Dragger Captain

Excerpt from Dragger Captain in Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell (written in 1947):

Young draggermen regard Ellery with awe because of his frugality with gear. He once went a year and seven months without snagging a net. Unlike most draggermen, he doesn't buy ready-made nets; he buys netting by the yard and makes his own. He gets the netting from George Wilcox, who runs a net loft on his farm in Quiambaug Cove, a crossroads village between Stonington and Mystic. There is a sign in this loft which reads, "NO CREDIT EXTENDED IN HERE UNLESS OVER 75 YRS OF AGE & ACCOMPANIED BY GRANDPARENTS."

"Im related to George," Ellery says. "I guess we're cousins. My grandmother on Pa's side was a Wilcox. They're a long-lived set of people. George is in his eighties and the Wilcoxes don't hardly consider him full-grown; he's got two brothers and a sister older than him. There was another brother, but he died some months ago. His name was Jess. Jess was ninety-three years old and getting on close to ninety-four, but he was still able to do a little light work around the farm. A few days before he died, he was breaking up some boulders with a sledge hammer, so he could use them in a stone fence. He had a blood blister on his left thumb he'd got shingling a roof and couldn't use his left hand at all and he was swinging the sledge hammer with one arm and the boulders were great big ones and the job was taking him twice as long as it ordinarily would and it aggravated him. A pouring-down rain came up and he wouldn't stop. He worked right through it and he got the pneumonia. The only reason he died, they took him to the hospital. Jess never slept good in a strange bed. Around midnight, he got up in the dark and put on his clothes, intending to slip downstairs and strike out for home, but he fell over something and broke his hip.

The Wilcoxes used to operate a big fish-scrap factory on the Cove, the Wilcox Fertilizer Company. That's the reason they're so long-lived. The factory was just across the yard from the house and the prevailing wind blew the fish-scrap smell right into the house. This smell was so strong it killed all the germs in the air, and it was so rich it nourished you and preserved you. People in poor health for miles around learned about this and used to come in droves and sit all day on the porch, especially people with the asthma and the dropsy. Some days, there'd be so many sitting on the porch, getting the benefit of the smell, that it was quite a struggle for the Wilcoxes to get in and out of the house."