Memories along the Merrimack

By Rob Marino
Friday, May 30, 2003

Newburyport may have been a rough-and-tumble place at one point in history - but it makes for great memories, from a gang known as The Renegades to a submarine called the U.S.S. Haddock.

Bruce Brown has lived in the city since 1960, and during those years distinguished himself as a City Councilor as well as the first chairman of the Newburyport Waterfront Trust. He still clearly remembers how he was attracted to Newburyport.

Brown served on the crew of an Air Force bomber at Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, NH, more than 40 years ago. One day, as his plane flew above the Merrimack River, Brown spotted something on the ground he couldn't quite make out. After pinpointing the location of the mysterious object from his plane, Brown made the trip by land to Newburyport to check it out. He was amazed to discover a decommissioned submarine behind the Custom House.

Brown learned that Jacob Checkoway, Custom House owner at the time, had bought the U.S.S. Haddock and used the large stock of fuel from the underwater vessel to start his own oil company. Although Checkoway sold the business some 20 years ago, Checkoway Oil Co. is still operating in Newburyport today.

The discovery of the submarine was Brown's memorable first encounter with Newburyport.

"I had an option to live off base, so I moved to Newburyport; I really liked it," he says, adding, "The stores were all closed, and you wouldn't walk down any of the streets because it was so bad."

Like Brown, many people were attracted to Newburyport, despite a scabrous downtown and waterfront.

"In a lot of ways, it was more appealing," says Carl Panall, a member of the original Newburyport Waterfront Trust, who was also a fisherman. "It was a real waterfront. It had kind of a raw edge to it which it doesn't have anymore."

Panall remembers when Checkoway sold oil to local fishermen on the docks. "He used to pump fuel into the boats and tell us stories," Panall recalls.

The eel story

Just a few decades ago, the fishing industry played a more dominant role in Newburyport's waterfront than today. In addition to tuna, bass and other fish, eels were considered a hot catch. In the 1970s, a huge eel fishery with tens of thousands of eels operated along the Merrimack River where Michael's Harborside is today.

"It was like a stampede," Panall says. "It was almost like a gold rush. There were people fishing for eels up and down the river, up through Haverhill."

"We used to put traps here and catch eels just like you catch lobster," says Wally Lesynski, owner of the Merri-Mac Yacht Basin, who served on the city's first Harbor Commission. "The fishermen used to come to Tournament Wharf and offload tuna, eels and all kinds of fish, sending stuff all over the place. They used to have a truck come down every couple of days and take the fish to the market. We used to have fishing folks come in with fish from Maine and other ports and bring the fish to us because we had the market for it."

Whereas fishermen had six or seven marina areas where they could dock their boats and offload their catch in the 1970s, Panall says today only a couple of local marinas and cooperatives still cater to fishermen, "but they do it on a much smaller scale."

With pleasure boaters dominating area marinas, a commercial fishing pier was built in the late 1980s, aimed at accommodating the needs of local fishermen. However, the pier project missed the mark because it didn't meet the specifications established by the Harbor Commission, including dredging the river deep enough to provide fishing vessels with appropriate access to the waterfront area at all times.

"It was never really finished," Lesynski says, "...not the way it was supposed to be. It was supposed to be dredged so that boats could come in at all tides."

In addition to his submarine encounter, Brown recalls the story of the "General Green," a Coast Guard destroyer that was given to the city. "It had a commendable World War II battle record," he recalls.

Subject to vandalism, the destroyer was towed to Lesynski's boatyard, and it was eventually sold. No one would have thought at the time that this combat-veteran boat would later be the casualty of another war - the war on drugs. "It ended up being sunk, because it was involved with running drugs," Brown recalls.

The gang's all here

Not all the action took place on the waterfront. During the early stages of urban renewal, as folks began to restore historic homes in once-off-limits neighborhoods like the South End, gang presence took on a whole new meaning -at least, for Bill Harris. In 1969, Harris bought an abandoned 17-room Federalist mansion, which turned out to be the headquarters for The Renegades, a local gang.

"I hired the entire gang to fix my windows," Harris says. "We had the lowest window breakage rate in the South End. Nobody would do anything to our windows."

Harris was one of the first to restore a home in the South End. "The banks wouldn't give us a mortgage because of the neighborhood's high foreclosure rate," he says. "They thought it was a hopeless investment. The alternative for our building was tearing it down for the oak and the bricks."

Citing a good indication of how things have changed, Lesynski remembers a sign on the highway directing people to "old" Newburyport. Although a more tasteful sign replaced the "old" sign many years ago, Lesynski can't help but remember what once was a sign of the times.

"Every time I saw that, I used to get frustrated," he says. "Who wants to go see an old city. In those days, the old was a mess but now look at it."