Jean Chenoweth has very kindly written more articles about past times in the Boothbay region. Previously she’s let us run her memories of life in West Harbor in the mid-1900s and her mother’s memories in the early 1900s. This time she covers a summer job she had and a good friend that resulted from that time. Barbara Rumsey

Jean’s Summer Job

Growing up right next to the ocean and just across the cove from a shipyard, I learned to love boats at an early age. So in 1960 when I was looking for a job between my junior and senior years in college and saw that the Passenger Boat Association (PBA) was looking for someone to work in their reservation booth that summer, I quickly applied. Eliot Winslow wrote back that I should come see him as soon as I got home so we met by Fisherman's Wharf. He asked a couple of quick questions, looked me up and down, and said, “Okay, I just wanted to make sure you didn’t have two heads, you’re hired.” He also recommended that I take as many free rides on the various boats as I could fit in so I would know more about the trips I was selling. Heaven!

The Booth

The booth was a little one-room building with a telephone and two windows on the wharf right next to the Fisherman's Wharf property. The first week or so I worked with a woman named Pauline Murray whose favorite comment was “It's hell to grow old.” She soon quit and they hired Captain Ross Dickson to replace her. Our job was to take reservations for the boats, talk to all the passing tourists, tell them about the various trips they could take, and convince them to sign up for one. We clipped reservation sheets to a line in the booth, wrote down names and the number of people in each party. The captains picked up the slips just before loading time. Money was collected on the boats.

Ross Dickson

I was 21 years old when Ross and I worked together. He was 73, but we quickly became great friends and that friendship lasted for 21+ years. He was born on Westport in 1887, and when I knew him he still owned a cottage there. From 1907 to 1910 he served as a deckhand on the tugboat Seguin. He then worked for the Eastern Steamship Company for many years back when steamboats were a principal mode of transportation, carrying passengers and freight. He began as a deckhand and then served as master and chief officer of passenger steamers on runs from St. John, New Brunswick, and Bangor via Portland and Boston to New York. He served on the steamers Westport, City of Bangor, Camden, Belfast, Cornish, Wilton, Wiwurna, Calvin Austin, Florida, Madison, and Nahanada. He was on the last boat that Eastern Steamship operated before the line closed, the Madison. He had a master mariner’s license, unlimited—any tonnage, any ocean. He was a well-respected river pilot for the Sheepscot and the Kennebec. He always wore his white captain's hat with the “E” on the front.

During World War II he was pressed into service by the U.S. Maritime Commission and was considered a master at maneuvering convoy-bound merchant vessels, mostly at night, through the Cape Cod Canal. He also piloted ships of many nations along the coast between Portland, Boston, New York, and Norfolk. He piloted ammunition ships out of Searsport and was piloting a Standard Oil tanker off Point Judith, Rhode Island when a German U-boat sank a vessel right in front of him. Those were dangerous times, and his wife Hazel said she worried a lot through those years.

After that he and Harold Dodge purchased the Nellie G II and ran that to Squirrel Island from 1946 to 1958. During that time he had a German shepherd who knew when the Nellie G II docked for the evening, and the dog would walk to the wharf to meet Ross. One day the dog was struck and killed by a car. Ross lamented that dog's loss for the remainder of his life. He and Harold sold the business to Ray Fish who was still running it that summer of 1960. Next time: Jean’s efforts to make captain.