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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer 2003)

“Might as well sit right here.” An Interview with George Andrews

By Jim Sulzer

In August 1999, George Andrews (1916-2000) sat in the entrance to his shanty on North Wharf and talked with me about the old days. He was cheery and friendly and spoke in that musical old wheeze of a voice that so many Nantucketers knew and loved. His pronunciation of key words reflected his fisherman's past: for instance, as he explained, fishermen said TAKE-1, not block and TACK-l. And instead of saying fill-A, he pronounced "fillet" as FILL-it, as in "I FILL-it-ed the fish."

I'M GEORGE ANDREWS. I'VE BEEN A FISHERMAN all my life. I never had any other job. It was a good life. Didn't mind working. I hated to get up three or four o'clock in the morning, but if you think your net's full of fish or something, you don't mind getting up, you know how 'tis.

Of course, we tried to be high-liners. You get some satisfaction when you come in with more than anybody else. But that doesn't always happen. We got skunked like everybody else.

There was quite a few of these old-timers around, and they were very fussy about getting things done right. . . . They'd watch the guys that were beginners, or they weren't too expert at it, and they'd watch them clean the fish. And if they left quite a little meat on the bone, the guy would pick up the two pieces. "Now," he'd say, "which part are you going to throw away?" (chuckles)

One of them was in here buying a fish, and he said, "Save the backbone for the cat." So I was very careful when I filleted the fish. And he looked at it, and he picked up the fillets and he put them in a bag, and he threw the backbone in the bucket. He stood there and he says, "The cat would starve off of that." So then I knew I was doing all right.

I liked to hang around, I liked to hear the stories the old-timers told, you know. Some of them would tell stories, and I'd hear the same story from my father. Sometimes it was a little different, you know. It wasn't always the same. So they'd improve on it over the years. Of course, that's natural, I guess. But there's not many old-timers left now. Hardly any.

In 1846,1 think it was, they had a big fire; it burned out the whole waterfront, the whole waterfront was gone. The whaling was going down, but they were still trying to keep it going, so they wanted to build right up again. This was one of the first buildings that was built. It was built for a family shop at that time. You see, they didn't have lumber yards. If you were going to build a big house, you had a vessel come with all the lumber on it, so they stored the lumber here. It was mostly upstairs; the joists up above are about three by ten, and they could put an awful amount of weight up there.

My father bought it [the shanty] about 1905 or a little bit later. Scalloping was coming in big then. He had some other people opening here. There was times we had twenty-five or thirty lined up here, all opening scallops.

That went on through the twenties . . . when the Depression came, it happened that the scallops shied up then at the same time, so there wasn't really very much.

Just before that, my father had an oyster business, and he'd have several hundred bushels of the seed oysters come, and he put them up in Polpis Harbor, and after a couple of years, when they grew, why he'd go and dredge them up and he'd be down here opening them. He sold them retail, and he shipped some away, various ones.

John D. Rockefeller used to buy a barrel of oysters, oh I guess for a couple of weeks. He had big parties, you know. That's why the Oysters Rockefeller . . . they claim that's where it came from. He had a special way of cooking them.

My brother and I collected all the fishing gear. A lot of them went out of business, and they'd give us the gear. One old guy, when he didn't want to mend a net, he'd cut it adrift somewhere near where we were, you know. So we'd go and pick it up. He knew that's what we were going to do. We got gear for every kind of fish there is, as far as I know.
There's miles of nets up there [in the shanty], and there's miles of long-line trawl for codfish, and there's rope. Of course we had all kinds of rope. We had small rope to tie on the net, and we had big rope for other things, for mooring ropes.

When there was a storm we'd go along outside of Brant Point, where there'd always be half a dozen boats, mostly small or medium. They'd part their rope or drag their anchor and they'd be up on the beach half full of water. So we'd go over'there with a plank and j rollers and a TAKE-1. A block and TACK-1, they call it; fishermen always called it a TAKE-1. And we'd hook that on the truck, we'd pull the boats up, get them safe up above the surf. Of course, they'd get full of water, and we'd have plenty of buckets so the kids there, a lot of kids around, we'd give 'em each a bucket and then they'd bail the water right out in no time. Then in the winter time we put the boats in the garage for them. We rolled boats for miles, putting down planks and putting rollers under them. So we got a lot of rollers.

We got a lot of masts up there, and nobody wants wooden masts now, you know.
I gathered up a lot of stuff to build lobster pots and kept building 'em, but I still got a lot of stuff left.

Then we would build boats. My brother built boats, so we got more or less lumber left.
So I've saved everything. I got a lot of bronze shaft and big propellers, and I've got to see the junk man and see what he can do with them.

We had quite a lot of shipwreck stuff up here. Big blocks and all kinds of stuff that came ashore. When I was very young there was a lot of vessels wrecked here. And there was wreckage all over the shore. You could pick up all kinds of stuff.

It's just mostly junk. When we didn't know what to do with it, we'd throw it up there.

We were always bringing in bluefish, more or less, you know, sometimes a hundred and sometimes only a dozen. But I could always get rid of mine. They'd grab 'em right off because I always took ice and I iced them up as soon as I caught them and so they were good and fresh when I brought them in. Some of the others would . . . well, they used to say they were pretty good on one side and they were cooked on the other side.

I went bluefishing a lot. I was getting about a hundred fish—four hundred pounds every day. I shipped them, two or three barrels, to Woods Hole. I got twelve cents a pound for them. That was all right. I got fifty dollars most every day and I had a good time catching them, you know.

We caught them with four lines, two on outriggers and two on the boat, and I'd see them around there with fish on all four outriggers, you know. I'd pull them in fast as I could, because you usually caught them on one tide. When the tide turned, sometimes the fish would leave. I don't know why, but they did. Of course, some days they didn't get hardly any.

I was a real Rube Goldberg. I don't know whether you knew Rube Goldberg. [Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) was a cartoonist whose specialty was fantastical machinery. —Ed.] He would get any old things he could pick up, and he'd make all kinds of machinery out of it. I was the same way. I built winches, all kinds of winches and everything. I had everything easy on my boat. I'd haul in a thousand pounds of dogfish and a bushel of flounder. We'd pick up the flounder and heist up on ... we had a net, a special net on the deck, we'd heist that up and all the dogfish would slide overboard. We didn't have to pick them out.

So now I'm just puttering, just trying to hold it together. I don't know what will happen.
Things are so out of joint here. Things go for an unheard of price. We could sell it and retire, I guess. But right now I'm sitting here in a nice breeze, the best there is on the island, so there's no use to build a million-dollar house and sit in that. Might as well sit right here.

by Jim Sulzer

 

Jim Sulzer is a member of the NHA's editorial committee and contributed to the summer 2001 issue of Historic Nantucket. An author and radio producer, Jim has taught at the Nantucket Elementary School for the past seventeen years.