Fall 2008 - Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

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16 Photo by Jessica Earle Earl White First Mate, Skipjack Stanley Norman My father was a waterman. In water season, he worked on the water. And when that was over with, we’d go working in fields, canning factories, all that. So when I got big enough to hit the water, that’s where I been. And the first me hitting the water with my father was a’tonging, and he was taking me out when I was about 13 or 14 years old. “All my brothers were watermen. The way I got on the water was a friend of mine, during the time I was young, I was going with his daughter. The boat he was working on got so he didn’t have enough crew and he asked me did I want to go. So, I went with him and I’ve been going on the water ever since. A guy from Smith Island, a boat named Ralph T. Webster. That’s the name of the skipjack I was on. Skipjacks, schooners, and bugeyes. I worked on them all. Well, it was a lot of fun. ‘Cause when I first started there were a lot of oysters. We had plenty of oysters. We’d put 3,000, 4,000 a day on a boat. That’s a lot of oysters. “Always take the word of the captain, if the captain’s wrong, that’s his fault. If he tells you to do something, you do it. Even if it’s the dumbest thing in the world. Do it. That’s his fault. If it’s wrong, if it goes wrong, it’s his fault. Ain’t but one thing the captain can tell me to do that I ain’t gonna do. If he tells me to jump overboard, I ain’t gonna do it. He’ll have to throw me overboard! “Look, let me tell you something. When you’re on the water, you’re not the boss of nothing. You just go along with it, ‘cause you can’t change it. You better believe it. You can’t change that. The wind start blowing, you can’t change it. Tide starts running wild, you can’t change that. You just have to wait it. You gotta have patience. That’s all you have to do. And realize that you can’t conquer it. Man conquer a lot of things, but he can’t conquer the water, the sun, and the wind. You can’t do it. You get that in your mind you’ll be all right. By Michael Valliant Chesapeake Bay oral historian Michael Buckley. Photo by David Harp. If you tune in to WRNR 103.1 FM on any given Sunday morning, you’re likely to hear an “old salt,” a scientist, or an activist sharing their story of a life lived on the Chesapeake Bay. Making sure you hear these voices and get to know their stories has become the life work of radio DJ and oral historian Michael Buckley. With his radio show, website, and a new book, Voices of the Chesapeake Bay, Buckley is covering all bases to make sure the Bay’s comprehensive story is being told. The concept for Buckley’s radio show gelled in 1999 when he met Jennifer Hicks, an environmental educator at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Buckley was the host of a Sunday morning radio show, and the two talked about incorporating ideas and conversations about the Bay into the program. The pieces fell together later in the year when he met Claudia Donegan and Robin Jung Brown. Donegan’s late father was a bay pilot from Baltimore, and she knew the locals and the scene in Annapolis. She was trained as a geologist and was an environmental activist for the Bay. Brown moved to Annapolis to work for
the U.S. Geological Survey Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md. She worked with the local Sierra Club to create an environmental radio project called “Watershed Radio.” Buckley met Brown when she delivered the first demo of Watershed Radio to WRNR. Buckley brought up the idea for a recurring Chesapeake-based radio show, which led to a number of brainstorming meetings about possible guests and a format for the show. Brown suggested the name, “Voices of the Chesapeake Bay” for the series, and the group began with 10 hour-long interviews. They decided on in-the-field style interviews, going to visit watermen, conservationists, and musicians in their element. “I do not remember us ever mapping out a strategy for how to tell the story of the Chesapeake Bay from beginning to end,” says Buckley in the epilogue to his book. “We just tried to think of people who had good stories to tell.” To date, the Voices Project has recorded more than 250 oral history interviews with folks of all walks on the Bay. The diversity of perspectives and viewpoints represented is a point of pride for Buckley. “The thing I like to communicate about the Voices Project is the scope of the interviews, this method of telling stories about the Bay by seeking out a variety of perspectives,” he says. “We all tend to see life through our own particular interests. This project encourages people to look beyond themselves, to see the Bay through other eyes.” The Voices book showcases more than 50 of the interviews (three of which are excerpted here for WaterWays Magazine), illustrated with black-and-white photographs by renowned photographer David Harp. Buckley and publisher Lenny Rudow can often be found taking the book on the road to festivals, fish fries, crab feasts, and other gatherings where people come together to celebrate the Chesapeake. It was through his radio show that CBMM first encountered Buckley. His interviews with Curator Pete Lesher and former Boat Yard Manager Mike Vlahovich, which aired on WRNR, both appear in the book. And as CBMM was de- Photo by David Harp Russell Train Former Administrator, US Environmental Protection Agency Nixon was an enigma and he was strange in many ways, brilliant in many ways, effective in many ways and a disaster. He was his own worst enemy, certainly the whole Watergate fiasco was an example of that. When you’re at the pinnacle, you’re vulnerable. Maybe it’s a good lesson for the rest of us. Nixon was certainly not an environmentalist. I’ve got to say, I don’t think he understood many of the issues very well. However he knew one thing about it and that was that the people of this country were worried about the environment. I’m talking about the late 60s and the early 70s. The people of this country were worried. There were huge oil spills, there were rivers catching on fire, toxic chemical poisonings, a lot of things. It was very scary. There was rudimentary regulation; much of it was left to the states to handle. And it was plain that the federal government had to get more actively into the whole thing. Nixon seized on it. He made it a central effort of his administration, certainly in his first term. It was not only a political choice on his part, in that sense. It was a Democratic Congress whose environmental leader was Edmund Muskie. Nixon recognized Muskie as a potential Democratic candidate against him in 1972. Muskie’s track record for the public was basically dealing with air and water pollution. Nixon made up his mind he was going to trump Muskie with his own issue, and I think he did. Hah—he ‘stole his clothes!’ I think somebody said that, and I think it’s quite true. “Whatever the motivations were, Nixon grabbed the issue. He signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law on January 1, 1970 as his first official act of the decade. A few days later he sent his State of the Union message to the Congress, and at least a third of that message dealt with the environment. 17
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Page 5 and 6: (Above) Families try their hand at
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Fall 2008 - Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum

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