Reminder of a Bygone Way of Life on Lake Ontario
By Tom and Jerry Caraccioli
In February of 1958, during a particularly harsh Oswego winter, the boat of commercial fishermen William S. Cahill Sr. and his son, future mayor of the Port City, William S. Cahill Jr., broke from its mooring and sank.
“The Jackie was docked on the eastside of the Oswego River with steel cables,” William S. Cahill III recalled from the story his dad told him. “Back then, fishermen would have ice saws in order to cut through the ice around the boat in the winter. If you didn’t, the cables wouldn’t be able to withstand the weight of the boat and ice. It was a particularly bad winter and they didn’t keep up with sawing the ice. The cables snapped and the boat was blown east towards what is now the nuclear plants where it ultimately crashed and sank.”
As commercial fishermen, the Cahills needed a replacement for the upcoming fishing season on Lake Ontario.
“That spring, my grandfather and father went to Erie, Pennsylvania and purchased a 10-year-old Great Lakes fish tug — the Eleanor D,” Cahill III explained. “At that time, my grandfather retired from being captain of the boat and my dad became captain.”
According to custom or superstition, fishermen, sailors and boatsmen will tell you it’s bad luck to change the name of a boat. The original builder named his vessel after the First Lady of the United States Eleanor D. Roosevelt. The Cahills found no reason to tempt fate.
The 42-foot, all steel Eleanor D was built on Lake Erie in 1948 with ¾-inch sheet metal surplus from World War II, which was what they used to make tanks. Powered by a Detroit diesel engine, the Cahills fished the 40-ton vessel from 1958-78 where they patrolled the waters of Lake Ontario and provided residents of Oswego, surrounding local communities and even residents of New York City and Philadelphia with trout, whitefish, perch, bass, chubs and sturgeon.
Until 1978, the future Oswego mayor would rise every day at 4:30 a.m., drink his coffee, leave the house by 5 a.m. and the Oswego Harbor by 5:30 a.m. on the Eleanor D for five and sometimes six, days a week from March until January.
“The crew would set up prep areas on the way out,” Cahill III explained. “When the fish came in, that’s when the work started. In the early days, they didn’t have winches on the boat to pull in the nets. They would set their nets, marked by buoys, and then go back one or two days later and pull the nets in by hand. As technology progressed, they got winches to pull in the nets. In the 1960s, my dad got into trolling — pulling the nets behind the boat. The biggest one-day catch he ever had was 2,000 pounds of yellow perch. After the catch the crew would transfer the fish from the nets to big containers the whole way in. When they got to the dock the fish were transferred from the boat to the market where they were packed in ice and shipped the next day.”
For the life of a commercial fisherman, especially during the season, days off were scarce.
“Most of the time, my dad would get home for dinner at 5 p.m., which was already a 12-hour day, eat, head back down to the market to ice the fish or repair nets until 10, 11 or midnight and then get up and do it again, five days a week,” Cahill III said while marveling at the memory of how hard his late father worked. “Sunday was always cleaning day at the market, really making sure everything was cleaned up for the coming week. He really only had one day off per week.”
Today, the Eleanor D has been on display at the H. Lee White Maritime Museum in Oswego since 2004 where it was stabilized, repaired and restored. The Cahills donated it to the museum with the goal of creating an attraction that provides opportunities for interested tourists, students and citizens to take a trip back in time and learn about the last U.S. commercial fishing boat to fish the waters of Lake Ontario.
Cahill III, a 27-year teacher in the Fulton City School District, puts the history of Great Lakes fishermen like his grandfather and father into perspective hoping today’s youth will remember the way life used to be in Oswego and America’s pastoral communities.
“Post World War II, 51% of all Americans were farmers,” he explained. “Oswego was loaded with farmers. Today, farmers represent less than 1% of the population in America. There also are very few commercial fishermen on the Great Lakes compared to generations ago. It really is a way of life that is bygone.”
And the Eleanor D sits at the H. Lee White Maritime Museum to remind us of those days.
Tom and Jerry Caraccioli are freelance writers originally from Oswego, who have co-authored three books: “STRIKING SILVER: The Untold Story of America’s Forgotten Hockey Team,” “BOYCOTT: Stolen Dreams of the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games” and “Ice Breakers.”