Jimmy and Leona Brackett (Photo courtesy Sherril Brackett Callahan)
After the war the U.S. was booming with a new consumer-based economy. Maine and Bristol remained pretty much stuck in the past. Taxes were inequitable, many roads were still dirt and others were out of repair. Much of our infrastructure and institutions were antiquated. Most people returned to their previous jobs or became a “jack of all trades.” It’s interesting that so many of these people lived into their 90s.
Jimmy Brackett went back to fishing. He had started lobstering with his father when he was five. At 11 Jimmy went out on his own. He fixed up an old punt he had found and his father gave him a dozen old traps. He fished in Pemaquid Harbor.
Jimmy fished all through high school with 25 or 30 traps and a bigger boat. Everything was manual in those days. When he got out of the service he worked as a diesel mechanic for about a month at Cliff Hanna’s garage. Jimmy’s father got cancer and asked him if he’d like to take over his boat and gear. He fished with that boat for three years then decided he needed a new one.
In 1948 he had Jimmy Chadwick build him a 28 foot boat at his yard at Pemaquid Beach. It had a 6 cylinder Chrysler engine. Jimmy didn’t like it and he went up to Pemaquid Falls to see if Jesse Greenlaw would help him build one. Jesse did and a partnership was formed.
They built 16 all told in the winter when they weren’t lobstering. They built the last one in 1965 and got $8,000 for it. During Jimmy’s career he never fished more than 340 traps, never had any electronics, or a sternman.
Alex Hanna got talking up a lobsterman’s co-op and the 20 Pemaquid Harbor lobstermen met about it overhead of Cass Blaisdell’s store in 1949. That building is now the Riverview Market in Pemaquid Falls. None of the fishermen had wharves and had to depend of John Partridge or Fred Gilbert for the gas and bait and to buy their lobsters.
Some of the guys decided to wait and see how it turned out, but most of them jumped on the idea. They pooled their money to buy a lot on the north side of the harbor and put in a road themselves. They also cut the logs for pilings and saw logs for lumber, which Poole Brothers milled for them.
Bob Fossett and his work horses yarded out the logs. The men built everything themselves. The idea was they would hire a manager and share all the profits. It became a great success and everyone joined. It was the first co-op in the state. One year they heard the price of $.25 per pound was going to drop to $.21. Jimmy said that they crated their lobsters for four days and he took them over to Southport and got $.28 per pound.
Eventually that summer they got the price up to $.38. Alex Hanna was the co-op president for the first two years and then Jimmy was for the next 28 years. Jimmy was always one of the high liners and one year Danny Cheney was.
Danny told me that the co-op closed a few years ago due to declining membership. Jimmy did some dragging off the Pemaquid Point in the spring. He caught sand dabs, gray sole, and flounder. That’s all gone now. Jimmy had some close calls over the years. One March on a very windy day he was seven miles off Monhegan and his boat hit a chop, throwing him overboard.
“I had my oil clothes on, boots, everything,” he said. “I had a hold on a line and pulled myself in. I was scared! I couldn’t move for half an hour and stayed by the diesel muffler to keep warm. It took me three hours to get back.”
Jimmy’s wife, Leona, told me: “I never heard anything about it for two days. I was away in Portland for an Eastern Star meeting. When I got home my neighbor said, ‘Weren’t you lucky you didn’t lose your husband?’ I asked her what she meant and she told me all about it.”
Jimmy said he had a lucky $2 bill in his wallet and that he still had it. Jimmy died in 2014 at the age of 96.
Tuddy said when she and Tom got discharged he didn’t want her to work but he changed his mind. She started with some private duty nursing and then got a job at Winchester Hospital in Massachusetts.
When Tom got a job in Catenoria, N.Y. Tuddy worked as a school nurse. I was pleased to hear Tuddy’s reflections on her career.
“I was really satisfied and glad with my nursing career,” she said. “It was what I had always wanted to do. I think young people should do what they want to do, and put everything into it; do the best they can.” Those were very wise words Tuddy!
Dan Thompson came home after the war ended and helped out around the Thompson House. After he and Edie married they took it over. They added three rooms and four baths and expanded the dining room to seat 65. He started building cottages in 1950 and built a few at a time as they could afford them. The Thompsons built a total of 21 which Dan managed until he was 82 when his son, Merle, took over. Merle’s daughter, Katherine, is now running the operation. Dan died in 2012 at the age of 94.
Winnette Brackett started teaching in 1936 for $10 a week. She started at the new Bristol Consolidated School in 1954. She taught for 30 years, with taking time off for her kids. Winnette died in 2009 at the age of 95.
Harney Hanna was a self proclaimed jack of all trades. When he got home he helped his brother Carroll build a wharf in Round Pond and then went down to the Point to clear cottage lots for Professor Libby. Harney started lobstering with an old beat up boat and an old beat up string of traps. In the winters he worked on a coastal oil tanker.
For a few years he worked for Luther Fowler at his poultry operation in Brown’s Cove. That gave him the idea of getting into poultry. Around 1957 he bought Emelda Jones’ property in Pemaquid Falls. It had a big dairy barn and over a few years he converted it for hens. He started with 5,000 hens producing hatching eggs. He added a floor and increased to 8,000 hens. He had to get out of hatching eggs and shifted over to broilers with Lippman Poultry. Then he built on a big addition at the end of the barn for more broiler capacity.
He was with Lippman for 15 years before they abruptly closed shop. The industry moved south where there were no heating costs and the grain was cheaper. For three or four years in the mid 1970’s he did general carpentry work for Bruce Swift. Harney died in 2015 at age 90.
When Carroll Leeman got home from the service he went to work for Bayshore Machine in Damariscotta. He said George Masters from Round Pond was the foreman. He then went to work for Archie and Eldon Westhaver’s Bristol Machine and Gear in Bristol Mills. The building is still there next to the post office. He also did some lobstering and worked in the woods.
Next he went to Bath and worked for Hyde Windlass Company and stayed there until BIW bought them out. Then Carroll started his own painting company with five employees. He stayed with that until he retired after 25 years. Carroll died in 2011 at age 86.
I got information from Belinda Osier about her father’s career. Leonard graduated from Colby in 1943. He was drafted but a heart condition classified him as 4-F. Leonard then started a long teaching career beginning at North East Harbor in 1945. He was principal at Bowdoinham next and then went on to teach at six different schools, finishing at Lincoln Academy in 1970. He was Lincoln Academy’s driver ed instructor from 1970-1976.
At the beginning of his career at little schools Leonard taught a broad range of subjects. In Thomaston in 1954 he started teaching science, which he did until he retired. Leonard was paid $1,700 at the beginning of his career and $10,000 at the end. He moved back to New Harbor in 1960 when he started teaching at Lincoln Academy, He owned shore property on the north side of New Harbor right in front of his house.
In 1950 he built two cottages which he rented and started Harborside Cottages. From then until 1967 Leonard built eight more cottages as money allowed. He had many repeat customers including four generations of one family. He ran the cottages until 2003 when he transferred them to Belinda. Leonard died in 2013 at the age of 92.
After Bob Hanley was discharged he came back to the farm. He started out cutting pulpwood on the farm with a crosscut saw for $2.50 a cord. They also cut saw logs at John Gamage’s farm. They yarded them out with a team of oxen which hauled them down the Old County Road to Poole Brothers.
Bob’s father, Ross, had been a mason for a long time and Bob went in with him. They went all over the state and I remember they built a boiler house for one of Dad’s poultry barns. In the 1950s Bob went out on his own and stayed with masonry for 18 years. During this time Bob started a small construction company. He started with a tractor with a bucket and a dump truck. He expanded and later said, “I got in it so deep I had to keep going with the masonry.”
One of his first jobs was to put in the road for Lake Pemaquid Campground. Bob expanded every year. Jewell and Mark inherited the company with Mark buying out Jewell. Mark’s son Stuart runs the business now. Bob died in 2010 at the age of 84.
Thelma Baker began teaching at the Washington School during the Depression for $600. She took six years off after her children were born. When she began teaching again it was at a one room school in Jefferson. Then Thelma came down to the two room Franklin Grammar School in Newcastle. My wife, Judy, had Thelma in class and remembers her fondly. In 1953 she started at the Bristol Consolidated School which had just opened.
In her next to last year teaching Thelma had 43 children in class and said, “I had the best time; the children were almost perfect. I was so fond of that class. Every child could read and were eager to work all the time.”
Thelma had taken a course on children’s behavior based on praise and rewarding good behavior. She put that into practice and was a much beloved teacher. Thelma retired in 1980 after 38 years of teaching.
“I feel like I’ve had a happy and rewarding life except for my husband’s health,” she said. Thelma died in 2009. She was 97.
When Harold Davis got discharged he came home to his uncle’s farm. He started clamming that May. Harold couldn’t go in the winter because he had gotten frostbite in his fingers. He went by boat in the John’s River with Buster Sproul, Raymond Poole, and Dicky Fossett. They sold their clams to Roy Prior in Bremen for $2 a bushel. In the spring when I couldn’t sell clams anywhere else I sold them to Roy for $5 a bushel.
In 1947 BIW called Harold back to work. He said he thought he was “set for life.” That job lasted four months. Harold and Mathias Benner bought a portable saw mill. They trucked lumber to Worcester, Mass. for $50 for a thousand board feet. A man came along and told them that he’d pay that price and truck them down. Harold said that, “He took six loads down and we never saw any money,” Harold said. “It was about $1,200 and that put us right out of business. We had to go to work to pay off the stumpage.”
He and Buster worked in the woods for a while. Harold Morton from Bristol was the captain of a 130-foot pogy boat and he got Harold and six other men to come down to the Carolinas for the pogy season. They fished for three months and Harold said he really liked that job. After the pogy season was over Harold bought a dump truck and hauled gravel for the town. Then Harold hired on with Arthur Weeks, driving his truck and cutting firewood with him which they sold all over town.
Harold recalled back to back hurricanes in 1954. They left trees down all over town and he and Wes Mahan went down to the Ireland Estate in Pemaquid Harbor to clear up the mess. They had chainsaws by then and were paid $1 an hour which they thought was really good money. They got to keep the pulp wood also.
Harold also had a lawn care business, was a mason’s tender, and painted houses. He sure was a jack of all trades, master of none. His favorite job was his last one, working at Hill Top Market in Damariscotta. He loved talking to the customers. The only regret Harold expressed to me was that he never went lobstering. He was all set to go when BIW called him back and he sold all his gear. Harold died in 2010 at the age of 87.
After the war was over Sterling Crooker went back to BIW. When he retired they gave him a plaque for 44 years of dedicated service. Sterling died in 2006 right after I interviewed him. That showed me the importance of doing these oral histories.
When Phil Crocker got out of the Coast Guard he went to the Franklin Technical Institute on the GI Bill. He got a degree in mechanical design and worked at BIW for a year, but was not satisfied with the pay. He saw an ad for a job with G.E. in Schenectady, N.Y. and got the job. He worked there for seven years.
In 1958 Phil got a job with MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Mass. He worked there until he retired in 1985 at the age of 62. Phil died in 2015, 92 years of age.
Ron Yates was another of those jack of all trades. When he first got out of the service he lobstered some and cut wood in the winter. Later he had a lawn care business and plowed snow in the winter. Ron said he was proud to grow the biggest squash and pumpkins in town. Ron died in 2014 at the age of 92.
Mollie Perley said that her Aunt Wintie had a real estate business in Round Pond for years. She died in 2011, age 88.
When John Reilly got home he went ground fishing for a few years with his Reilly cousins. Then he built a poultry barn and got in the egg business. Later he built two more barns and a brooder house for day-old chicks. The pullets were raised on the range with shelters to go in at night. When they started to lay eggs they were put in the barns. The eggs had to be cleaned, graded, and packed into cartons for H.P. Hood to pick up. They sold eggs at the door too.
The Reillys also had two large strawberry beds. They sold the berries for 65 cents a box. John plowed gardens and mowed hay around town. In 1972 John started John M. Reilly and Son well drilling. His son-in-law, Paul Kelsey was in it with him. The company is still in business today. When Marilyn died in 2017 John was devastated and in poor health. He died the next year at age 97. He was the last World War II veteran in town. I was very fortunate to be able to interview him when I did.
Una Brackett had a beauty shop on her porch for years. She died in 2012 at the age of 98.
Florence Elliot worked at many jobs early in her marriage. At one time or another she packed eggs for Luther Fowler and also packed shrimp or fish. She often did finish work, papering and painting, on the houses Norman and Wilbur Gorham built. She was in high demand around town and some out of town. Her son Craig told me that she was really fussy in her work. “Flossie Belle” died in 2011, aged 87.
(Pete Hope is a local historian.)
