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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 41, no. 2 (Summer 1993), p. 24-26
No Reserved Seats For the Mighty
By Robert F. Cross
A little more than three-quarters of a century ago, a small group of men gathered around a potbellied stove in an Old North Wharf fishing shanty and founded Nantucket's now famous Wharf Rat Club. Today, although the founders are gone, the club remains vibrant and strong as a place of equality, fraternity, and good will.
The small cedar-shingled shanty, thought to have been built at the turn of the century for scallop fishermen, became the site of the Nickerson and Perry quahog business in 1915. When Nickerson died, Eugene Perry formed a partnership with Herbert H. Coffin, and they continued to operate the quahog business.
First situated on the opposite side of the lane running down the wharf, the building was moved to its current location around 1915. Its new location, on the water's edge, would be more convenient for fishermen and sailors. Back then, fishermen would stop by each day to talk over recent events. At first, these "gam" sessions were casual, but they took on a more formal nature in the mid-1920s. The Wharf Rat Club had been born.
In 1938, Perry died and Coffin converted the quahog business into a marine outfitting store, which he operated until the mid-1950s, selling oilskins, boots, gloves, and other clothing required by boaters and fishermen. By then, the Wharf Rat Club was in full swing, with members stopping by each day for their morning chat.
Charles G. Coffin, quahog fisherman, harbor pilot, and Herb Coffin's father, along with Austin Strong, commodore of the Nantucket Yacht Club, Bill Doyle, and Karl Adams, Jr., summer residents from Boston, have been credited with founding the club. Charles Coffin became its first commodore.
In the early years, the club consisted of mostly fishermen, sailors, native residents, and a few summer visitors. They would gather each morning, inside the store in the chilly weather or outside on the deck facing Steamboat Wharf in the summer, and talk about local and world issues. Over the years, the living membership has increased to include some 176 men and women, more than one-third of whom are summer residents. (The India Wharf Rats, a similar but older club located in Boston, was established in 1886 and is also still going strong.)
The membership roster has included a U.S. President, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, ambassadors, admirals, generals, artists, writers, pilots, clamdiggers, scallopers, sailors, craftspeople, scientists, government officials, elected leaders, and captains of industry. All come together to share their ideas and opinions on everything from world and national affairs to whether the Steamship Authority should build a new boat.
Over the years, an aura of mystery and secrecy has developed around the club and, at times, hundreds of individuals have been on its membership waiting list. Some have waited as long as twenty years before being admitted—others have waited in vain. Although nonmembers often are not quite certain what the mysterious Wharf Rat Club is all about, they do know that they want to be a part of it.
In 1933, one of its early members prepared a short booklet on the club. He wrote, in part: "The Wharf Rat Club has no constitution or bylaws, and no dues or membership fees (the economy finally caught up to the club in 1992, when nominal annual dues were started). Its government is vested in a secret board of directors, whose names are known only to the directors themselves and whose powers are completely autocratic. Its members have no rights except the privilege of associating on terms of equality and fraternity with one another."
The club is "highly exclusive and, in spite of the apparent dearth of privileges, membership is eagerly sought for and correspondingly prized. While there are no restrictions on account of race, religion, color, sex, or previous condition of servitude, summer residents are ordinarily required to undergo a probationary period of three summers under close observation before being eligible for membership," the booklet notes.
"Those who are unfortunate enough to be financiers, bank or corporation presidents, high public officials, artists, or men of great wealth or importance, are further handicapped by the necessity of obtaining a unanimous vote of the Board of Directors, and of exercising the proper amount of humility and self-effacement in their relations with those who are fortunate enough to be members of the club," the writer states.
The club has had eight commodores, the current one being Charles Sayle, Sr. He has been commodore since 1985, after having served as the longest tenured vice-commodore, beginning in 1955. The commodore makes the final decision, after polling the board, as to whether an individual is admitted.
While commodores have come and gone, the club motto has remained the same: "No Reserved Seats for the Mighty." The motto is carved on a wooden sign hanging over the north door of the clubhouse. More than just a motto, it is a guiding principal that must be followed once one steps across the club's threshold.
"The point of the club motto is that money, or the Social Register, or fame, does not amount to anything in itself for membership," wrote author William O. Stevens in his 1936 book Old Nantucket, the Faraway Island. "If the commodore decides that a candidate does not measure up to the standard, that settles it. ... To be privileged to fly the Wharf Rat pennant aboard your own boat or hoist it in your quarters at home, is a real patent of nobility. The old Nantucket tradition of democracy, every man on his own merits, flourishes still among the Wharf Rats."
In the 1933 booklet about the club, it is explained this way: "We know of nothing more salutary for the person in authority, accustomed to have his words and opinions not only respected but treated as oracular—in short, 'Yessed to death'— than to introduce him into a companionship where he gets no more and no less consideration than the humblest clamdiggers, and where he finds his pet theories and dissertations on almost any subject, from fishing and boat-sailing to world finance, not only disputed but oftentimes refuted.
"And unless he can 'stand the gaff,' as the fishermen say, he soon finds that he is not fitted for membership in the Wharf Rat Club, where nothing counts but innate ability and integrity and natural force of character," concludes the booklet.
Most Nantucketers and many island visitors are familiar with the Wharf Rat flag, which can be seen hoisted above the clubhouse each morning, or on the automobile decals or lapel pins of members. The blue and white triangular pennant depicts a dapper rat, holding a cane and smoking a pipe. Most, however, probably are not so familiar with the identity and accomplishments of its designer, Tony Sarg.
Sarg, who first operated his shop on Centre Street, later moving to Easy Street, was a renowned illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post, and was the designer of the now-famous giant helium balloons for the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. He also directed and operated the country's most successful traveling puppet show. At the urging of his fellow Rats, Sarg drew the Wharf Rat insignia, which was registered in the U.S. Patent Office with patent number 886,913.
The flag has been taken all over the world by club members. In 1933, on one of Admiral Richard E. Byrd's expeditions, Captain W. F. Verleger, a Wharf Rat, hoisted the flag in Antarctica. Byrd himself later became a Wharf Rat. The flag was flown aboard the Effie M. Morrissey on Wharf Rat Robert Bartlett's 1937 North Pole expedition. Years later, Navy Commander Maurice Gibbs, also a club member, Nantucket native, and former executive director of the Nantucket Historical Association, planted the flag at his destination during a 1983 mission to the Geographic South Pole.
On June 19, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt hoisted the Wharf Rat flag on his chartered schooner Amberjack 11, after he had been made an honorary Wharf Rat by Herbert H. Coffin (the club's second commodore). FDR stopped over in Nantucket Harbor on his historic cruise along the New England coast, following the completion of his "first hundred days" in office. As the President sailed out of Nantucket Harbor the next day, the Wharf Rat flag was snapping proudly in the breeze aboard the 45-foot schooner.
That same year, the current commodore, Charles Sayle, was inducted into the Wharf Rats by Commodore Herb Coffin. Sayle had first visited Nantucket in 1926 aboard the Eleanor, a fishing vessel from Gloucester. Three years later he decided to make Nantucket his home and moved to the island.
"On November 29, 1929, I took the six o'clock train out of Gloucester," Sayle recalled. "I got the boat from New Bedford and it took five hours to get here." He said the boat made stops in Woods Hole, Vineyard Haven, Oak Bluffs, and Edgartown before finally docking in Nantucket. There were no direct Hyannis-to-Nantucket runs in those days. During his first winter on-island, Sayle worked on one of his ship models and house-sat for Probate Judge George M. Poland, while the judge worked at his law office in Boston.
Sayle said he spent a lot of time around the waterfront in those early years and became acquainted with Herb Coffin almost as soon as he arrived on island. "I followed the water here," Sayle said. "I went quahogging and scalloping. I was the last one to scallop here under sail." Sayle, who never had a boat with an engine until 1938, used to bay scallop from his sailing dory and his little schooner and quahog from his skiff, using a pair of 14-foot-long tongs.
Sayle, 84, has been trading stories of the sea with his fellow Rats for sixty years. When Herb Coffin, the club's second commodore, died in 1955, Sayle was asked to take Coffin's place. However, Sayle was too busy fishing, building ship models, and carving ivory to spend every morning on the wharf.
Herb Brown, a local fisherman, was installed as commodore, and Sayle agreed to serve instead as vice-commodore. The club had four more commodores before Sayle finally agreed to take over in 1985, relinquishing the vice-commodore title he had held for thirty years. Sayle tapped island resident Al Silva to fill the vice-commodore post.
Following Herb Brown's death in 1959, the top job was held successively by Marcus Ramsdell, George "Bunt" Mackay, Arthur McCleave, Peter Grant, and Sayle. All were year-round Nantucket residents except Mackay, who was said to have ties to the Starbuck family and who only summered on Nantucket. Peter Grant was the son of a well-known Nantucket resident, George Grant, one of the island's last whalemen and the curator of the Whaling Museum at the time.
Although Sayle has been a Wharf Rat for more than half a century, and is regarded as the authority on matters pertaining to the club, he says he does not hold the record as the longest-tenured living member. Sayle says that distinction goes to Helen Wilson Sherman, niece of Austin Strong, one of the club's founders.
Sherman, however, says she shares that honor with at least three other women, two of whom are still" alive. She lists Pauline Mackay Freeman, Wilhelmine Kirby Waller, and Leila McKnight as charter members who, along with herself, were admitted as teenagers in the mid-1920s when the club started to take on a more formal character.
Sherman, an artist who has been coming to Nantucket since 1921, taught sailing off the Old North Wharf and once worked in Tony Sarg's Easy Street shop. She recalls clearly the story of how, in 1926, Sarg first created the Wharf Rat emblem. "My uncle (Austin Strong) went down to the Jetties Beach where Tony was sketching fat people in thin bathing suits and thrust a piece of paper in front of him and said, 'Draw me a rat/ and, so, with a brave whisk of his pencil, he did."
Strong was a Broadway playwright and commodore of the Nantucket Yacht Club. He also was a step-grandson of Robert Louis Stevenson.
"I love the Wharf Rat Club," Sherman says. It has been an integral part of her life since 1926. Sherman does recall a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when she thought the club started to lose some of its vibrancy. She said Charlie Sayle changed all that, however.
"When Charlie became commodore, all of a sudden the Wharf Rats bloomed again," she said, crediting Sayle's natural ability to communicate, tell good stories, and make people feel welcome. "The sun rose over the Wharf Rats again."
Members often bring along curious friends to the morning sessions, which are held every day except Sunday, May through October. Gathering on the deck facing the pilings that once held the Skipper restaurant, members chat about happenings in town, on the water, and across the sound in that place they call "America."
In early years, the Club would salute Rats who were arriving on the steamship from America by firing the club's cannon. Now, the cannon firing is reserved for special events such as the Fourth of July and Labor Day parties.
On chilly mornings, members congregate around the potbellied stove in the clubhouse, which contains a treasure trove of memorabilia from Nantucket's past. In addition to historic quarterboards, a lantern from the old Nantucket Railroad, ship models, and countless photographs, maps, nautical charts, drawings, and souvenirs from club members, the clubhouse boasts the daily logs of the second commodore, Herb Coffin. When club meetings began to become more formal around 1927, Coffin started to record carefully the happenings of each day, along with notations about the weather and other interesting events. Coffin faithfully kept these logs until his death in 1955. Commodore Herb Brown took over then and continued the logs until he died in 1959.
Since Sayle took over in 1985, he has been trying to gather as much Wharf Rat history as possible so that it will be preserved for future generations. That has been no small task. For, although Herb Coffin and Herb Brown did maintain daily logs, subsequent commodores did not, and no comprehensive membership rosters or other records appear to have been maintained either. Commodore Sayle, therefore, continues to collect and compile as much historic information on the club as he can find.
"I've been trying to piece it together," Sayle said about his efforts to collect and preserve the club's history. In addition to gathering as much historical information as possible, Sayle has been making his own contribution by maintaining a written record of his tenure as commodore. He is the first commodore to record diligently the date when each new member is admitted.
As a result of Sayle's efforts, the club's colorful and fascinating past, along with the cast of characters that helped to create it, will be preserved for those in future generations who take an interest in this extraordinary piece of Nantucket's living history.
Robert F. Cross has been a regular summer visitor to Nantucket since 1976, and was admitted to the Wharf Rat Club in 1990. He is also a member of the Pacific Club. He is an award-winning newspaper and magazine writer, and this is his second contribution to Historic Nantucket. He also serves as an assistant commissioner in New York State's Department of Environmental Conservation in Albany.
