Cod Fishing Summer, 1920

In the summer of 1920, Art Loftus made his first trip west at the age of 23. As he liked to put it, he “always gave all of his business to the Northern Pacific,” which meant he bummed his way by rail, riding the gondolas and freight cars with a buddy named Cliff Reisberg.

When they got to Seattle, the two signed on with a two-masted schooner called The Maid of Orleans, captained by J.J. “Codfish” Kelly. Raised in upstate Wisconsin, Art had never been on the ocean before, but according to his wife Dorothy much later, given his “Viking” background, he loved it. The Maid went up the Unimak Pass to the Bering Sea for cod.

Sailors went out at 5 AM for the day, in one-man dories that were about 14 feet, and hung out a pair of lines with baited hooks just above the sea bottom to catch cod. There was a windlass on board to weigh anchor, but Art pulled the tarred cotton fish lines with twenty-pound cod by hand, and slit their throats for distribution in bins aboard the dory.

Usually the dories returned to the ship around noon to turn in their morning catch, eat lunch, and return to the ocean. A good day’s catch might be as much as three or four thousand pounds. When the dories were hauled up on deck at the end of the day, a plug in the bottom was removed to let them drain out.

“Always after that, Art would say, ‘Well, I like dory plugs,’ which were muffins. I had to learn to know those were muffins. And when we would be traveling around, bumming around like we did all the summers, and we bummed across Canada a lot, we’d go into these little towns and Art would say, ‘Do you have any dory plugs?’ Thinking I was the interpreter, I’d say to them in a very sweet way: ‘He means raisin muffins [laughs]. Bran muffins.’ But they were always dory plugs. I never made any muffins ever—they were dory plugs.”

Art did not get along with Captain Kelly. For one thing, the sailors liked to play poker at night or whenever they were not out fishing, and they played for fish. “Art wouldn’t play for fish,” his younger brother Ted recalled. “He didn’t want to play poker anyway. So they didn’t like him for that account.”

Worse, he repeatedly gave the skipper fits by staying out in his dory longer than anyone else. “He would be so far out alone, by himself,” Dorothy said, “that he could just barely see the mast of the schooner, over the curvature of the earth. And he had a beautiful compass that was issued him, which he kept wrapped in what he called oilskin. And he never took it out, because he wasn’t going to spoil that beautiful compass, you know.”

Ted elaborated: “If he was catching a little bit, why, when they’d blow the whistle at night to bring the boats in, Art would wait until the last minute, trying to get another fish or two. They’d be looking for Art, you know, it’s starting to get dark and no Art. Skipper’d say, ‘Well, we just have to leave him, that’s all.’ And to leave a guy out there in that little 14-foot boat, you know, overnight, why ... nobody’d ever find him again. Art would be rowing to beat hell on that dory to catch up to the boat. And then the crew would be mad because they’d let the steam down on the winch, and they’d have to haul him in by hand, put the boat on top. They’d be mad at him, and so would the skipper. So he never got along very well.”

Once, he failed to find his way back to the ship, and spent a frightening night alone in his tiny boat on the north Pacific before reconnecting the next morning. “I think he always liked to live dangerously,” Dorothy said. “He’d be racing with some of these other fellows, and taking all kinds of chances. They had a little sail, and you had to be real careful, if it were going to tip you over, to get that sail down in a hurry, you know.” (That’s a photo of The Maid of Orleans in Seattle harbor, above; she had been built in San Francisco in 1882.)

Many years later, not long after Art and Dorothy had retired near Coos Bay, Oregon, in the mid-1950s, and Art had built a house on the sand of the bay, another man who had sailed on The Maid of Orleans that summer roughly four decades before came to visit. “There was a knock at the door and here was this man and he said he was looking for Art Loftus,” Dorothy recalled. “And I said, well, he isn’t here. He said, ‘Well, I was I was fishing with him in the Bering Sea.’ And I said, ‘Well, come on in,’ so he and his wife came in.”

The man was German and spoke with an accent, and recalled that back in 1920, when he asked Art what he intended to do with his life, Art had said, “Well, I’m gonna marry a girl that will give me a big family and bake all my bread.” The visitor added, “I had to find out.”

This man, Martin Nagle, remembered that Art had mentioned a brother, Martin Loftus, who lived in a town called Tomahawk—neither of which was difficult to remember. So when he was traveling across the U.S., around the world and to Israel, Nagle stopped in Wisconsin and found Martin Loftus, who by then was mayor of Tomahawk.

Martin gave his younger brother’s current address to the Nagles, and near the end of their long journey, they swung by Coos Bay … “and found out that Art had married a girl that had given him a big family, and fortunately, I baked all my own bread.”