James Banagan
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JAMES BANAGAN TRANSCRIPT December 10, 2003 Interviewed by Anna Leong and Victoria Jones St. Mary's College of Maryland St. Mary's City, Maryland 00:41 Q: This is Friday, the 21st of November, and we are interviewing Jim Banagan in his house on the St. Clement's Bay, and the interviewers are Anna Leong and Victoria Jones. A: I'm Jim Banagan. I live at Abell on St. Clement's Bay in the Seventh District. I have worked around the river most of my life, the first ten years, as a boy living while I was going to school to make a few dollars. Crabbing in the summer, oystering in the winter from the time about ten to twenty, then I ... First, when I was ten years old, I used to go out in the river with my father. He was a waterman. My grandfather was a waterman, and his father was a waterman. I used to go out and help him cull oysters. And as I grew a little older, I started having a skiff and a boat of my own, and I tonged oysters then, they were plentiful and you could catch 'em right around the shores. What they called nippering, you had a boat with a little set of tongs, nippers they called 'em. You could catch one oyster at a time when the water was clear, and I used to do that to get money for to buy treats, have a few dollars to spend at school. And high school, I had money to buy clothes and go out, because watermen were having a rough time back in the forties and although the oysters were plentiful, they weren't bringing nothing but a dollar a bushel. A dollar went a long ways in those days. And then as I got older, I went in the seafood business after I got out of high school for about a year. I had a little truck and I caught hard crabs in the summer, and sometimes dredged oysters in the summer if somebody wanted 'em real bad. There weren't too many policemen then. And then I oystered one season and it was real cold and after that I went to work in the store for a while, and then I went in the Coast Guard for three years, came out, and went to work for the telephone company for twenty years. And then I went in business for myself, it was janitorial lawn maintenance business, for ten more years. And after that I retired. During the time, I still oystered when I worked for the telephone company. I oystered on Saturdays. And I worked in the janitorial lawn maintenance business, I still oystered; in fact, I still oyster. I go out and catch a mess of oysters, but now it takes about three hours to catch a bushel where I used to catch a bushel in about fifteen, twenty minutes. 04:37 A: Right where I live on St. Clement's Bay there were several oyster bars, now there's none. The closest place where you can really catch a few oysters is the Wicomico, which is about ten miles from here. Only about half a mile from the Potomac River, that also is all the oysters are dead from MX and Dermo [oyster parasites, MX is also referred to as MSX]. I have some planting ground in St. Patrick's Creek but that, they closed the creek up for pollution, so that's no good anymore. I don't know what's going to happen to the oyster business. It looks like we're going to have to go the way of Louisiana, Texas, and Washington state, and turn it over to private beds. I know the watermen don't like it that way, but it doesn't seem like the state's gonna give us enough money to build on their own. They just give us a few million dollars and they seem like they plant those, and they don't last very long. Dermo gets 'em, and I think they're just gonna have to come out with the Asian oyster, which they say is disease-free. Aquaculture root, where you have floats and things like that, that seems to be working but I don't think anybody'll get rich, maybe you'll survive off of it unless you're a big company, a very big company. 06:17 A: Right now I think, I read the paper the other day, we have five watermen oystering in this area, and it used to probably be about five hundred. Every creek, every house on this creek, they were all watermen. Now there may be two watermen on each creek, St. Patrick's, Canoe-neck Creek, White's Neck Creek ... You can look out here on the bay today, it's oyster season now ... and you don't see a boat. 06:48 Q: What did it used to be like? Can you describe it? A: It used to be at daybreak the oyster boats were going out in the creeks. Usually, they'd have a captain and two people to tong, and to cull the oysters. Usually two tong and one cull the oysters. The oysters have to be three inches, and they have to be clean of mussels. And they would go out in the morning, oyster 'til about two o'clock. Then they had market all over. They had local oyster houses, plus they had oyster barges that came from Crisfield came over and bought the oysters. Each one would raise it a quarter or lower it a quarter or whatever the market was. Then they ... they made a fair living, after the war. But it's pretty rough, you have to work in the ice and the cold ... But it's a good way of living, you know, you're not tied down to somebody on your back telling you to do this and telling you to do that. You're sort of free ... But it was a hard life. Many of them wouldn't give it up. I know my grandfather did it all his life, and my father did it. He tried different jobs but he came back to the river. 08:31 A: They eventually got other jobs as the oysters died away, faded away. It started I guess about ten, fifteen years ago, maybe, when Dermo and MX ... It seems the salinity, the water control, if the water's real salty this Dermo and MX thrive. And it just kills the oyster. And then we had hurricanes which came through, and that's sort of too much fresh water, that kills some of them. The clam industry was the same way, that's completely gone. The only thing we have left now is a few crabs, few fish ... 09:27 Q: What do you remember most about oystering ... A: Well, I'd come home from school about three o'clock, and then I'd get in the skiff. And this was a lot later, after I stopped oystering with my father. And I would go in the planting ground, that was my grandfather's, and he said I could take 'em up so I was pretty lucky there. And I would probably catch ten bushels in an evening, on Saturday we could work all day. It wasn't too bad, I was doing ... When I went to school I had as much money as anybody else [laughs]. We were all farmers and watermen in those days, 'til the base [Patuxent River naval base] moved down here in '41. 10:15 Q: Do you think that was a good change? A: Yeah, 'cause after that, people started getting jobs on the base. They wanted people to work too because most of the good able-bodied youngsters were drafted in the service. Then after that... I guess I ended up going in the service during the Korean War. I got a chance to travel, I went in the Coast ... I was in the National Guard, then into the Coast Guard. Then I went to California, boot camp, and to [unintelligible] Connecticut to school and then I got on a ship and traveled allover the North Atlantic on patrols. I ended up the last eight months on [unintelligible]. So I was lucky there, and then out to Norfolk and took care of the Potomac River and I was almost at home on the weekend. And then after that, I went to work for the telephone company for twenty years. Then I found out that the janitors were making more money than I was, so I went to work for ... started my own business. Ended up with about two hundred fifty people, we worked in southern Maryland, around D.C. and Virginia. It was very successful, we traveled all around the world, my wife and I have. We really enjoyed it. 11:57 Q: You mentioned that your family did its oystering on rented grounds or private grounds. What are the differences between those and common grounds? A: The only difference is, well you own the ground, the private ground and then what they ... Well, most of the better watermen had -- well, can't say 'better' but the ones who were a little, guess they had a few more dollars, they had their own private ground and when you went out and caught oysters, sometimes the market was very slow. Certain times of year, if it was too hot or it got too ..