Joe Roderick, a fisherman’s story • Part 1

Story as told by Joe Roderick, part 1 of 5

I don't know too much about the Roderick side of the family. On the Sousa side and on the Valentine side, which was my mother's side of the family, I know my grandmother and most of her sisters and brothers were born in Provincetown. I think my grandfather met his wife in Provincetown. They were married in Provincetown and all the children were born in Provincetown. We're going way back to at least the 1870's. I remember my grandfather and my grandmother.  My mother was born in 1899.  If my grandmother was born in Provincetown, it had to be at least 18 or 20 years before.

I don't know how they came over here. I do know that my grandfather went out of Portugal on a whaler.  He took a whaler. I've never been able to find out what whaler it was. It was out of Nantucket. It went over and took part of the crew from the Azores. He was gone for two years, and winds up in New Bedford. He jumps ship in New Bedford, comes to Provincetown and marries my grandmother.

I don't know why he came to Provincetown. He must have had some idea of people being in Provincetown he could get associated with. Our family goes back at least to the 1870s. I don't know if they lived on Long Point. I do know that my mother was born in a house way up in the West end of town. They were practically the only Portuguese in that area when my mother was born. The Azoreans lived in the West End of town and the Mainland Portuguese in the Center.  They never got along. And they did that with fishing boats when they first came over. Then it transformed. Then they changed over. Just like my wife and me. All my grandparents are all from the Azores. All of Emily's side was mainlanders, from the Algarve, a place called Aljezur. I don't think I would have been married to my wife if my Father-in-law hadn't gone to Portugal.  

When I graduated from high school, I went fishing with Emily's uncle. That was the first boat I went on. I didn't go fishing in high school. I tried to raise $250.00 to go onto college. I could have gone to Bates College for $250.00. There's no way my father and mother could afford to send me. Elton Ramey and Tony Duarte were from Bates. Tony was my coach in high school. I couldn't get the $250.00. There was no money in the family. At one time there were ten children. My brother Steven never went. None of us went to college. Arthur probably went the most to school. Even after he came out of the service he wound up going to school. I had no money.

The only job I had was working on the pier, on Skarloffs wharf. Before I went fishing, I went to work there in the summers. I started working on fish when I was 13 years old. I was paid 25 cents an hour. I remember the first week I worked for Skarloffs wharf. I brought home of $23 at 25 cents an hour. My mother and father gave me $3. $3, what I couldn't do with $3. That was a lot of money. Skarloff was the name of the people that owned that pier, not the town wharf, the one. They were the ones that built it; it was in their family for years. The Skarloffs were Jewish people. There was one man that used to run it. He had one arm. He had lost it in some kind of an accident. His name was Bill Skarloff. It was taken over by Boozy and Lamb.

At one time down there at the pier, they used to have seiners going out for fish. They'd bring it in the afternoon. They had to dress that fish because they weren't shipping it out iced. They would split it, salt it, and put it into barrels. The cold storages were open. But this was another business that used to be carried out by Skarloffs wharf. They shipped salted fish all over the country. The fish was packed in salt in Irish barrels. The barrels would either go out in trucks or they'd go out on the railroad.  The time I’m talking about, if I was 13, it had to be in 1935.  The first job I had was working there.  

Then the next job was when the government came out with Social Security. I was employed by Atlantic Coast Fisheries to work on whiting. I was 16 at the time. We were doing different jobs pertaining to frozen whiting. They used to take and make a butterfly out of them and shove them into the quick freeze. That was one of the big businesses they had at Atlantic Coast. It was the last big business they had. And that was even before they made a cannery right alongside of it. They owned the Cape Cod wharf and others, too. They took over other cold storages.

Atlantic Coast Fisheries came in and took over from the old cold storages. The old ones, the original ones, the old cold storages, were strictly sold by shares. The two first cold storages were the one near Flinx's Barber Shop. The other one was over here in North Truro. Those were the first two cold storages on the local level. That was back in '93. The railroad came in 1873.  After that is when they started to build those other cold storages. Most of the cold storages in Provincetown were all built after 1910, from 1910 to 1918. And Skarloff's wharf wasn't even built before they put the town pier there. There was no pier there at the turn of the century.  Matheson's wharf was there. I remember all the cold storages along Commercial Street. All the cold storages had trap boats. Their trap boats used to have five weirs out all the way around the bay. That's the first part that I remember about fishing. Colonial was in the East end near Howland Street. Puritan wharf was right next to Cape Cod wharf where Flyer's Boatyard is now.

In front of the Colonial building there was a track that went down to the water. That's where they used to unload the boats. The water wasn't deep enough for draggers to come in beside the wharf. When they built on the end, we were able to come in and unload.

At that time the draggers started going fishing. They would land fish at the cold storages because the traps weren't catching the amount of fish the cold storages needed to operate. It was a good deal to go out and get 50, 60 barrels of whiting and bring them in and take them out. We used to take them out round. Then the cold storage would treat them and use them to meet the demand for frozen fish, but it had to be fresh. You couldn't go out and stay overnight. You had to come in the same day. We didn't have refrigeration, just ice in the hold.  Even then we didn't have that much ice because we couldn't afford to pay for the ice. I had no choice but to go fishing. There weren't that many jobs around where you could make any money.

I tried to go to school. I took a PG course at Cambridge High in Latin. My sister Ida was working in Cambridge at the time. She was working for Judge Fort and I was living with her. I started to go to school there. I went to school at Cambridge High in Latin. I went there for about a couple months.  Then I had some trouble at one of the places where I was working. I was working in Harvard Square, right in Cambridge. I was working in a little shop there. It was called Highlers. They served lunches and all. I threw a glass of water back in one of the college girls' faces, so I came home. She sent me back three times to rectify her order. There were some of them that were son-of-a-guns. She was a Radcliff girl. I was 17 at the time. That's when I came home. I came back to Provincetown and got a job with Emily's uncle, Manuel Thomas,

Dr. Foo. On the.Aerolight. Dr. Foo used to say about dogfish,"Damn it you kill one a thousand come to the funeral. Dr. Foo was Emily's mother's brother.

I was 17 years old in the late 1930's. Dr. Foo was the first one I went out with after I came out of high school. I hadn't been out fishing before. When I first came out of high school, I went fishing with him for the summer. Before I went I decided that I was going to go to school and work in Cambridge. I started to do that, but I only lasted about a month, a month and a half.  

At the time when I came back to Provincetown--that was in October--summer was already over and Dr, Foo didn’t need any more men. I went on Edwin Gill's boat. He used to live on Conant Street, upon Nezera? I went with him. In 1942 I went with Ernest Tarvers on the Mermaid. It was a dragger and a hard-working boat. It was one of those little sailboats, the big round and full type boats with a single mast in them. They used to go sailing with them. It was like a catboat. That's exactly what it was like. They were very close to the water. They didn't have much free board.  In fact you couldn’t even go into the fish hull. My size, I'd be half out. You had to go down on your knees to load the fish. It was a dragger with a small net. At that time they still had gasoline engines when they first went dragging. 

We’d go fishing right around the Cape here, mostly in the Bay and around the Cape. Later on they started to get more power and diesel engines, they started to go further down.  They'd go down off Chatham, down off Nantucket.  When I started fishing with my second boat,  that's where l used to fish.  It was a job. I also got a break. I was fishing with my father-in-law when I first got married. My father-in-law had to go to the hospital for an operation, and turned the boat over to me.  He let me run it. That was before I went in the service. I went in the service in '43 so I think, at the end of ‘42.  I'd only been fishing with him a couple years. He let me take the boat. He trusted me. And that was the first break I got.

Part 2 coming soon …