True Maine Lobster Festival packed away with the sardines

The Maine Lobster Festival has come a long way, as has the city of Rockland, unfortunately. They both used to be wild and woolly and they would give you as much trouble as you wanted. Even if you didn’t want.

One festival night we walked down the stairs to the Red Jacket Lounge with some effete visitors from Plymouth, Mass. Out the door came a gang of locals, bleeding and bandaged. The Plymouth types stopped in their tracks, refusing to go in. We wondered what the problem was.

By then, we were used to Rockland and its similarity to Gloucester, Mass. Shut your mouth and drink anywhere you want. Run your mouth and take the consequences. Rockland had The Oasis, the Dory Lounge, The Jacket, the Thorndike, the Wayfarer, the Log Cabin, the Black Pearl. You ordered a rum and Coke and never knew what you would get.

The Lobster Festival (festibul, the locals pronounced it) was the celebration of Rockland culture. Forget the Seafood Goddess pageant. The highlight was the World’s Champion Sardine Packing Contest. For 51 weeks a year these women sat in dark and drafty sardine plants, making their fingers move faster than the speed of sight to snip the heads and tails off sardines and pack them in a can. It wasn’t an art form. The faster you were, the bigger the paycheck you brought home.

For festival week, the fish packers owned the stage. Rita Willey was the boss sardine packer back then. She ran them off almost every year and ended up on the “Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” showing him how it was done.

Every year, the police said this was the year that the Hell’s Angels would come to the festival and do motorcycle battle with the local bike club, the NSKK. Every year we believed them and waited for the titanic battle. We waited for the National Guard to pull in a khaki caravan. It never came. Why a motorcycle club from California would come 3,000 miles to Rockland for some lobsters we could never figure.

The “fistibul” was not a place for the kiddies, especially after dark.

One story I have heard about 100 times is about the fisherman-miscreant who unfortunately drew the attention of the local constabulary. The police chief wandered down to the waterfront and saw how much trouble the shore-bound fisherman was causing. He ordered his two minions to “hold him,” knocked him cold and carried him off to jail.

The lowest point in my 30 years of festivals came when the annual moment of silence was held for the fisherman lost during the previous year. The carnival was the heart of the festival back then and paid the bills. The moment of silence on the festival stage was drowned out by the noise and music from the carnival rides.

The highest point (to me) came when newspaper reporter Ted Cohen, (later famous for sitting on the George Bush drunken driving arrest for 90 days) walked onto a festival stage and blew cheap cigar smoke into the face of a third-rate Bert Parks during the tuxedoed emcee’s biggest number.

Those were the days when the O’Hara fleet and the other boats ruled the seas and threatened Boston with the greatest landings of groundfish. SeaPro ground up the fish guts into chicken meal, covered the city with a nauseating stench and few had the nerve to complain. There was so much crap in the harbor that sailing guides advised rich readers to bypass the city for the islands, please. There were maybe four or five masochistic pleasure boats in the harbor.

The Monday morning police reports were priceless. A decade ago, the festival almost died, mostly from lack of interest.

My, how times have changed.

The sardine-packing contest has gone, along with the sardines, the packers and the plants. Now, MBNA has taken over the waterfront, buying the old Fisher snowplow plant, thrown a million or two into renovation, even added a harbor walk, if you can get there before dark. The Chamber of Commerce and the do-gooders have taken over the festival and made it into a wonderful place for the wife and family, day or night.

Main Street has become an art colony, for God’s sake. They close the street for the annual open house for the galleries, which serve wine and brie and sell $500 oil paintings. Tourists come for the “aaaaaahht” at the Farnsworth Museum. O’Hara’s wharf is a marina and you have to get on a waiting list for a harbor mooring, if you can believe it. Rockland has more “skin boat” schooners than Camden, for heaven’s sake.

The police chief is a polite, college-educated teetotaling gentleman who claims he looks like Al Pacino but hasn’t punched a fisherman in the face for decades.

The New York Times, Down East magazine and The Washington Post all write articles about the wonderful “new” Rockland and the art galleries. The most exciting festival event now is when the women of PETA picket against the untimely death of the festival lobsters.

I hate to admit it but I kind of miss SeaPro, the sardine plants and the fishing fleet. It isn’t the bar fights I miss so much as all that change on the barroom floor.