oysters are cultivated) and from the Chesapeake-Delaware Bay area (where 60% grow naturally) thousands of the industry's 65,000 workers have traipsed off to defense plants. To get men back wages have been bid up 15%. U.S. No. 1 oysterer, Bluepoints Co. (General Foods subsidiary on L.I.), will smash the immemorial "no-wimmen" tradition, hire women for shucking, packing, other inside work...
Anyone can enter a boat in the Miles races. Last week, for its 79 events, there were 1,500 entries: ranging from sleek sloops and speedboats to the work boats of local oystermen and crabbers. In the sailing classes there were Snipes, Stars, Comets (the Eastern Shore's own baby), Scrappy Cats, Sneak Bores, Crickets. But the heart of the Miles River Regatta is the hallowed log canoe...
When the hurricane of 1938 swarmed over Long Island, it played hob with the oyster beds. That is one reason for higher oyster prices this year. Oystermen have other foes. Nastiest is a thing called the drill, which bores through the oyster's shell, devours the oyster. One active drill can liquidate 30 to 200 oysters a season; a swarm of them can wipe out a young crop. But most oystermen save their wrath for the starfish (good for nothing but fertilizer), which glaums on an oyster, wears it out until it opens up, then eats it. Oystermen fight...