“First Person” shares the stories of people who make a life here, in their words. Conversations are edited for clarity and length.
On the eve of his 93rd birthday, Mark Crowley looked back on the simpler life of a boy growing up in the lobstering community of Orr’s Island.
My sister, Mary Patricia, and I grew up on the east side of Lowell’s Cove with my grandfather and grandmother, John and Mary Tibbetts. My grandfather was related to everybody over there. When I was old enough, maybe 7 or 8 years old, I started working on the lobster boat, like young boys did at that time and still do.
I turned 93 on the 1st of June. I was born before World War II. Most of the young men went to war. But people like my grandfather were too old, and I was too young. I grew up in Harpswell in an environment that’s very different from today. All the young people went to work as soon as they were able to. We didn’t have drugs. We didn’t have anything like that to distract us.
It was a wonderful place to grow up. We played baseball, we played football. Our parents and grandparents were busy working, so we made our own fun. The region was very poor. Lobsters, I remember, were selling during the war for 20 cents a pound. The average fisherman didn’t have very many lobster traps either. Maybe 100, 200.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we were all shocked. My father was drafted into the Army and he went into battle and stayed in the service until after the war ended. Most people from Orr’s and Bailey islands joined the Navy, which was a natural thing because they all lived and worked on the water.
We had a lot of woods on that point, and my friends and I had camps in the woods. We started out very young on the boats. It was our job to plug the lobster’s claws, bait and clean the traps, and stack them on the deck. When we had six or eight or 10 lobster traps baited, they were in a string and it was, “Get out of the way, boys, or they’ll pull you right in when we push them over into the ocean.”
What do you learn being on a lobster boat? It starts with getting up early in the morning. They’d wake me at 3 o’clock in the morning, make breakfast and off we’d go at dawn. Sometimes we were done by 11 in the morning, sometimes 2 or 3 in the afternoon.
We were using wooden lobster traps in those days, and in the winter, they had to be pulled out and repaired or replaced.
The other boys my age were doing the same thing. We’d see each other out there. Most of our lobster traps were set by Pond Island or Ragged Island.
As we got a little older, we had another job: digging and selling sea moss. It’s like kelp, but it isn’t kelp. With steel rakes on a long pole, we could dig 1,000 pounds on a tide and load it into our skiffs. They were paying us 2 cents a pound, to use in products like toothpaste. We’d deliver it to Garrison Cove, where it was put into creel boxes, weighed and carried away in trucks.
Before the war ended, there were still Germans around here in submarines. In fact, they blew up a ship, the USS Eagle, on April 23, 1945, this side of Portland. It was one of the last U.S. Navy warships lost in enemy action during World War II. They would surface regularly alongside of a fishing boat out where we pull lobster traps. I never saw one. But my uncles did.
We all had radios and listened to them every day. Even the young people. We were interested in everything that was going on. We had a lot of rationing, but fortunately, we ate well from the ocean: fish, lobsters, clams, crabs. We all raised chickens. And we all had gardens; they called them victory gardens. So, we weren’t deprived. And when it came time to a have a bicycle, there was money for one.
We didn’t have automobiles, but there was a guy named Louie who’d come around once a week in a black van to sell socks, underwear, clothes.
My grandparents were modest and hardworking. My grandmother came on the boat from Ireland when she was 15 and married my grandfather when she was 16 or 17. She was this vivacious little Irish lady. Everybody loved her.
On Orr’s Island, we went to a two-room schoolhouse. Then, in ninth grade, I went to Brunswick High. Class of 1951. That was probably one of the best times in my whole life. Growing up on Orr’s and Bailey islands, we barely knew people in Harpswell Neck. So my friends and I got to meet a lot of nice new people when we got to high school. I was on the swim team, vice president of the senior class. But playing sports was tough because there was only one bus a day, and it left before practice. So we had to hitchhike back and forth.
After graduation, I enrolled at Maine Maritime Academy and, after, went to work for Socony-Vacuum Oil Co., predecessor to Mobil Oil. I was on an oil tanker, in the engine room. We traveled mostly between New Jersey and Venezuela, sometimes to Galveston.
We had three gigantic hurricanes on the East Coast, and I was out in all three of them. Man, that’s an experience you’ll never forget. The last one, we had just picked up a load of crude oil in Texas and, in the middle of the night, the damn hull cracked. Fortunately, we were able to make it back to the shipyard.
A friend of mine who worked for New York Life Insurance helped me land a job, and I worked there for the next 35 years. I sold life insurance in Brunswick and Bath for a few years, then got selected for their management training program and was promoted numerous times, eventually becoming senior vice president of New York Life.
Later, I was named president and CEO of the company’s first stock subsidiary, the New York Life Insurance and Annuity Corp. It was our mission to develop and market a family of mutual funds sold through a network of 10,000 agents. We lived in New Jersey; Poughkeepsie, New York; Boston; New Hampshire; and Connecticut.
My first wife and I had three children: John, Diane and Lisa. Our marriage came apart after 20 years and then I met Flo, a wonderful lady, and we’ve been together 50 years. My oldest daughter, Diane, died a couple of years ago from a stroke, but my other daughter and son are doing well and we have two grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. After we retired, we found this property on Howard Point, just across the Brunswick line from Harpswell.
It was good to be close to Orr’s Island and to my late sister, Mary. She had polio as a small child, which partly paralyzed her and left her with a heart condition. She had the second open-heart surgery in the country, recovered well and went on to work for Bowdoin College for 50 years.
Harpswell hasn’t changed much, although there’s more people. On Bailey Island, the houses are stacked on top of one another, and Orr’s Island’s getting filled up, too. Life was pretty simple back then, although we didn’t think it was. But you can’t eliminate change; you can only work to make the best of it. I just feel very fortunate to have been able to grow up here.
