Let's Go Down to the Water F ront down at the fish men with a blink of the big eyes in the dead-pan face, and off he drives.

Whether the fish on the boats Is fresher than the fish which ar-

rives by truck is one of the issues on the wharf that never will be settled. The wholesalers in the stalls of the municipal market building on the land side of the wharf consider the fish boats an

unnecessary nuisance and are of the opinion that the trade could get along very well without them.

They call the fish boats a racket. “They're not fishermen; they buy the fish in the ports down the bay

V

By George Kennedy Sketches by Gib Crockett

their fish are fresher than those arriving by truck.

“We go from Crisfield down the bay to a fishing port on a Mon- day," one of the captains explains. "About 25 fishing boats work out of the port. They have been out that morning getting a catch for us. When the fish are loaded into this boat they are alive, flipping all over the place. We shovel cracked ice. which we buy for $5 a

ton, on them and bed them down. “You can't handle fish in boxes

and trucks as good as that, We know. We see it done.’’

Most of the fish boats have a

sail reefed to the boom on their mainmast, which adds to their picturesque quality. They do not use the sail in their passage up and down the river, however. It's function is that of a spare tire. If the motor stops, they can use

the sail to get somewhere until the motor is fixed.

Crisfield, Md, is the home port of the fish boats. Three of the captains who come upriver every week are named Evans. The Evanses have been a prolific

other man on the boat h8d prom- ised to save her some spots, "he ought to be whipped to death— not keeping his promise like that. Here, I'll give you a bargain in trout—$3.50 for this boxful that I usually get $5.50 for.” He sells her.

His attention is called to dead crabs floating between his boat and the wharf. "My man do that?” he asks. ‘‘I don't want him to do that. That's against the law. Here, give me one of those baskets.” He retrieves about half the crabs and throws them in the receptacle intended for spoilage.

Boats used to bring farm pro- duce to Washington, but there is not much of that anymore. The automobile truck and good roads dealt river traffic its second blow. The first was rail transporta- tion. There was a time when decks of market boats had ali the colors of the garden, when 50 oyster boats were crowded about the old wharf. Trucks have ended all that.

The fish boats were run out of

lie taste in seafood. Even when snad. the most delicious fish of the ba,v and river, is in season it is more popular for its roe than for its tasty flesh. They can't stand the bones, say the mem-

bers of this finicky generation who come down to the sea to eat.

So fillets of haddock under trade names become popular in the retail markets because they have no bones and “they don’t taste so fishy,’’ and steaks from large fish are popular in the res- taurants for the same reasons.

Before the war proprietors of some bars used to boost their sale of beer by advertising “all the shrimp you can eat for 25 cents.” Now steamed or spiced

, \ J

^ uThey’re nice this morning Sure are nice ones

today."

THE wavelets slap, slap,

slap on the hulls in the

predawn murk. The breeze, faintly stirring,

is laden with the odor of fish. A dark figure appears at the rail of one of the boats, swings a pail into the water with a line and douses the baskets of crabs on

the deck. Another day on the

Washington water front has be-

gun. Under the willftws of Ha ins

Point across the channel the in- reasing light reveals the pleas-

ant prospect of green meadows

/

7 %

Norfolk spots. He leans over and

pats them, the long ash of his cigarette hanging dangerously above his stock of food.

‘•They’re nice this morning,” he says approvingly. ‘‘Sure are

nice ones today.” There is something about the

fish dealer’s attitude toward fish that only the inveterate angler will understand. The fish deale: really likes fish and that is prob- ably why he is in the business— the way a book dealer loves book*.

He is going to push his little cart through the nearby blocks Sf Southwest, making a lot of noise about fish.

"These are about the right size.” he says flipping a spot over

fondly. "Some of my customers buy one of these for every mem-

ber of the family. One colored

beside still waters. Business be- gins on the Municipal Wharf. Other men are slinging pails from other boats, push carts, horses and wagons, and delivery trucks arrive. The fish business like other divisions of the com-

merce in food is transacted while most of the ultimate customers sleep.

Once in a while during the morning a liveried chauffeur stops by to purchase fish for the mistress of a big house who feels that fish is fresher from the boats. An occasional resident of Chevy Chase drives his shiny sedan to the wharf to buy fish for his wife for the same rea-

son. Most of the fish from the boats, however, goes to the huck- sters who sell it in the colored neighborhoods of the city.

A heavy-set white man, his thinning straight hair combed neat as a bartender's, has just filled his little pushcart with

woman buys 10 every time she buys fish.”

Shorty arrives sitting high on

the wagon seat and driving a

horse harnessed with brass-deco- rated bridle and collar. Shorty is a diminutive Negro, very dark, with wide, blinking eyes and handsome Caucasian features. He cannot weigh more than 85 pounds. He rents the horse and wagon for $3 a day. Some day he is going to buy it.

A cackling goes up among the men on the boats as Shorty's wagon arrives on the wharf. You can see they all like Shorty not

only as a customer but as one of those contacts that make the day more interesting. Shorty climbs down from his wagon on his frail pins and boards a boat to look at the fish. The men are baiting Shorty as he buys his fish. Soon three boxes full of ice and fish are loaded on his wagon, Shorty climbs back on the seat, looks

the same as we do," one com-

plains. "It takes them 17 hours to get up here. A truck will do it in four or five. The boats sometimes lay around here four or five days before all their fish is sold. Fish begin to soften after two days. The boatmen pay only a nominal dockage fee. We pay rent. They undersell us when- ever they want to and they can

do it.” The wholesalers feel that they

are bound by the District sanitary code and the boatmen are not.

What shocks the wholesalers most is that the boatmen sell fish wrapped in newspapers. Rolling a

fish in a sheet of newspaper is no violation of sanitation. It is a

violation of the ethic that devel- ops in every commerce and years ago the fish business arrived at the convention that newspaper packaging was bad for the trade.

The boatmen are confident that

“Soon three boxes full of ice and fish are loaded on

his wagon.”

Somerset County family. Capt. Otis Evans is the dean of the boatmen at the Municipal Fish Wharf. There is also Capt. Her- man Evans and Capt. Chelton Evans, the latter a relative new-

comer who started in the war

years. Capt. Herman has the line.

‘Lady,” he says to a colored woman who complains that the

Baltimore under an ordinance passed by pressure from the city flsh dealers. A bill to bar them from Washington was intro- duced in Congress, but it was

killed by the opposition of Dis- trict, Court Justice T. Alan Goldsborough, then Representa- tive of the Southern Maryland district.

"They had a Congressman and we didn't," said one of the Wash- ington fish wholesalers bitterly.

The fight probably was an-

other case of business shortsight- edly trying to legislate against its own interest. The entire trade benefits from the right-from- the-water suggestion the fish boats give the market. Certainly the seafood restaurants thrive in the fishing port atmosphere.

The gilded restaurants of the water front hardly carry bay fish on their menus today, and even the raw bars have banished as too messy a nuisance that delicacy of seafood so popular in the local tradition of shore eat-

ing, the steamed crab.

Change in Menus Due to

Change in Population One restaurant man blames

the change in the menus to the change in population—the new

people who have come to the

Capital and are the big major- ity of the customers.

Missing from some restaurant menus right in the summer sea-

son of netting them in the bay are the Norfolk spot and that tasty flsh with the inelegant name, the croaker. Even the rock bass is neglected. Trout is usually on the menus, but, the way the flsh business is organ- ized today it is more likely to come from New Jersey than from the Chesapeake.

The fishes popular in the res-

taurants are swordfish and hali- but from the Boston flsh pier, tuna from California, bluefish from Jersey ports, lobster from Maine and shrimp from Louisi- ana. The crab maintains its popularity—fried^in its softshell state, crabflakes served cold with cocktail sauce, crabflakes Nor- folk (sauted in butter), crab Newburg, and crabcakes—de- spite its ostracism in its tastiest form, steamed in the shell.

Those who like fish note with sadness this debasement of pub-

"They say it costs more than in comparable quar- ters ashore.”

shrimp are 65 cents a dozen at the raw bars and a sign on the wall says, “One glass of beer to a customer.”

Fresh clams off the ice. tasting of the very essence of the sea, are

always ready to be opened on

order and that delicious drink of the sea. the fresh clam juice cock- tail. which has restored the will to live to many a hungover drinking man, is obtainable here and there only.

There are several explanations for the banishment of the steamed crab. One is that It was a casualty of the war. During the war the bars could not get the crabs. After the war business was so

good the crab was not allowed to

come back.

What Has Happened To the Steamed Crabs?

"It takes a customer so long to

eat them,” said one proprietor. "They slow down the turnover of customers when the place is crowded. A customer eating crabs takes up a lot of room at the counter and the shells make a

mess. And eating steamed crabs is so nojsy with several customers in the place beating the crabs.”

Only two places on the water front serve them, one a little market restaurant and the other a place that tries to continue the

atmosphere of a water front saloon. Reader, if you are new

to the Nation's Capital and have never eaten crabs in the shell, hie yourself to the water front, discover these places, reward the proprietors for continuing a

manly tradition of eating, for serving food that kept the first Adventurers from deserting the Virginia shore.

As every fisherman in the lower river and bay will tell you, the delicate flavor of the white crab flakes which delights you in the cocktail, the’crabcake, the deviled crab and the crab imperial, is but a dilution of its true flavor. As

the flavor of the chicken is con-

centrated in the fat, so it is with the crab. When the crab is broken and its white, flaky meat is removed, the fat is washed away before it is packed. Right there much of the flavor goes.

The only way to get it is the hard way—to break open the crab and remove the meat yourself. Fortunately the natural history of the crab causes it to co-operate to an extent. Three times in its life the crab feels that its shell is restricting its growth. It opens the shell and crawls out and for a

few days, until it hardens again, it is an unarmored soft-shell crab unable not only to protect itself but to fight for food. To effect this extrication the crab has a

hinge in his shell.

Just unfold the hinge on the underside and off comes the top of the crab. The heavy armor

gone, break the remainder in two.

Moet crab eaters will caution you

a

“They spend far more time paint- ing and puttering than at the helm”

against eating the devil fingers which removal of the upper shell

eave exposed, but they are tasty, too, and won't hurt you.

It's the white meat and the fat you are after. Now the wooden block and baton brought to you with the crabs comes into play. Judicious use of these tools, as

with the nutcracker, will break the shell without mincing the meat inside. Soon you will be separating the meat from the blades of shell with increasing skill, hazardous though it is to the beginner, for you may cut a

finger. Do not neglect the shell of the

crab which you abandoned after working the hinge. The fat in the points at each side is de- licious. Remove it with the par- ing knife furnished you. But eat

it off your fingers not the knife. After all! The passage of the years. Autre temps, autre mores.

Some, including the writer, like the crab when it is still warm

from the steamer. It is much more work than eating a lobster but the meat is just as sweet and

good. Unlike the lobster you will need no drawn butter to dip the particles in. It is runny with its own fat. Don't crush the crab's claws in breaking the shell. Like the lobster they contain a choice morsel.

Your Host Will Show You How to Fix Them

Others like the steamed crab from the refrigerator, its fat firm and the more tasty for that reason. Both schools agree that hot or cold the steamed crab goes well with beer. With a tail shell the white capped amber fluid so

cold that the moisture is con-

densing on the glass within easy reach of the right hand and a

half dozen crabs under process of becoming a mountain of broken shells in the middle of the table— ah, wilderness were paradise enow.

Your host will show you how he steams the clams. Taking a large tongs he gingerly lifts the lid of a bushel basket a little. The crabs are fighting to get out. He grabs one with the tongs and turns it over as it flays its claws about vigorously.

"These were taken out of the

place for its water-front saloon atmosphere as well as for the crabs. The population of sum- mer residents is so large and shifting that it is impossible to check. About 50 families liva there throughout the winter.

Feature stories that it costa little to live on a boat annoy these people. They say it costa more than In comparable quar- ters ashore. They live on tht water because they like the water. And they feel their con- formance to the moral code is personal and voluntary—not due to the pressure of society and neighborhood gossip,

Their Boats Are Their Castles

Some must get more pleasure in the maintenance than in tht operation of their craft because they spend far more time paint- ing and puttering than at tht helm. The James, the Rappa-

^hannock, the Potomac and tht Patuxent, all wide tidewater es-

tuaries in their lower reaches branch out of the bay like four fingers. The typical owner of a cabin cruiser likes the thought that he can explore these hun- dreds of miles of beautiful wa-

terways but he seldom gets more

than 50 miles downriver. Every Friday evening the parade of boats starts south, the empty fish boats among them. Many of the pleasure boats anchor for the week end in the Cut, a huge bay opposite Alexandria.

Night time brings a different crowd to the water front. The market people have gone home. Now the summer guest is enter- tained at the balcony dining tables overlooking the wharf, and the gilded restaurants of the

"Another day on the Washington water front has begun” water near Leonardtown about 8 o’clock this morning,” he says proudly. "Look at him fight.”

He pierces the crabs at the hinge with an icepick, more to keep them from fighting and pulling off each other’s claws than from humanitarian reasons. The up- side-down position reveals the blue of the crab claw—one of the loveliest colors in nature.

He uses 2 quarts of vinegar, a

handful of celery salt and red

pepper to steam 2 bushels of crabs in a standard-sized ash can. A half cup of vinegar will do a dozen crabs at home.

Many of the Bohemian group, who live on cabin cruisers along

Washington Channel, frequent this

A

area cater to tnose wno enjoy a martini with their seafood. (Only beer is sold with meals at the wharf because it is unthinkable that intoxicating liquor should be sold on Government property !

Little colored boys gather be- neath the balcony and dance for pennies.

By 11. however, all is quieting down. Capt. Tyler comes back to the berth on his flshboet. "I get up at 4:30 a m ," he says.

'But once a week I go up to F street to a movie. I like the one

that has vaudeville in it. That's not exactly what you call night life. But if you come up here to go sporting around you might as well leave the fish behind."