Sheldon Morse Sr. died Dec. 5, two weeks shy of his 86th birthday. He lived his whole life on the land where he grew up on Allen Point Road, fishing into his late 70s on a boat he built with his father and named after his daughter. Family and fishing were the focal points of his life.
Sheldon grew up around his father’s boat shop, but he wanted to be out on the water. He started with a few traps and a skiff as a teenager. He was fishing that same way near the end of his life, when he couldn’t operate his lobster boat anymore.
His grandson, Josh Morse, is also a fisherman and lives with his family down the road from his grandfather’s house. The two of them built the skiff that Joshua first fished from, and Sheldon’s Teresa Ann was the first boat that Josh worked on. Josh still sees reminders of his grandfather when he goes out, like a little hole Sheldon would set traps in or a spot he told Josh about. In early January, Josh says, a friend was dragging for scallops and brought up one of his grandfather’s trap tags.
Sheldon’s youngest granddaughter, Lauren Webster, remembers her grandparents’ house as a place where she and her cousins could be kids, with as many Popsicles and grilled cheese sandwiches as they could eat.
“My grandparents loved to have us around, and we loved to be there,” she says.
Once, as kids, she went with Josh in his skiff to set lobster traps. Despite their grandfather’s warning, they crossed under the Cribstone Bridge, where the water got rougher. Webster says that just as they started to feel nervous, Sheldon pulled alongside in his lobster boat to shepherd them to safety.
His love extended beyond his biological family. When David Moody was a boy, his mother got sick and spent several months at a hospital near Washington, D.C. Moody went to live with the Morses.
“They were like second parents,” says Moody, himself a fisherman who lives on Harpswell Neck.
Sheldon’s marriage to his wife, Anita, who died in 2015, has a legendary quality among those close to them. It began in a snowstorm, according to family lore. When the couple and their families couldn’t agree on the details of a wedding, the two eloped.
“I always wanted to have a marriage like theirs,” says Moody.
“The love between my grandparents was what we all dreamed of growing up to someday find,” says Webster.
Moody’s connection with Sheldon continued the rest of his life. When Moody and Sheldon Morse Jr. went out in the evenings in their teens or early 20s, Sheldon Sr. would ask each if they needed some pocket money. Moody and Sheldon Sr. shared the same birthday and always tried to celebrate it together with a drink and some cribbage.
Sheldon Jr., also a fisherman, and his wife, Kathy, opened Morse’s Cribstone Grill on Bailey Island and now operate a food truck called Morse’s on Lookout Point. They live a few hundred yards from his father’s house.
The Morses’ house was where the neighborhood boys wanted to hang out, says daughter Teresa Morse, now of Topsham, because of her father’s wicked sense of humor and because her mother let them stay for dinner. And as with Moody, many of those relationships grew into close friendships in adulthood.
In the course of his life, Sheldon raced cars, worked at the Pejepscot Paper Co. mill in Topsham, and drove logging trucks. He operated a lobster pound on the wharf near his home. He built houses for his son and daughter, as well as a post office on Route 123.
When the post office he built was scheduled to be replaced, he convinced the U.S. Postal Service to let him have the old building. Or, as Teresa recalls it, he fought them until they agreed. That building became Morse’s Market — now Uncle Pete’s Community Market — which he and Teresa ran until 2003.
Sheldon was a skilled cribbage player. “I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of games of cribbage he played in his life,” says his son.
He preferred to win. “If you won more than one or two games, he’d give up,” Moody remembers.
Close observers — or those who lost to him a few times too many — might eventually notice that Sheldon’s cribbage board was shorter by a few holes on the side he always played on, which gave him an edge in close games.
One thing Sheldon never learned to do was swim. So, when he was still fishing a few traps in his 80s and growing less steady on his feet, Teresa finally bought him a life jacket. “Of course, he never wore it,” she says.
Sheldon held strong opinions and let them be known. “You didn’t have to wonder what he was thinking. If he didn’t like something, he’d say it,” Josh says.
That may have been especially true if he thought he could get under a person’s skin. To some, that was a sign of his affection. “He always gave you a hard time. That’s how you knew he liked you,” says Moody.
Teresa says, “My hope is that my dad has left such a mark on Harpswell that even 100 years down the road people will still be telling stories about him.”
