Joe Roderick, a fisherman’s story • Part 3
Story as told by Joe Roderick, part 3 of 5
Emily had a lot of family out there in California that went tuna fishing. They were in a good business. I thought maybe I could get a job on one of the boats out there. What kept coming into my mind was the $4,000 I owed. How in the heck am I gonna pay off this $4,000? At the time, right after the war, they were making big money tuna fishing. So we went out there.
I was out in California, I got a call from Henry Passions from Provincetown. He had the Liberty Bell and wanted somebody to run it. It was late '49 or early '50. I had already lost the boat and then a year later in 1949, I lost my son, Jimmy. I was almost lined up with a site when I got the call from Henry Passions. He wanted me to run his boat the Liberty Belle. He was going to Florida for the winter. So I did. I came home. That's the boat I ran and started with. He knew I had been fishing a while. I'd had the Amelia R. At that time his son-in-law, Frank Motta, wasn't fishing with him. That boat was built in '47. I ran it in '49. I was the captain and I ran it for five or six months. In the spring, there was a boat for sale up in New Bedford. That's when and where l bought the Jimmy Boy.
I didn't have it built, but the boat was rebuilt. She had blown up in New Bedford Harbor. When she did, they rebuilt her. They added another ten feet onto the bow. The bow had split open from an explosion of bottled gas. The same thing happened with my brother Sonny. They were using propane for cooking, but had a leak in the line. A fella went down and turned on the switch. When he turned on the switch, boom, she blew right open. They fixed it all up. We bought it.
After I lost the Amelia R, I went fishing. I did make a few dollars. When it came time I could buy the boat, you can't imagine how many different people from Gloucester loaned me money on a share basis. They owned l6ths of vessels and went for three or four years like that. Finally I needed another engine in the boat and I had to buy them out. That's when I went looking for another investment. But I cleared up most of the bills that I had. The fishing was very good.
There's a lot of difference between different types of fisherman. If you're fishing with your father or if you're fishing with your brother or whoever, you could be taught but they don't want to teach you anything. They don't want you to get too interested in fishing because they don't want you to object to the work you are doing. I just don't know how they could go do what they did. The only way that they could operate the boats was if they had sons working with them. The owners weren't making that much out of their own share unless they had somebody with them who'd take the boat fishing if they weren't there. That's the way the boats were run for years. They were family affairs.
When I stop and think about families, I can remember when my father used to be a trap fisherman. He was in Madison's wharf. He was there for years. He took over as captain of the trap boat from old man Joe Lucas who lived up on Commercial Street. Bill Lucas used to be at Madison's cold storage. When my father became skipper, I had four uncles and my father on one trap boat: my Uncle Arthur, my father's brother-in-law, Manuel Brown, Arthur "Deeda" Roderick, my uncle Joe Souza, my mother's brother, and my Uncle David Souza who was married to my aunt Juliana.
I had as many as six or seven men on the Jimmy Boy. The big thing about any fishing vessel then was you had to be able to handle the fish you could catch. You had to catch so much fish in order to make any money. It wasn't a case of just bringing the fish in. You have to dress and clean the fish and keep them iced and keep them cool. If you leave them on deck too long, they spoil especially in the summer. So we always felt whatever number of men were aboard could always find work. They probably didn't share as much as five or six in a boat. Accordingly their share would probably be greater on a boat that might be run by four men, but how much can they handle? It isn't like what you have today.
I went on a whale watching boat and I saw Joan and Tom. He's fishing out there all alone. He’s one of the sons of Alfred Silva who owns the boat. He's got a son that's fishing that boat alone. I always said it wouldn’t surprise me someday if he runs into a little accident. He’s all alone trying to run the boat, runt the engine, run everything, and run the winch. If he ever falls overboard and the boat is moving he’s a goner. Anything can happen.
Business was very good until, I'd say, the beginning of the 80's. The last good fishing when you got a good price, I’d say, was around 1980. The 70's were very good. After that, I think it was fished out plus, I think that's when we were starting to get the effects of the foreign fisheries. When I first got this boat, the fuel bill for the year at that time was $3,600. I used to buy fuel from Marcy's Oil. Marcie went into business around the same time that I got this boat. It was around 1950. He was with his brother, Chris. Chris ran the Cape Cod garage. The last year that I can remember I paid $36,000 for fuel, ten times what I paid in '50. And then there was the price of ice. We didn't need much ice. Ice would go for 1 or 2 cents a pound. You'd get four or five tons of ice before you started fishing. At that time we no longer had any icehouses. They weren't making their own ice. We were having it brought in. It was at the East End Cold Storage where they were making ice. That's where we used to get most of the ice. The cost of all the gear went up.
Insurance though, was the thing that really hurt you. The price of insurance went way up. There's always been something wrong with the insurance companies if you compare the fisheries to businesses on land. Any insurance company could cancel you from one year to the next. If something had happened, you had some accident on the boat, even though you're paying, and they're being well paid to cover the accident, they could refuse to take you on the next year, just cancel you out. If you had a big claim against the insurance company, if it was even one-third of what you were paying as a premium, the next year they would probably double up the premium. And you had no guarantee you could get the insurance. And if they didn't want to take you, they didn't have to. And nobody would take you. They'd only take you at the same rate. And knowing that you had been with another company and you were a risk, they'd just cancel it. You had to have insurance. Suppose somebody gets hurt or supposing you need to go to the bank to borrow money on the boat. Do you have insurance? No, you don't have insurance. If you don't have insurance, you can't get a loan from First National Bank or Seamen's Bank. The Seamen's was the first one, I always remembered, to refuse loans to a boat, provided you didn't have a house to mortgage. That's the way it went. They had you right in a bind. You either had to have insurance to go out or to borrow money? What else could you do? I had people get hurt. I was at a point where they were gonna double my insurance, and I went for seven or eight years without insurance. I couldn't afford it. If I were to pay the additional premium that they wanted me to pay, I might as well forget it. I wouldn't have made one red cent out of the boat. It would have been all for the insurance. The only thing I could do was to found the corporation. The corporation owned it.
Before I got the Jimmy Boy I was in a position where I was straddled. I gotta make up this $4,000 I’ve got to make it on the side. To make $4,000 above what you have to live on was quite difficult in those years. You're talking $4,000. When I kept thinking of that debt, I'd say to myself how in the heck did you ever go out and borrow $30,000 to purchase the Jimmy Boy. That’s what I paid for it originally. I didn't have any money. I got different people to loan me something. I wanted to pay off my debts. In other words, I didn't want to be just getting by. I felt that if I’m gonna be working at this, and I don't think fishing at that time was very good, you make money if you get your own boat and you get it paid for. But it was a big stipulation, the upkeep and all the insurance got to be too much.
Part 4 coming soon …