A young Charlie Miller at Rock Harbor. Courtesy photo.
By Doreen Leggett
Commercial quahog dragging is not for the faint of heart; a 1,000-pound metal cage filled with big mollusks swings towards you. Still, it’s better than doing it with bombs falling.
Charlie Miller, who spent summers half a mile from Rock Harbor when he was a kid, remembers fishing with Chet Higgins, captain of F/V Old Glory. Higgins, who lived in Orleans, would pick Miller up at 5 a.m. in his Corvair and drive to Wellfleet where he had his boat.
Sometimes they’d be dragging by the SS Longstreet, a target ship for the military, and as warning pilots would circle three times so boats could move out of the area before they started.
“Chet would be in no hurry,” Miller said with a chuckle, looking at an old photo of Old Glory. “He would still drag a knot and a half.”
Miller remembers culling one day on the west side of the ship and planes came in to bomb east to west. They used rockets and small smoke bombs, said Miller, nothing blew up, but they weren’t toys either. On this day one raced across the water towards them:
“The (bomb) skipped across the water and sunk right off the stern. If it had hit us; it would have killed us.”
Miller was only 12. He took one of those bombs to show-and-tell at school in his hometown of Walpole. He painted it beforehand.
“Imagine if I did that today? I’d be in jail!” he said.
Miller started spending summers in Orleans when he was around 5, with his grandparents, the Ogilvies.
“I have had a boat in Rock Harbor since 1954,” Miller said. “I think I am the oldest there now that has continuously had a boat in the harbor.”
Miller is known for his charter boat, Miller Time, a fixture in Rock Harbor for decades. He spent a recent sunny day reminiscing at his Eastham home, the task made easier by stills and video footage he has amassed over close to 70 years.
“My dad had an 8-millimeter, and I took a lot of movies,” he said.
Captain Tom Smith also has a long history at the harbor, but it pales in comparison.
“We call (Miller) the mayor of Rock Harbor. He seems to have the pulse of what is going on,” Smith said. “And he is a great storyteller.”
Miller calls himself a harbor rat and there were three of them in the early days: the late Brian Gibbons and Harry Smith.
“The three of us raised hell down there,” he said.
One moment stands out: They had crawled under Young’s Fish Market, knowing there was hole used for drainage right next to the spot where the fish were filleted.
They tossed up some fireworks and ran away as the owner, Lester Young, chased them with a filleting knife around the harbor.
Perhaps because of his penchant for getting in trouble, Miller’s grandfather had him get a job when he was 8.
Miller started with H.L. Mallows shellfish company; they sent a driver down from Marion to pick up quahogs landed in Orleans and Wellfleet.
“I’d help this guy load the truck,” Miller said.
Miller didn’t get paid, but on good days he would get an ice cream at the Dairy Freeze on the Wellfleet Pier. He once got to make the trip to Warren, Rhode Island, to the Blount factory where quahogs were made into clam chowder for Campbell’s Soup.
He got to know fishermen well and soon had a job on a quahog boat working for Bob Lindsay, who lived in Brewster and owned the American Eagle. Lazy Lindsay was his nickname, but Miller spent seven days a week, 12 hours a day sorting quahogs, paid 25 cents an hour.
“I had a ball. I would have done it for nothing,” he said.
Miller worked for several captains – including a stint working for Ed Milliken (whose son Steve owns the Dolphin fleet) on the Three Ms owned by Elmer Costa. There were a lot of quahoggers in the harbor. In the past few years, Miller has been happy to see more draggers coming in and out.
“There has been a rebirth. I’d say there is the same amount now as there were back then,” Miller said.
There also were plenty of charter boats, which came to the harbor a bit before Miller arrived; he estimates in the late 1940s or the early 50s.
The first captains, Ray and Vernon Nickerson (brothers and the uncles of Miller’s future wife) tied up at Boat Meadow Creek and then moved to Rock Harbor.
Miller rattled off names of some other charter captains who were at Rock Harbor in the 1960s: Stu Finlay with the Sea Biddy, Fred Harris with the Kitty W, Steve Stevenson with the Shirley L, Phil Schwinn with the White Cap, Ed Horton with the Owl, Henry Clark with the Flying Mist, Elmer Costa with Columbia, and Art Gorham with the Sou’Wester.
“A lot of them were schoolteachers,” he said.
After hopping off Higgins’ boat, Miller started working on the charter boat Nekton for $1 an hour, captained by Stanley Smith, principal at Nauset High School.
“I figured it was something different,” he said.
Dickie Stevenson, who Miller knew, had the idea for a charter boat booth in the early 60s. He’d charge the captains $5 to set up a trip. One day, after getting too much of a hard time, Stevenson pushed the wooden booth right into the harbor; they could book their own trips, was his feeling.
There weren’t too many dustups, though Miller remembers Mun Richardson of F/V Eleanor May and Warren Hopkins of the Lillian C. almost coming to blows after Richardson threatened to ram the Lillian C.
“Mun’s wife came down and started squirting them with the hose,” he laughed. “No cops involved.”
The “prettiest” charter boat, Miller said, was the Columbia, owned by Costa and built in Taves Boatyard in Provincetown.
The boat attracted so much attention that Costa was one of the few captains who didn’t want Rock Harbor reconfigured. Costa preferred the side-berth but the revamp went through, bringing back-up slips that are familiar today.
Miller used to put his own dock in at Rock Harbor Creek. They were allowed to do that.
“I’d call (the harbormaster) up and say I want to put my dock in and I would give them a fifth of whisky,” he said.
Like Miller, Brian Gibbons also worked on a series of boats, and one season he was helping Al Tabor build a boat in his yard. Taber, a big fellow and a bit of a character, had a house near the Community of Jesus beside the harbor. The community wanted to buy the house and Tabor wasn’t selling.
Miller remembers Gibbons telling him the members of the Community would stand in the road outside the house and sing hymns in an attempt to get under the captain’s skin. Tabor and Gibbons would sit in the front yard. Tabor would smile, drink a beer and say, “This is God damn nice, huh Brian?”
“He didn’t care about them,” Miller said with a grin.
Miller thought about working on a dragger out of New Bedford, but got into construction and then shipped to Vietnam in 1969. He spent two extra months in Vietnam instead of being reassigned to a safer spot in the United States so he could get home sooner.
“Not the high point of my life,” he said.
Miller married Eileen Roy, and they built a house as soon as he got back. More than 57 years later the two still go fishing or clamming together.
Soon after he returned he wanted to buy a 20-foot Mako but didn’t have the money, so he and Gibbons set on building a boat. They got plans from Jim Shaw, who supplied the plans for the boat Nauset high school students built every year, for a $100 and built it from scratch in his garage.
“Shaw always said every man should build his own boat and his own house once in his lifetime,” Miller said.
By the time they finished Gibbons, a skilled lobsterman, had his own boat.
“But we fished together, recreational. Did some commercial bass fishing too,” Miller remembered.
After a stint as Eastham harbormaster Miller began charter fishing in earnest. Miller had a series of charter boats, all named Miller Time, at Rock Harbor. Pictures of the boats line the walls of his study.
Buddy Wilson, 81, also a retired charter boat captain, also is down at Rock Harbor most every day. He and Miller are long-time friends and he noted that one can trace the arc of his and Miller’s lives through boats; small at first for couples, getting bigger, fishing with children and grandchildren, getting faster and more comfortable, now keeping comfort but about half the size for retirement.
Miller said there are only about a half dozen charter boats there now; captains are more likely to trailer their vessels.
“I thought I was going to make some money in the charter business, which I didn’t,” he said. “I met some nice people.”
Miller’s newest boat, 26 feet, is in his driveway, covered for the winter, waiting patiently to get back.