In 1965, I went to community college in Hyannis. I liked to hang around on the waterfront, go down to the docks. Ted Gelinas owned a passenger ferry company called Nantucket Xpress, almost right across from where I was living. He had all these old wooden boats and a converted steam boat that he had bought. Then one day he asked me, "You looking for work?" I said, "Well, yes."
My normal routine back then was to work seven days a week—you didn't have a day off. You worked seven days a week from the day the boat started running until the day the boat stopped. Start at Nantucket at 7 a.m., come to Hyannis, load up, go the Vineyard for the day, come back to Hyannis, load up, go to Nantucket. Go have a drink, meet up with people, do whatever you wanted to do. Wake up the next morning and do the same thing all over again. I was ready for the end of the summer. But you know, I was 21.
I actually met my wife on the boat. Her mother had a summer house on Nantucket. I was a deckhand. The captain actually invited her up to the pilot house. When I got off the wheel, she said, "What are you doing when you get off?" I said, "Why don't we go get something to eat?"
I bought my home in Sagamore Beach in 1966—my wife and I got married in February and we bought the house in August. Prices in Hyannis were too expensive—$14,000, $15,000 for a house. Our house is an old farmhouse—it's more than 100 years old now. It was built on a big pile of sand that had been dug out of the canal.
The guy we bought it from had worked for the railroad. He had emphysema, and he couldn't walk up and down the hill. It's a two-story house, and he couldn't go up stairs. After I got out of the Navy full-time, I was in the active reserves. We were tied up on Nantucket, and my wife called me and said, "I think I found a house." I took the ferry home that night, we looked at it, and decided to take it. It was $9,800. Furnished. Overlooking the canal.
As it turned out, the owner of Nantucket Xpress refused to pay a state licensing fee, so the boat line was shut down. At the same time, we were closing on the house and passing papers. So when I went to buy the house, I didn't have a job. But the day they shut us down, I walked across the harbor to Nantucket Boat. The general manager said, "When can you start?" I walked on board the boat and went to Nantucket. I worked there for nine years, then the Scudder family bought out Nantucket Boat.
The high-speed Hy-Line actually made Nantucket a commuter island. The reason this boat did so well right off the bat was because a lot of people don't like to fly in those small planes. Before the high-speed, it was an all-day thing: you took the 7 a.m. boat and came back at night. Now people can take the 7:45 a.m. and head back on the noon boat if they want.
Weather's your biggest problem when piloting the ferry. It can change quickly. Fog doesn't bother us—it's just an inconvenience. In the summer, we get some squall lines coming through, thunderstorms occasionally, but those don't really bother us either. It's ice. If we're in a channel that's clogged with ice, it might take us half an hour just to get out of there. There's no speed when it's like that.
I look forward to going to work. I love doing this. You can count the number of times I didn't want to be here on one hand. Just look at it—it's just beautiful. We've met a lot of people that live out here that have homes and have become our friends. You see them grow up, you see their kids grow up and have kids of their own.
When we moved to Sagamore, it was a very closed village. There were a lot of old families, their kids, and their relatives. It's all changed now. People have grown up, moved out, died off. Now we're older and we're starting to say, "Well, we live on a hill, there's a lot of stairs..." But my wife would have to drag me out of there.
