Celebrating our 40th Anniversary!
Island Memories
Quidnet
My family was fortunate to spend half of each summer in Quidnet. We lived in the old Life Saving station house located right on the beach. Often after dinner, we would look out and see the surface of the water changing. A slick of bluefish was moving down the beach. We would grab our fishing poles and run down to the ocean. The fish were often so thick and close to shore that everyone would catch one.
Bill Fisher’s tackle shop used to hold a weekly contest for kids during the summer. The winner of the largest bluefish would get a free lure. When I was 10 years old I won the lure (which was not an ordinary Hopkins but something more prized) with my 12 lb. bluefish. The next week my younger brother was determined to catch a bigger one. He fished and fished and the deadline was drawing near when he caught a bluefish that looked really big. He got on the old scale in the bathroom, first without the fish and then with it. It still wasn’t as big as mine. He took that fish in to Bill Fisher and won that week anyhow. I think he put buckshot down the throat of that bluefish.
The worst thing was that there was so much bluefish being caught that my mother would make “blunafish” with the left over bluefish – ugh.
- Penny Dey
This season is Yesterday’s Island’s 40th year publishing on Nantucket. We’ve seen many changes on the island in those four decades, and over the years we’ve made many changes to our newsmagazine.
As part of our anniversary celebration, we’re printing memories of the island in 1970 that have been shared with us by readers. Jo Ann Hubbard saw our request on the Yesterday’s Island Facebook page and was the very first to respond. We’d like to thank her for sending in her story, and we hope that it jogs some memories of others on-island 40 years ago.
If you have a memory of Nantucket Island in 1970 that you’d like to share with us and our readers, please email it to yi@nantucket.net or mail it to us at P.O. Box 626, Nantucket, MA 02554.
