A BAYMAN TALKS ABOUT HIS LIFE

John H. Overton was living in Sag Harbor in 1977 at the time of these reminiscences.

JOHN HOWARD OVERTON

My father was Bonac-born in Springs. He's been dead about 10 years now - he was 92 when he died. So I'm really a Bonacker. I remember years ago when I first had a Model T, we were down there, he pointed out a place, he said, where he was born - the house was gone, he said, but that's where it was.

"Where the ice dripped off the roof," he said, "in that clear ice I spotted a penny." I says, "You did?" "Yeah," he says. "What did you do?" He says, "I went in the woodshed and got the ax and chopped it out of the ice and," he says, "I spent it. I had to walk two miles, but," he says, "I spent it."

They come from Wales - my family - and somebody had some money over there, but when they tried to collect it, I guess they'd waited too long or somethin'; it went back to the Crown. There was supposed to be three or four brothers come over here, and what happened to them nobody knows, except my grandfather's supposed to have settled in Southold. He was in the Civil War.

My grandfather was a fisherman, too - he used to be on the bunker steamers, and he worked on Gerard Park. There used to be a fish factory there, Deep Hole Factory. He worked out of there, and I guess that's where he met my grandmother - she lived in Springs. She was a Lester. I got the fish scales right in my bones, see.

The Deep Hole Factory folded up; it busted up long before I was born. My father said they went bankrupt. When it was settled, my grandfather got a seine boat out of it - that's all he got for a season's work. So he made a sailboat out of it. Then he went over to Orient; he was a pretty good farmer and he had charge of Hallock's farm. He was more a farmer than he was a fisherman, 'cause he was superintendent of Hallock's, and this was when I was a kid.

They were so far ahead of anybody, it's not to be laughed at. They had overhead irrigation when I was a kid - they had pipe overhead. They used to raise two and three crops a year, small stuff, and they had a dock, they had a packing plant, and they had this immense big pump to pump the water; and they had a boat, the Hollyoak - she used to run to New York, New London. The Hollyoak, that was their own boat. They used to not only ship their own stuff, they used to buy produce from the other farmers and pack and send it. She was a steamer; she burnt coal. But as I say, they were so far ahead of everybody else in that business in them days. I was in my teens, I can remember goin' over there. Then my grandfather and uncle saved enough money and they bought this farm down in Cutchogue.

And my mother, her family come from over in Massachusetts; their name was Bogue - that's a name you don't see very often. That's where my family's supposed to originate from - that's all I know. And there's very few left. I don't know of anybody except me and my two sisters.

When I was a kid - a young fella - I worked at the old Joseph Fahys Watch Case Factory. They moved here from Carlstadt, N.J., and people round here didn't know what a German was till that. They brought all these old Germans here. Some mechanics! Oh, jeez, they could do wonderful work. They used to have such a big bunch of all these old Germans here. They had what they called the Atheneum. That was also owned by Fahys Watch. They had a bowling alley in it, a stage, and they showed movies in it, everything, a basketball court - it had everything wrapped all in one. And every year they'd have a German Ball, use to last about three days - yes, yes, up to the First World War, and of course they didn't bother to have any German Ball then.

Well, the cod fishermen used to come down here with teamloads of codfish and pull up at the old factory there, and you'd see everybody - for a quarter you'd get a five-six pound codfish - you'd see everybody goin' home with a codfish. Sag Harbor used to be one of the best places in the world to sell stuff; they always had money in the Harbor them days - not much, but they always had some.

East Hampton and places depended on summer; wintertime they had pretty rough. But the old Fahys Watch Case Factory had about 500 or 600 working in there them days, and they had a nice little payroll. What I mean is, the businessmen could depend on about so much every week. People didn't go out of town to trade - you couldn't get out. Used to be a couple wagons come round. I.A. Mann, Abraham & Straus. Outside of that, the money was spent in Sag Harbor.

A lot of the people from East Hampton and Bridgehampton would come down when they wanted to go on the town. We were a city alongside of them in those days, see; we had about seven or eight gin mills - with swinging doors.

I always fooled around the water some, but I never really went commercial till the Depression hit, because I always had a job. Just before the Depression hit I worked for a company called E.L. Phillips Company. They did the construction work for Long Island Light. E.L. Phillips owned the controlling stock in the Long Island Lighting Company, but he had this construction company and he was bleedin' the Long Island Light through it. The stockholders in the Lighting Company didn't get no dividends, he was gettin' it all through the construction company. And at that time they had a lot of work, they were just boomin' - Montauk - you know, Fisher. [Carl Fisher's Montauk Beach Development Company]

Phillips put in all them pole lines down there and they also put an eight-inch gas main from Riverhead to Southampton and they continued that through to East Hampton and of course all round the streets and all the houses and everything - there was an awful lot of work. They had, I guess, over 200 men - a gas gang, a labor gang, electricians, the regular line gang - and they had their office in East Hampton.

E.L. Phillips got so bad the public service got after him. The public service got after him to show his books and he wouldn't produce his books. He just dissolved the E.L. Phillips Company, and the Lighting Company absorbed all his equipment, and that was the end of it - we all got laid off. I was there from 1926 to '31.

But Fisher, when he took Montauk over, they cut all them roads and put them poles in; there was the office building they built, and the bathing club, and an indoor tennis court - that fell down long ago; they had Star Island - that was the gambling; the Yacht Club. Course he put the channel through and built the breakwater. Boy, he spent some money on that place. Not only that, there was a golf course, there was the polo field - he put everything there a rich man would want, and that big hotel on the hill, anything they wanted. It was a lot of money, even in them days.

And then the boom fell in 1928, and that was it, see, and nothing happened there practically until after the war, in '46.

The grass all died, y'know, round '28. You couldn't find a piece of seaweed from Maine to Florida. The scallopin' was bad out in the bays, but all during the time there was no scallops in the bay, we always had a set in Three Mile Harbor, Northwest Creek, and, of course, Montauk Lake. Then clams and oysters started to come in there - you should've seen the oysters, some of they oysters, they'd grow four or five together, and you could hardly get them in a bushel basket; you had to knock them apart. Every one had a curve on the end of the shell, they were a son of a gun to open.

That was clean bottom, see, when that set took. After a few years the grass got in there, and you don't get no set like that anymore. Old Bill Lester, that's Jimmy's grandfather, he used to go down there and bull-rake. One drift across the lake, he'd have six bushels of these big cherries and be home before the kids'd be goin' to school. That's how thick the clams was there.

The first scallops I caught commercially I'm pretty sure was in 1931. That was the beginning of the Depression, you couldn't get any jobs, and that was the last year that you could take any amount of scallops you could catch. I went to Napeague - that thing was loaded, and I got 18 bushel the first day, and I didn't know really what to do with 'em. Only had one dredge, too, can you imagine that, they only allowed you to pull one dredge. But they took 'em out of there by the truckloads - Model T trucks - all they could stagger under, some of the fellas did. After that, then it went on the limit - 10 bushel per man, and 15 per boat.

Your qualifications them days was a strong back and a weak mind. You had a boat - a sharpie. 'Course you could have sail if you could afford a big boat. They used to have big sloops, very long - some were 40 to 45 foot, and terrible wide. But they could handle 'em - you'd see them come down, like on a bend in the shore, they'd come down there and by just workin' that boom and sail back and forth, they'd follow that shore down just as nice - they could handle 'em.

Some had one of them two-lung engines in 'em - boomp boomp boomp boomp. But I mean, the average guy, he had a sharpie, 14-foot sharpie, 'cause you had to row it and you didn't want anything bigger, and you had about 200 feet of running line and a good anchor so it'd hold good. So, you get out where you want to scallop, you throw the anchor over, and you row your boat backwards - you row it out till you fetch up on your 200 feet of line - you throw your dredge over, then get up in the bow and pull up to the anchor - a strong back and a weak mind was what you needed.

Them days we only pulled one, you could have it as wide as you could pull it. We used to have what you call a "mud" dredge - it was damn near four feet wide; we'd roll it up on the culboard - you couldn't pick it up - no man could pick one of them up. I seen a guy had one made out of the end of a double bed - he had a rope from each corner come down to make a bridle, see.

Later, when outboards were cheaper, we use to have a sail stickin' up from the sharpie, with an outboard on the back kind of kickin' over a little bit. When you'd get a fairly good breeze of wind, you could pull three or four dredges with just the sail, but it wasn't as good as an outboard.

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Transcribed by and excerpted from The Baymen's Newsletter (January 1977), a sometime publication of the East Hampton Town Baymen's Association. John H. Overton died later that year.