The doorknob twisted around and round and finally came off in my hand. I pushed the door open and was assaulted with a snoot full of the acrid scent of lye soap. In that era, it was a practice to wash the wooden stairs with Octagon soap or Lysol to clean and remove dirt and germs from the stairs of multi-family homes.
The doorknob twisted around and round and finally came off in my hand. I pushed the door open and was assaulted with a snoot full of the acrid scent of lye soap. In that era, it was a practice to wash the wooden stairs with Octagon soap or Lysol to clean and remove dirt and germs from the stairs of multi-family homes. Once a month my mother got on her hands and knees and took her turn at washing the wooden stairs in our tenement building. On that day I was on a mission of mercy and was uneasy about the outcome. On instructions from a group of my mentors at the boathouse, I was to carry a cup of coffee to one of their brothers who had been absent from the club for almost a week.
I knocked on the door of the cold water flat but I was told to open the door and walk in if there was no response. I opened the door and walked into a chilly two room apartment with faded blue wall paper peeling from the walls and yellow water stains on the cracked ceiling. Danny was wrapped in an old green wool military blanket, fast asleep in the only soft chair in the room. There was a chrome table with but one chair and not another sign of habitation. The old timer served as a boilerman in the engine room of a Merchant Marine vessel and was deaf as a stone.
I was warned not to startle him so I began calling him, softly at first and finally yelling until he showed signs of life. What was once a rugged individual was now a shell of the man I once knew. He had prickly grey hair, a scruffy beard and his thin body looked extremely vulnerable. We also lived in a cold water flat, but our three-room apartment was a palace compared to that dungeon. His eyes finally exhibited recognition and he spoke my name. “What are you doing here Charley, where did you get that coffee?” I told him the caretaker and his crew were worried about him and asked me to check on him. “I’m broke kid, and I didn’t want to take advantage of my friends. My pension check is late or stolen and I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning.”
I looked at that decorated veteran and wondered how a man who served his country with distinction, could find himself in such dire circumstances. I had a dollar eighty from the caretaker’s duce, so I told old timer to drink his coffee and I would be right back. He didn’t protest. It was an executive decision my mentors would agree with. In less than a minute I was back at the diner ordering a bacon, egg and cheese on toasted white, it was Danny’s favorite food.
I watched as the old man gnawed tiny bites of the first nourishment he’d consumed in over 24 hours and was uplifted by his grateful smile. At his insistence, I walked him to the club, a slow and obviously painful trip for the old man, but once he walked in that door all the pain and anxiety departed as his comrades gathered around him. I gave the caretaker his change and tried to sneak out but he crabbed my arm. “You’re are a part of this family,” he growled, “you ain’t sneaking out of here until you break bread with our brothers.”
The following day Danny’s downstairs neighbor found his check hidden in the folds of her magazine and all was right with the world. That old vet didn’t forget who brought him food and drink. On Monday as I was walking home from school, he was waiting on the corner. “Let’s go to Parent’s and get a big bag of that penny candy.” Danny loved candy, he was always chewing on licorice or a spice stick. We walked together to the club, a 13-year old boy and a 73-year old man, talking about our mutual interests, fishing and boating. Danny didn’t own a boat, so he and I shared the club’s leaky livery and he asked me if I was ready to get to work on that old barge. I assured him I was.
Back then we enjoyed a healthy biomass of winter flounder, eels, tautog and white perch. The bait shop was open year-round, and they were busy repairing and servicing reels, building rods and providing a warm place for the locals to visit and talk about past seasons and plans for the future. It was a small cinder block building with two of those thick glass block windows that let light in and made it difficult to break through. Danny perked up after that scare and was a bait shop regular during the winter as we made plans to work on the old skiff so we would be one of the first boats out on the mud flats to produce a catch of winter flounder.
As I recall, that winter mirrored this season in terms of weather. It began with a warm early February that had everyone’s hopes for a mild spring surging until a couple of northeasters moved in at months end. I do recall a warm late February afternoon when the temperature was in the high 60s in the direct sun when one of the members showed up with a few pounds of Auclair’s Market prime sirloin ground hamburger and two dozen Gold Medal buns.
A charcoal fire was stoked, the caretaker broke out his chrome plated grill and set it up over the bricks and one of the old timers began to mix the burgers. These were not your run-of-the mill burgers but those that would rival the specialty pub burgers of today. He took the burger, rolled in finely chopped onion and a red liquid that might have been barbecue sauce. He sprinkled in salt and pepper and formed several thick burgers. My mouth was watering as I opened the buns and put them on a cookie sheet over the fire. We ate and drank, toasting the spring season and the burgers were something to really special.
Three days later, I was shoveling five inches of heavy snow off the long stairway that led to the club’s front door. Somehow, we suffered through the next eight weeks that varied between sub-freezing with occasional above normal temps, conditions that toyed with our emotions. Then just when we thought the ugly spring weather would never end, the sun shines, the temperatures became mild and the boat still required a good scraping and painting. That was work that could not be completed under wet and damp conditions. We began working with an intense determination. We finished the boat late one Friday night in late March but were disillusioned when two of the other members used a large aluminum boat to beat us to the mud flats where they caught a big mess of skinny but delicious flat fish.
We hit the water the following day full of enthusiasm, but rowing as hard as I could, the tide and wind were against me when Danny suggested we might try a little mud flat just around O’Neil Point and inside the cove where the power plant ramp is now located. We stirred the bottom with the anchor then set it before tossing out some mussels for chum. Danny put us on a bonanza. Our catch didn’t equal that of the other members but each of those fish were much larger and many had a yellow ridge around the belly, causing Danny to refer to them as Snowshoe flounder. The caretaker put the blade to them and prepared one of his famous fish fries with a healthy portion for me to take home to my family.
I’ve worked on, built and sailed wooden boats until Captain Roland Coulombe bought the very first fiberglass boat I ever saw from Pratts Sporting Goods on Slade’s Ferry Ave in Somerset. She was small, round and very tender but she didn’t leak or require any maintenance. On several occasions we filled the bottom of that little tub with schoolie stripers while fishing under the draw of the old Brightman Street Bridge. I stayed with wood until I could afford a fiberglass center console, but I still miss those great wooden boats, particularly the 23-foot MacKenzie bass boats with tillers fore and aft, they were, and still are, classic boats linked to the historic Cuttyhunk legends who fished from them.
While steering my fiberglass center console through the white water of a boulder field I can still hear Danny and his mantra. “If God wanted men to build fiberglass boats, he would have planted fiberglass trees”.
God Bless Danny and the old guard.