CG That’s on? Okay. Okay, we’re going to get started. What is your full name?

DBK Daniel Baker Kenney.

CG Daniel Baker Kenney.

DBK Mmm hmmm.

CG That’s a surprise!

DBK Why?

CG I thought it was Benjamin!

DBK No, Benjamin was my father. My father’s name was Daniel Benjamin, and I was named after [Lorne] Baker, who lives in Yarmouth, was a lawyer, and my middle name was Baker. My son, Danny, his name is Baker, but his son is Benjamin. Daniel Benjamin. So it’s gone on for four generations.

CG Yup. I thought it was four exactly the same, but it’s not quite the same…

DBK No. No it isn’t.

CG So you’re D.B. Kenney…

DBK I operated my business as D. B. Kenney Junior. And then when my father passed away in 1970, then I bought out his business, along with my own, and I just [?] under the name of Junior until Danny come along, and then he renamed it D.B. Kenney Fisheries. That’s been twenty, oh twenty years ago, Danny took it, but before that it was D.B. Kenney Junior, and I exported and everything under that name. Would you like me to tell you just how I got in the business?

CG Love to!

DBK I got a call one evening from a chap in Grand Manan, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him or not, Glen MacLaughlin. MacLaughlin Brothers, used to be a big outfit in New Brunswick. Tellin’ me that this fish plant that was owned by Joseph Seal, at the time here, was being sold for taxes, and he wanted me to go bid it in. Well, I’m not much at bidding, so a friend of mine, Holland Titus at the time, he went up to Digby and bid it in for us. And we got it for nine hundred dollars. That’s in 1953. And from then, it’s been history. That’s what got me in the fish business, but, ‘cause I was working with my father. I worked with him, for, well, I was I guess twenty three when I went with him, when I was twenty three years old, and I did mighty well with him. I got fired three times in one day! (Everyone laughs) That’s true! Oh, he was a hard master. Three times… he was only a little guy. My father only weighed a hundred and eighteen pounds. He was just a little fella. But he was snappy. (Laughs). That was true. But he always took me back!

CC Your mother made him! (Laughter)

DBK Yeah, if things didn’t go his way, why he was up in the air. But as I say he was just a small fella but he was just as full of fire as he could be. But he, he taught me a lot of things, and uh… But anyway, I went with MacLaughlins, and at that time, was after the war, and there was a, they formed a fish board in Halifax whereby people could not ship fish to the Caribbean, that had to go through a dealer. So Glen wanted to know if I would export fish for uh, buy fish and export them for them. Which was, uh, it was operated under MacLaughlin Brothers at that time, here. So I said, yeah, I’ll do anything, try it, so we started, started an export business. And it went on oh for probably eight or ten years, and some of the big boys, like Halifax Fisheries, and there was, oh there was a lot of them, the Cunninghams and down on Cape Island, tried, they had a meeting with my father right next door, tried to get me to this meeting, to get me to win me over to join their outfit so that I couldn’t ship fish unless I exported them through those people. Well, I um, Glen said “Don’t do it.” He says, “Stick to your guns, don’t do it. Don’t go near them”, so I didn’t go near them, and we kept on exporting until nineteen… about 1955, was when Glen got into trouble. This is true, this one. Glen got into trouble with the Income Tax, and me being working for Glen, my wife can tell you, and the girls can tell you, we were raided by Mounties! They come and they went from the top to the bottom. The [?] went on, and Glen, I called Glen, and uh tried to ask him what was going on, and Glen went to work and said, well they’re the same over here, so he says we’re in the same boat. They even went up in the attic, as far as they could get. And anyway, they seized all the papers we had and everything, so… but every year I worked for Glen he had an auditor in Saint John did all of our work. Everything was done through them, so I had nothing to answer for anyway. I was, I wasn’t hired even on wages at that time, I was just working for them, whatever they wanted to give me then I, I got. And the results was that they worked three years, wasn’t it Viola, yeah they worked three years on that and it cost me eight hundred dollars. That’s how much they got for three years work, and all those guys coming down, swarmin’ right on you! You remember that, Penny? Yeah. But that was a, that was a highlight of my business, I’ll tell ya! So after, I think it was fifty-six, around fifty-six Glen got into difficulties over there so he sold me the business. That’s how I got it, I got it from Glen. And we took it, we run it from, we run it from that. And the people that I started with when I went in business, here, were with me until I quit. Same people. Dealt with the same ones.

CG What was the year that you got it from Glen?

DBK I got it from Glen in fifty six. Yeah. And it was, uh, we did very well. I bought it for ten thousand dollars. That’s what I paid for it. I had saved that much. It took all of our earnings. Remember Viola? It took all of our earnings. To buy that. We bought it out. And that was the beginning of D.B. Kenney Fisheries. And D.B. Kenney Fisheries, we operated it until, Danny, I, I gave it to him. I didn’t sell it. I gave it to him. I said, “I’ve had it long enough. You can have it”. So I just dropped out, and I stayed with him. I stayed with him and I worked with him, well, in fact I’m still there.

CG You still are.

DBK Still there, yeah. (Everybody is laughing). Yeah, I go every day. Every morning at seven o’clock. But uh, I uh, I’ve seen a lot of changes in the fishing industry, I’ll tell you. When I was a kid I can remember fishing off the rocks up here, what we call the High Knoll, catching pollock and cod right off the rocks right up here. Now you never see a fish. Never. Well you see this harbour pollock down here growin’, but you don’t see any, any large fish. Yeah.

CG So could we back track to establishing who your parents and maybe even your grandparents were?

DBK Yeah. My father came here in the turn of the century. He came here soliciting lobsters and we’ve, Viola and I, we’ve often talked about this, it took him two days to get here from Digby. One day to Sandy Cove, next day to get here. And he would, he come down here, oh yeah there’s some little story (laughs)… He came here and, soliciting lobsters, and he met, my mother was a Lent, he met, she lived over across the road here. Anyway, he came down here soliciting lobsters, and he met her, and eventually they decided to get married. And the day of the wedding, my father used to like to drink a little, but, so he took a, he had a, a fifth. I don’t know what size he had, anyway he had a bottle of whiskey, and he wanted to save it until after the wedding before he opened it. So, we had down here by, where you come off the ferry there’s a place, the building there it’s a motel now, and there was a, a chap there…

CG The Dock and Doze? Where the Dock and Doze…?

DBK Yeah, where the Dock and Doze is now, there was a, a, he was a tailor. (Someone in the room says “Shoemaker, wasn’t her?”). No he was a tailor. What was his name, Viola? Utley. Mr. Utley. He, Dad went to him and asked Mr. Utley if he would keep that bottle until after the wedding was over. So he said, “No problem, no problem, Mr. Kenney. I’ll look after it for you.” So he took, give it to Mr. Utley, and after the ceremony was over, Dad went back to Mr. Utley, he says “I’d like to have my bottle now.” He says, “Mr. Kenney,” he says, “you should have brought two instead of one!” (Lots of laughter) That’s a true story! Yeah.

CC And he never forgave him, did he?

DBK No. He sure didn’t. I can’t remember this Mr. Utley, but it was before my time, but I know that there was lots of times, you know, there…

[Penny] Your generation came on the Mayflower, didn’t they Dad?

DBK Well, I’m not, I can’t back that far, you know more about it than I do. But I know he came from Cape Island and he came up here, and he married my mother and he stayed here. After he came he stayed here. That’s brought the Kenneys into…

[Penny] Irish descendants, though…

DBK Yeah

[Penny] That’s what I thought, they came on the Mayflower.

DBK But he, he was a businessman. Oh boy. He was rough! Yeah. Lots of times, he would, course he would say it to me. He wouldn’t say it to the rest of them. I got it! And that wasn’t so good, either, ‘cause I wouldn’t take it! And that’s how I got fired. But we worked together for years, and Viola can tell you the, the outcome, at the time that I was doing these things he, he told her, he says ‘he’ll never amount to anything,’ he says, ‘you forget him’, he says, ‘he’s, he’s history.” But before he died he came to Viola and he told her that he was wrong.

CC You were okay.

DBK He was wrong. Yeah.

CG His name was Daniel Benjamin Kenney…

DBK Yes.

CG And, what year was he born?

DBK Well, Dad was 70 when he died, no, he was 87 when he died, and he died in 1970.

CG Okay

DBK So you subtract that, would give you…

CC Eighty seven. Eighteen eighty seven. Was he eighty seven or eighty three when he died? Eighteen eighty three if he was eighty seven.

DBK Yeah, yeah. And he, he worked at different things before he came here, he worked, he, well, show them the picture out there, Penny. Bring the picture off the wall and show them the picture of the boat. He used to work on the one that run to Boston and to Yarmouth, he was on the old… and [?] has got the key to his state room. There, there’s a picture of the Calvin and Austin was the name of the boat. He worked on that, yeah.

CC Gorgeous. I’ll have to get a picture.

CG A picture at the end of the interview.

CC Isn’t that beautiful.

DBK She bought that, Penny bought that from, Uncle, he had a brother, he had several brothers, but he had a brother lived in Yarmouth, George Kenney, who owned the Grand Hotel for years. He owned it until he sold out to the, to Rodd’s Grand Hotel which was in PEI, I think. Anyway, he, he run that and Dad started bell hoppin’ in the hotel and he didn’t like that so he went, got a job workin’ on the Calvin and Austin. That was in his early days, before he came up this way. Yeah.

CC Was that a freighter, or…

DBK No, no, she was a passenger boat, went to Boston, between Yarmouth and Boston. Yeah. And they had five children. I had a brother George, who lived in Digby. And I had three sisters, who are still alive. Two in Halifax, and one, well she lives in Halifax in summertime, and Boston and Florida in the winter. They’re all older. I was next to the youngest, and George is the youngest.

CG George is no longer alive?

DBK No, George died, what, ten years ago? Around that, about ten years, I’d say, but he got away with murder! Anything he wanted to do, he could do it, but I got the blame!

CG So you were, you were next to the youngest?

DBK Yes.

CG The three girls were older?

DBK Yes, and they’re all alive. Three of them. One’s, uh, Gret… Annie is next to me. She’d be, I’m, I’ll be 84 my birthday, she’ll be 86. And Elizabeth is 88 and Alvah’s getting close to 90.

CG And George was the youngest.

DBK He was the youngest. Yup, yeah.

[?Viola?] George was my age.

CG So most of, that family was basically from around Yarmouth, Cape Sable…

DBK Yeah. My mother was from here, and he was from Cape Sable, or Cape Island, Clark’s Harbour. And like I say, he stayed here and he finished his life here. He, he worked the fish business. But what I did after I took over MacLaughlin Brothers, why Dad was getting up in years, and he wasn’t paying, he wasn’t, well the fish business was getting sticky, so I run the both of them. I run his and mine too, run them together. And he had the lobster business, I didn’t have that, I just had the fish business at that time.

CG What, what the name of his business was D.B. Kenney…

DBK D.B. Kenney, D.B.Kenney Limited. In fact we, we still got the, the sign is out in the garage, D.B. Kenney Limited. We just, we just destroyed the property this year. Danny’s building a new, expensive outfit down here, he’s got a lobster pound.

CG Over where the lobster car, pound is…

DBK Oh, no it’s a new one. Gee, it’s all refrigerated and everything.

CG Wow.

DBK It’s big. It’s a big outfit. So, D.B. Kenney, we had to tear the…We started to move the building, we were going to put it on another lot, we were going to save it, you know, ‘cause it had gone through… It went down from my grandfather, my grandfather had had it first, and he sold it to my father, and we were going to save the old main store part, just for, ‘cause it’s been, in fact Penny was using it for a whale watch office. And we went to move it, and got one side up, and the other side, the sill would not come, it was rotted, so, had to destroy it.

CG Well you tried.

DBK Mmmm. So we tore it down and that was the end of it. But that was a, over the years there’s been a lot of history gone through that.

CG Mmm. So that had some history even before your Dad.

DBK Yes. Just imagine, when I started in, that lobsters sold apiece fifteen cents!

CG Fifteen cents apiece!

DBK Apiece!

CG Yeah? No matter what the size?

DBK In those days they sold [jinx], everything. They saved everything. Then as the years went on, they changed that law so that they only couldn’t sell the jinx. They used to go to work and only just keep the large ones, and throw the small ones back. Yeah, I bought lobster out on the shore for Dad for quite a few years. That’s when they were fishing in rowboats, in Freeport. All of them. [?], Parker Thurber, Rennie Prime. All the boys. I knew them all. Yeah, I used to go out the daytime, go out around Peters’ Island, go up the south shore and spend the day up there and buy lobsters from those small boats. And that all changed, well, it’s been quite a few years now, but I remember. Rennie Prime, boy, and them fellas were very hard guys, you know, they fished and they really fished. Yeah, Raleigh Nichols was another one, he was there, and there was, uh, Titus, uh, shoot.

CC Not Keith.

DBK Yeah Keith, Keith fished, he never fished out of a rowboat. He might have fished a little while, not too long, down this [?] but there was a lot of them fished out of what they called Israel’s Cove, the first one up on the south side, there. Uh shoot. The other Titus, I’m trying to think, it’s David’s father, David Titus’s father, what was his father, David Titus father was a fisherman there and then, and up the island there, Crocker, Watson Crocker, Harry Crocker, and then you get up further you get into, oh let’s see, I was reciting them off the other day we were talking about, uh the Canns, the Cann boys, they were fishing. And Eldred Guier, and Horace Johnson…

CC And Raleigh Bates’ father?

DBK Pardon?

CC Raleigh Bates’ father. He was telling, Raleigh told us the other day….

DBK Who…?

CC Raleigh. What was his father’s name?

DBK Rollie Bates.

CC Raleigh Bates’ father.

DBK Don’t ring a bell, but…um, I knew them all. Knew them all. And they come out a boat, every day, after they got through with their catch, you’d buy the catch, you’d bring it in here. And we used to go to Tiverton and buy them up there, fact I even went up, up to Cumberland County, up to Advocate, up to Horseshoe Cove, and up those places. Apple River, and bought them up there in the summertime.

CC Really!

CG Did you drive…

DBK No, no, we’d boated them first. But then, after the boat got age on her, we decided, we used to take a truck and go up to Harbourville, and hire, what’s the name, Viola, the fella lived in Harbourville, we used to hire him to go across, take us across to Advocate…

VK Fields.

DBK Yeah. Gur…

VK Arthur

DBK Arthur? No not Arthur.

VK Gurvin.

DBK No, no, no. They’re the ones, the people in Advocate that used to get the truck to take me over to Apple River. No, uh…Oh gosh. Anyway, we used to go up there and then I’d go across, take the crates and go over and we buy lobsters and bring them back and truck them down here in the night. Come down in the night, have them here for the morning.

CG You wouldn’t take a vehicle over…

DBK No. No.

CG I think I heard a story of somebody who, there was some kind of a sling, you could sling your car aboard this ferry up there and go across…

DBK Oh there was. That, that run out of Wolfville.

CG Wolfville?

DBK Yeah. That, that went across to Parrsboro. But this was really, those places you know were quaint at that time, because they, you know what they’d do with their lobsters? They used a place they called a [Lubber Hole], was a place, and they’d dig a hole, big hole, and they’d put the crates of lobsters in that hole and then they’d cover it with rockweed. So that the sun wouldn’t get on to them, because the sun would kill them. And that’s what they did, over to Apple River.

CC How long could they keep them that way?

DBK Oh, they kept them for, we used to go out once a week.

CC Really!

DBK Yup. They kept them.

CG This was totally above the tide?

DBK No, no, no. Below the tide.

CG Below the tide.

DBK Yeah, the flats drain off up there, you take up Apple River, they drain off for miles. Oh, goes way, you ever been there?

CG Nope.

DBK Oh, I took Viola up…

CG That’s the other side of the Minas Basin, what we can see on this side, you get the idea.

DBK Yeah. I took her up just to show her where I used to… We went over the route that I used to go, you know, we went there and it was Apple River, and Advocate, and Horseshoe Cove, the three places that we went. And we’d lay the boat into Advocate, and the, we’d start to buy, and then we’d float them alongside of us till we’d come back, and then we’d buy lobsters on the, on the way coming and going, up on the shore, the North shore of, like in Annapolis County and up… But Harbourville was the place that we took them out and loaded them on the truck and brought them home. Yeah, that was kind of interesting.

CG That was pretty far away! That’s not exactly local, so how did you ever make those contacts, at first?

DBK Dad did it. Uh, no my brother. George did it, first. George used to go, take the boat. He did it first, then he went up there, then him and Dad had a falling out of some sort, that he didn’t uh, do just what he wanted, so I fell into it, I had to do it, so… I had one fella with me, fella by the name of, Little River guy. Frost. Frost fella from Little River with me, just the two of us. And on the way back we stopped into Digby, we’d buy at Victoria Beach and different places, wherever we could, bring them back here. But all the lobsters, I was going to tell you, all the lobsters up there were large. There wasn’t a, what we call a jink, there wasn’t a short lobster to be bought. I went off with, uh, I’ll think of his name, anyway, I went off to haul the traps, well we used to go off to Isle Haut. You’ve heard talking about that island, there? We went off there and he’d haul those traps, and the only way you could haul traps up there… He had a peg board, all his buoys were numbered. Because, if he didn’t do it that way, you’d be hauling the same one twice. So every time he hauled a trap it had a number, he’d put the peg in the board. That’s how he did it.

CG Why would you be hauling it twice, because the tide was…

DBK Well, gee they have terrible tides up there, you know. They go like everything. And he’d go off there, we’d have to stay probably five or six hours before he’d get them. On the northern end of that island, it’s a big bar runs right up parallel to the land. And that’s where he used to fish on that northern part. Yup.

CC How many traps would he have set?

DBK He’d have probably a hundred, yup. But he was a, he was a good head. He knew what the, anyway we used to go what they used to call the Lubber Holes, I was telling you we used to go in there, it was going to blow we’d go in there and we’d put our lobsters over and float them until the next tide. ‘Cause once you got in there you couldn’t get out until the tide got back up. There was a bar made across, and you had to go over it to get inside.

CC Can you reach that there?

DBK Oh, that’s okay.

CC That’s from your loving daughter!

DBK Yeah. Penny.

CG So to go up there still, you went so far in a vehicle?

DBK A truck, yeah. I took the truck, went up, with the crates and I’d meet him, and then we’d leave like early in the morning, or we’d leave in the afternoon. Sometimes we didn’t go haul the traps with him, but if he, um, he was all alone. He never took a person with him.

CG And this was with no engine? Or with an…

DBK Oh yeah yeah. Oh yeah. He had a nice boat. It was a well kept boat. Yeah, and he had and… What it was, he married Gurvin’s sister, Viola.

VK Oh that was it. I forget her name.

DBK Oh it will come to me. But anyway, it was really something for me, and we arrived back, and if we got back on the side we’d have to wait until the tide got back before we could get into Harbourville to unload the lobsters on the truck. And whenever we’d unload them why then I’d start out and come home with them.

CG Did they have a different, did they have lobster seasons at all then?

DBK They’re summer. All summer seasons. That’s all. No fall, just summer.

CG But down here already, there was a fall season. That kept you busy, longer.

DBK Yup. Before, before my, I can remember they used to have a spring season. They never had that December season until after… oh, well, I can’t remember just the year, but I know that they had the, it just had a spring season. Then they had that winter season come on, and that changed the whole complex of everything.

CG Yeah. I wonder if that coincided with better boats.

DBK Yeah. Larger. And they kept get larger. Yeah.

CG Amazing. Okay, still gotta go back to establish a few things I’m still not clear on. What was your mother’s full name and her maiden name?

DBK Mary… What was her middle name, you know?

VIOLA Elizabeth.

DBK Mary Elizabeth Lent. She was, her father operated a cod extracting business here, cod oil. He had a plant. Right down, just the other side of the ferry dock. He had a plant, and he used to buy cod liver oils from Freeport, bought them from everywhere. And they had these big cookers, all steam heated cookers and they used to boil them up, let them sit, and then they’d dip the oil off of the top. Cod oil. That was a big business in that time.

CG I think there was one of them in Centreville, too.

DBK Yeah, there was, yeah. Raymond. Keith Raymond?

CG I betcha that had a nice smell, going…

DBK Yeah, but you know that [pummie?] They called it pummie. They used to let that go down on the beach and that (background voices: Penny “Okay, that’s the Kenney’s there”. CC “Thank you”.) and the fish, the fish would swarm. What have you got there?

CC The family tree.

DBK Oh yeah, yeah. She got it.

PENNY The three generations. Really our young Daniel is the fifth Daniel, because your grandfather was Vincent Baker, but Dad’s great grandfather was Daniel Vincent, so his father’s name was Vincent Baker and then when [Bompa] Kenney come along, he was Daniel Baker, that’s how the Baker and the Daniels came down the generations. So Danny’s son Daniel would actually be the fifth Daniel Benjamin…

DBK Yeah, but he signs his name Daniel the Third.

PENNY He’s really the fifth.

DBK That’s what he does. I’ve seen it, Daniel the Third.

PENNY But going back through the generations, in all reality, he’s really the fifth. The first Daniel would have been Dad’s great grandfather. I’ve traced it back that far.

CG You’re the one that’s doing all the work. Everyone is going to appreciate that.

CC Was that cod oil used totally for medicinal purposes?

DBK Yes, that was shipped to the States. That went in barrels. 45 gallon drums, they loaded it on boats, here, the Firelight over in Freeport, Frankie Davis? Frankie Davis Fisheries was over there, Crocker Brothers there, and Connor Brothers. And they used to go I reckon, let’s see, Viola. At that time the hake business was big business, they caught a lot of hake. And they’d take that hake livers, and the cod livers, and they all went in the same thing. Pollock livers. All the same. Didn’t make any difference.

CG And all called Cod Liver Oil, though?

DBK Yeah. Cod Liver Oil. And it was shipped to Gloucester.

CC Yes?

DBK Yeah, the Firelight, and they had a lot of boats that used to carry it. Fact my father had boats, he carried it too. But it was a hard cargo, it was in barrels. They’re very heavy.

CG So everything at that little plant went into barrels. Nothing smaller…

DBK Nope. No. Everything in barrels. And they shipped it to, I don’t know where it went, but I can remember the time, and I know when they shipped it, it sort of went, it all went down that way. And, all went by weight. No gallons, just by weight. But they’d have to go to work and take (laughs at something happening in room) they had to go to work and take, dip that oil off the top, they used steam to do this. They had a boiler, and they used steam, that, the pressure underneath would force the oil to the top. And then they’d dip it off, and they’d take the pummie, they called it pummie..

CG I heard you say something about “pummie”…

DBK Yes, pummie. And they’d take the pummie, and they’d put it into, uh, bags. They had these big bags. I don’t know what they ran, and they had a press, and they put them in this, and they put the press down, and they’d force the oil out of the pummie.

CG The pummie’s the livers, really. That they’re extracting the oil…

DBK Yeah, yeah. That’s what’s left, really. Anyway that’s how they got the oil. And one was the top, was first grade, and the second one that they dipped off was second grade. That’s all graded. But it was big business, it was, in fact after my grandfather went out my uncle, Francis Lent, he went to work and he run it for a number of years and he wasn’t making a success at it, so Gerald Bailey was a local person, he bought it, he hired them and took it over and run it until it was all through. When the war, after the war it petered out, it didn’t last too long.

CC The demand died?

DBK Pardon?

CC The demand for it died?

DBK Yeah. Yup. But now it come back again. That’s what I’m saying. Now it’s back again, cause there isn’t any.

CC and CG Yeah, yeah.

CC Was there a barrel maker here on these islands?

DBK They put them in steel barrels.

CC Oh!

DBK Steel. Everything was steel. They used to buy, in fact I bought when I had a boat and I was running to Gloucester, or to Boston, towing boats down there, I used to bring barrels back for them. Bring them back. They used to get those linseed barrels, something, you had to be careful what you put in them. Had linseed oil..

CG … food quality, maybe?

DBK Yeah. But the, at that time… Now what?

CC (Laughing) Well there’s lots to talk about!

CG What was the uh, what were some other by-products of the fishing industry? Was there something called the sounds…?

DBK Yeah, they used to save hake sounds.

CG What were they for?

DBK Glue. That’s glue.

CG For glue.

DBK They dried them. Had to dry them on the flakes. You’d dry them on the flakes, and then they’d buy them by the pound, and then they’d ship those to the States somewhere, I don’t know just where they went, but they, they were glue.

CC What part of the hake is the sound?

DBK Hake, it’s in the belly, right next to the backbone. You know, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen, you ever see a hake after it dies?

CC Nope.

DBK Well hake, you throw a hake overboard and it’ll float, belly up, there’ll be a big lump on his stomach. That was the sound, it would fill full of air. That’s the sound. They’re a deep-water fish, hake. That’s where they get them, off here in the deep water. And they used to save those… that sound when you just, after you cut them open, you take the inside out, you take the livers out first, and you take out the organs, one thing or another, and that left the sound. That sound, you just take hold of it and it would come right up. Just like, just as easy.. And they used to save them and salt them. Salt them and dry them. On a flake.

CG Eventually ended up to make…

DBK I’m not sure, but I think it was in glue, myself. Because it was a very gluey thing, I mean it was awful sticky.

CG Yup.

DBK Now another thing they’ve done lately, they’ve done in late years, they made glue down to Port Saxon down here. They used to come buy all the fish skins. You noticed, you skin a fish how the oil is on the back of them? They take the skins down there, and they make uh, Lepage’s glue. That’s where that come from. out of fish skins. And I was down there, a friend of mine who used to go with me in the boat, he worked down there, and he showed me all the, what they go through, the things they do. It takes a lot of skins to get very much. But they cook, cook them and they extract that oil out of that skin, to make glue.

CC Right?

DBK But it takes a lot of stuff. That was really, that’s quite an operation, too. And then they made fish meal over to Freeport. We saved all the offals for, Connors did that. We saved the backbone, the heads, everything. And they’d come collect it once a day. Called a gurry boat, they had a gurry boat, a scow affair. And they come and most generally we had a place built underneath the wharf that we wouldn’t have to have them out to one side. And they’d just come and lift the hatch affair on the end of it and take the hose and run it right into the boat. They paid you by the pound, wasn’t… You might get your taxes out of it, out of a year, that was about all… Yeah, there’s been a lot of changes in the fishing industry in my time.

CG Are fish plants saving the livers now? The cod livers now?

DBK They don’t save anything.

CG They don’t save anything, no? It just gets discarded, or…

DBK Yeah. Course today they’re, they’re only salting, now, see today, right in today’s, the guys come, these mink farms can get all the waste. Danny had a fish plant up in, urr, a fish meal plant up in Mink Cove? That’s been idle for two years. He was hauling all the offal up there, and they used it for fish meal. Well then that went out, so the mink farmers stepped in and what they have they sell to them.

CG The farmers come and collect it?

DBK They come collect it, yeah. After they, uh, after the boats come in and they get them dressed they save them in boxes and they have, they leave boxes here for them to put the stuff in.

CG Okay, I’m still establishing some facts, here. Um. We know who your mum is, and who your dad is… Your, do you remember anything about your grandparents?

DBK My grandfather Lent, I can, yeah. Grandfather, he was Frank Lent, and my mother was Alvie, or grandmother was Alvie Lent. They had three children, Dora who lived in Halifax, and then Francis was home and my mother. That was the three of them that they had. I guess they lost one at birth, years before. But they were in the oil business, that’s what I’m saying, they ran the oil business until he died. In fact he had an oil plant in Grand Manan, too, at that time. But after he died, uh, there wasn’t such a call for it and then, if you don’t look after business, you know what happens.

CG Okay. The year of your birth. We haven’t established that.

DBK We haven’t! 1917.

CG And you were born right here in….

DBK Right next door. That’s my parents’ home right next door, over to Nancy’s. Where the restaurant is. Nancy’s. That was my parents home.

CG Remember hearing any stories of your birth? Was your mother attended by a doctor, or…?

DBK Oh no, we were born right in the house, right there. Same as all these, all of our kids were born right on the Island. Five of them, they were all born, all here.

VIOLA All my beautiful children!

DBK Yeah. All born on the Island.

VIOLA You have seen them all together before.

CC Beg your pardon?

VIOLA You have seen them all together before.

CC Yes. Yes I have. Fine family!

DBK Well what was the number, what was the number when we had the, we had our…

VIOLA Fifty five.

DBK How much? Fifty five. And you know something? Would you believe it that all started on a blind date!

CG Tell us, tell us about it! (Everybody laughs).

DBK Well, she came down here to work for my uncle. Fred Barkhouse, she came to work for him, to help him, and the rest is history.

CG Where did she come from?

DBK Little River.

CG Is that so?

VIOLA Yes. I was a Denton…

DBK She was a Denton from Little River. Yeah. And she came down here…

VIOLA I just came down here to put in a few months because I was going to Nurses’ Training. He changed my mind! Very persuasive.

CC What do remember about that?

DBK Well I remember, well I’m going to tell you about that! When we were married, when we were married my father had a car. He always had a, he got his first car in 1936, new car in 1936, and we were married in’39, and I was so, so provoked at him ‘cause he, well, I shouldn’t tell you what he said, but anyway, he uh… I wouldn’t ask him for the car, I was going up to her place and we were going to be married, I rode a bicycle from here to Little River, to her home.

VIOLA And his sister then came and drove us…

CC On your wedding? For your wedding?

DBK Yup.

CC My goodness!

DBK My sister, my sister lived in Digby, and she came down with her car and picked us up and we were married in Digby. But anyway, he, I was so set in my ways I would not…

VIOLA And he still is.

DBK He still is. (Laughter) But anyway, that was sixty, over sixty years ago. Sixty one years this year. And we are the oldest married couple on the Island. At the time. Right now.

CG So what were you provoked about, that you got on your bicycle, or were you just…

DBK Well, because I wouldn’t ask him. I wouldn’t ask him, I wouldn’t ask him for the car. I said took my chance, I said I’ll go… I had to go up Tiverton. Course they had no ferry boat in those days, they only had a boat, you know, had that scow. We’ve got pictures of that, not that one but the one here, but anyway, I went across the ferry, I paddled up the, and I had to wait ‘cause they had a ball game somewheres, and the ball team was coming back and I had to wait until the ferry come back before I could get across to drive up to her…See in those days it didn’t have any schedule or anything. You, you just, you just waited until the ferry came. And if it didn’t come you had to wait. So I had to go across the ferry and go up there to her home.

CC Was this the day of your wedding?

DBK Yeah.

CC Oh my goodness!

DBK I had my thing packed on the back of my bicycle and away I went!

CG Your suit? A change of clothes? And the ring?

DBK Yep, we had everything.

CC How old were you then?

DBK How old was I? I was twenty three. Yup.

CC Twenty three years old.

DBK And she, she was just, no you would have been twenty one in October. Yeah, we were married in September.

CG So who else was present at the wedding? Your… present at the wedding, your…

DBK Her mother, my sister…

VIOLA Your brother in law…

DBK Yeah, my brother in law, Fred.

VIOLA And uh, Fred’s sister.

DBK Yeah.

VIOLA Mrs. Turnbull.

CG But you didn’t elope. Your parents knew you were getting married that day…

VIOLA We were married at the Baptist….

DBK You want me to, you want me to tell you what my father said?

CG Yes.

DBK He told me, he said you’re going to pay damn dear for sleeping with a woman! (Laughter)

VIOLA Now that wasn’t very nice, was it?

DBK That’s what he said! Now here we’re talking, now, I’m telling you the truth, the things that happened that… (Laughs) Yeah. But I think he took back a lot of things that he said different times during the…

VIOLA Oh he was a very quick…

CC Temper?

CG And he was still alive up until nineteen seventy…

DBK Yeah he died in January, 1970.

CG What about your mom? Did he outlive your mom?

DBK Yes, my mother died in seventy six.

CG Yeah.

DBK Yes, we had her with us, we took her and went across to Winnipeg in the wintertime, her and I! Took my mother. She, she loved to travel, and we went across, but she went to see, after, my sister, Ann, she mar, she went to Boston. She mar uh, Fred, she married Turnbull from Digby. And they went, uh, went to Boston. He went to work there. Well then their daughter, Sheila was the oldest daughter, she met a guy that, and they were married and they moved to Florida. So that’s how we got down there. They went to Florida. He had a, he was, at that time he was with Eastern Airlines. It’s gone, now. He worked for Eastern Airlines. They went down there because he used to service planes. And that’s how, we got invited down to Sheila’s, and we went down. We took my mother, and Fred and Ann, we went down and spent, oh spent three four weeks there.

CG Yeah.

DBK That’s what got us down there the first time. Then after that well we went on our own. We, first we took a trailer, and then eventually we bought a place. We were there for twenty years.

CG Yup? You’re not still doing that?

DBK No, we haven’t, not since uh, well the last year we were down she had heart trouble and she had a heart operation the next year, had a bypass, and would you believe it by gosh last year I had one! So we both had them.

CC You both look great!

DBK It took Dad a long to re… a very long time to recover as much as he wanted because he had three major operations. Like I only had a double bypass…

PENNY Only!

VIOLA I wouldn’t want to do it again.

DBK Would you believe it that I never had a drink of liquor in my life?

CC Yeah? Good for you.

DBK A lot of people can’t say that, can they?

CC No, you’re right!

CG I wish I could!

DBK No. And I, I’ve never smoked. I may have, I’ve tried, with being with the boys or something, but I never, never took it up. Never smoked. But when I went down there, I told them, I said, the doctor was going to operate on me I said, he asked me if I used liquor. I said, no sir, I’ve never had a drop of liquor in my life, and I never smoked. I thought it was going to be a simple operation, but Gail can tell you, they were there, it turned into, well I was there three weeks!

CC My goodness.

DBK Just in Halifax.

VIOLA There wasn’t a day that two of the family wasn’t there with him.

DBK Yeah, last year I was in the hospital seven weeks.

CC Wow. That’s no fun.

DBK Never was in my life, till then. Never was in the hospital.

PENNY Good track record.

CC Yeah!

CG So how did you find that experience?

DBK Well, I’ll tell ya. It’s right to the point, I’ll tell ya that. Penny knows. Penny took me up, the first time they took me, they put me in a ward, no, was it a ward I was in, Penny? No, I… intensive care! Holy mackerel. You forget everything you knew, I’ll tell ya. But anyway, I got through it. And…

VIOLA They had some nice doctors.

DBK They moved me around. I had to go to Kentville, and they took me to Halifax to have that dye test and all that stuff. I had to do everything first. And what I think saved my life, I was in Dr. Stern’s office in Digby? And I had an attack. And I had to get the puffer out two or three times before I could get myself relieved at all..

VIOLA You mean nitro.

DBK And they called Dr. Black…. Pardon?

VIOLA You mean nitro, Dad.

DBK Yeah. He called Dr. Black, he said we’ve got to do something with this man, or we’re not gonna have him, so from then on it was, you know, quite quick they got me down there and got me operated on. Because I was postponed two, three times, wasn’t I Viola? They told me it was going to be a certain date, and then they didn’t do it, and then this happened, and they had to do something.

CG How many years did you know you were living with some heart problems?

DBK Didn’t.

CG You didn’t at all.

DBK Uh, two years. I had it two years. Started out here, I was mowing the lawn and I started feeling this pressure. In my arms, going up my arms, so…

CG Yup. Classic.

DBK Yeah, and from then on, why, I went to Dr. Black, he was our Doctor, and…But they, they wanted to take me to Halifax, or to Yarmouth and have a… I was supposed to go just before they took me into, for surgery, I was supposed to go to Yarmouth for a stomach scan. They said it acted the same way, I mean, they were going to take me to Yarmouth, but I didn’t get there. Went to Halifax.

CC I’m thinking of you taking your mother all that way, a woman who grew up on the Islands, that would be a big deal for her to go that many miles.

DBK Yeah. But you know something? When she got to Florida, she was staying at Sheila’s, do you remember this Viola? She was staying at Sheila’s, and she called me and she said would you please come get me. We had to go get her and bring her up where we were, and we were living in a trailer! We had…

VIOLA We were in a campground

DBK Campground. And we went and I said, okay I’ll come tomorrow. So we went and got her, she wanted to be with us. Because I think there was so much time on her hands she was there alone, and you know where they lived, well it was, I call it out in the boondocks myself, but it was out, out towards Monkey Jungle. Way out in the other end of the place, but anyway she wasn’t satisfied. She wanted to come home. With us. And we brought her up there and she stayed with us.

CC When you were a little fella growing up, how often would you leave the Island?

DBK Not very often. No we had the ferry boat, we had it down here first we had it under Ralph Morrow was the ferryman when I was small. Joe Sullivan had it next. Not Joe, uh Arthur, Arthur Sullivan. He had it, then Joe Sullivan, his brother, helped him. And then, uh, it changed hands, it went to Arthur, Arthur Sullivan burned himself up, you remember, you probably heard about it but anyway…

CC No.

DBK Oh yes, he had a, lighting…

VIOLA He’s the one that run the ferry.

DBK Yeah, he was lighting the kitchen stove and used gasoline. Whitt!

CG In his home.

DBK Yup.

CC Oohhh.

DBK He burned himself to death. He died, and then Emerson Titus got it. He took it next.

CG So it was all privately run?

DBK All private. Charlie [Webber] had it after, with Emerson Titus, and then Emerson…

VIOLA [Arden’s] father had it…

DBK Pardon?

PENNY Dakin…

DBK Yeah, he was in with Emerson Titus. They were all in it together. But anyway. And after, Dakin, Arthur, he died, why then Lorney got into it, Lorney was with, well no, there was another Dakin in there, Herman. Herman Dakin. They were in on it. It’s been, changed hands quite a few times. Then, uh, after that they got the old, what they called the Yellow Submarine up at Tiverton, they brought that scow up, and then they changed it over to, powered it, and made it self, you know, run itself, and they took and uh, then they built the Joshua Slocum. She came next. And then they went to work and…

VIOLA No, the Spray was before the Joshua Slocum.

DBK No, no, the Joshua Slocum went to Tiverton first, then they brought the Spray down here, and used it here. And so the Spray, eventually they went out and they built the new one which was the… Not the Spray. That’s what they called the Yellow Submarine, that was the one that, the older one. But then the Spray is the one that’s down here now. The Spray is here.

CG Was the Yellow Submarine privately run, too, or was…

DBK No. No, that’s when the government started it. Government, see I brought it here from Lunenburg. It was built in Lunenburg, and I towed it here with the Danny and Penny. I towed it here to uh, Tiverton. And they towed it with a boat first. It was a steel scow. They’d always had wooden scows and they had more trouble with them, they run into the wharf and one thing and another, and they sprung leaks and they had a lot of trouble. In fact they wouldn’t hold up too much, but they towed it as a scow first, until the government decided, they really got into it. And they put power on each end, and they built a house on it, and in fact they brought it down here, they did the work right here at the wharf. But it, it was starting to change then. Then the Slocum came after that and we thought we had something, because 24 hours around, because before you’d just go from daylight to dark. Nothing. The only time they’d go for you after dark was with the ferry boat, By Blackford had it in Tiverton, and there was different ones had it up there. But there’s been a lot of changes, I’ll tell you. Now you can go down anytime of the day or night, normally, and go. Which makes it nice. Because, I mean, years ago we had a doctor in Freeport, which we do not have now. Dr. Weir was there, for many years, in fact he brought all of our children into the world. And then he moved away to Yarmouth, and then that left, they had different doctors after that, they never stayed very long. In fact one of the last ones in Digby was, he’s still there.

CC Yeah. Lakovitch.

DBK Yeah. No. No, one before him.

CC Harding?

VIOLA Oh no, she’s talking about the last…

DBK Oh the last one, Ladovitch, yeah, but I’m saying there was one before, he’s uh, he’s an Englishman, he’s right there in Digby.

PENNY Purcell, Dad.

DBK Purcell. Yeah, he was here. Yeah, he was on the Island.

CG So what can you remember about how people were treated for any medical problems when you were a kid? You didn’t have penicillin or anything like that. What…

DBK You had a cold, you got over it.

CC (Checking tape). Check on that, you must have seen me coming! Well we’ve got a few more minutes there on that side. That’s great.

DBK No, there was nothing that I know. You had a cold or anything you got over it and you… Uh we had a doctor came here, Dr. Churchill came here for years and years, a dentist down in the old patient place, and did dental work. Come every spring.

VIOLA They didn’t have a doctor here when you had your concussion.

DBK Pardon? No, Dr. Weir. Yeah, I, that was in between. That was before, we were talking from the time I got married, but 1937 I fell off of the… We used to have, we used to have a farm up here where we kept cattle, and we had oxen, and I was hauling salt out of this, out of a salt boat similar to that. That’s the last one ever came here. [William] Kerr. Model of the last one. She was on the Dublin shore, down in Lunenburg County, and, and they were all young fellas that operated it, and they used to bring salt here. Anyway, I, I had taken the dump cart, I was on the wharf, and I had taken the dump cart and I tipped it up to scrape all the dirt out of it before I put salt into it, and see they had a chain around what they called the tongue that held it up, you know? And I tipped it up and I didn’t fasten the chain so when I got in, I crawled in over the front and went back to catch the tub, I kept right on going. And I had a fractured skull. I fell, I struck the rail of the vessel, struck the rail and rolled off in the water. Captain Fred Barkhouse, he was, he was there, he had the ship and he, he got right down on one of the fenders and fished me out. I had a red shirt on. That’s the only way they could see me. They got me and Dr. Weir who was the doctor, they brought some doctor in from Digby at that time for, to assess me, and I pulled out of it and…

CC You were twenty years old.

DBK No, no. I was seventeen.

CC Seventeen, okay.

DBK And I got the scar right there. Yeah

CC Close call.

DBK Yeah.

PENNY He got a bravery medal for saving Dad.

DBK Yeah, in fact we have the medal. Yeah, we have the medal that he got for saving my life. Yeah, and I was out seven weeks with that. Couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t even put a cap on. I wore a six and seven eighths, before I got hurt, and after that it was over seven, and I couldn’t… (Laughter)

PENNY He had a big head!

DBK Yeah, I had a big head.

CG So maybe you can give us a little history lesson just by sort of going through the types, there’s types of boats that have come through. We’ve sort of heard about the ferries, but your dad, you were born before World War One was even over, so your dad must…

DBK Well they had the old Keith Cann, operate between Yarmouth and Saint John.

CG Yup! That was a brother to the Robert Cann.

DBK Robert Cann. Elizabeth Cann.

CG Elizabeth Cann?

DBK There was Elizabeth Cann.

CG Yup?

DBK And there was, uh, [Latour]. There was several of them. Anyway, they was owned by, the Canns in Yarmouth owned it, and they had a, they operated, they bring it here, come here on a Monday, and go up to Saint John, go from here, Freeport, Tiverton, up to Saint John. And on Thursday, this was wintertime, winter schedule, and on a Thursday they would come back. Thursday afternoon she would come back and go over to Yarmouth, so you could go to Yarmouth if you cared to, or you could go to Saint John. And then the summer schedule, she, she’d come up on the Monday and come back Tuesday night, and then come up on a Thursday and come back Friday night. That’s what, that’s what they had. Other than the ferry we had that boat, and she brought all the produce for the Island, everything. Everything was bought in Saint John at that time. Yup.

CC Hmm. What would it cost if you wanted to take a little trip to Saint John as a passenger?

DBK Yep. You could go.

CC How much would that cost you?

DBK Ah, gee. I don’t know. Six, seven dollars, something like that. Very cheap. And to Yarmouth, I’ve gone to Yarmouth on her, it wasn’t very much, I know that. They had, they had berths on her. You could sleep. She was quite a big boat, the Keith Cann. She was the largest one they had. And then they had the [Rio Tambo]. They bought her.

CG What was it called?

DBK [Rio Tambo]. She was steel. They bought her and they operated her when the other one was out of commission or something wrong. But the Elizabeth Cann, some of those boats used to run down, down like Clark’s Harbour, that way, and the Islands, one thing and another. But the Keith was the largest, largest one they had.

CG We had heard that the Robert Cann wasn’t in the best of shape when it…

DBK Well, no, see she… Her captain was from here. Emery Peters was from Westport, here.

CG Yup? (Some talk about hooking microphone on)

DBK Yeah, Emery Peters was from here, and he had his brother, Jessie Peters was cook with him when he had her and, and… a lot of the guys were from Yarmouth. I knew them, I used to know them all, at that time. ‘Course Emery was lost on the Robert when she went down off of, between Grand Manan and Centreville. The Robert Cann. And the, the, oh what was his name, the… He was on at that time, he was the only one that got saved, I mean…

CG Ells.

DBK Ells. Captain Art Ells. Yeah, he was saved. He was on her at that time. And one other person. There was only two that was saved out of that whole crew. Yup. Yeah.

CG What was the reaction of people when they heard about that?

DBK We heard about it on a Sunday morning. And would you believe it? We had a chesterfield on that…

CC You did!

DBK Yup. And I had to fight with… I got it from Eatons. And I had to fight with them to…

CG To go good for it.

DBK Yup. They wanted their money.

CG Yup?

DBK Remember that Viola? We had a chesterfield and chairs on that. But we couldn’t convince them, see they’d have to take it, uh… We didn’t get delivery of it. And it was on the old Keith Cann.

VIOLA I was having a card party that evening, and when the, I can remember the storm so very well, because my first reaction was, “Ah. My new furniture is in the bottom of the sea”.

CG Where, where were you at the card party? Where was that?

VIOLA At my own home, and that used to be over at Brier House, here. Used to be Brier House. Then you see, after his aunt passed away here, we bought this home. Penny Rosalind was only four, then.

DBK Penny, Penny was four years old when we brought her over here, and the washing machine fell off of the back of the truck, I can remember that, and Penny wanted to go home. Wanted to go back home.

[GAIL] We all did!

CG Cards must have been a popular pastime, because you’re the second person we have heard who actually was at a card party the night that the Robert Cann went down.

DBK Yeah. Look! Look, [indecipherable] We’d get together, couples, there were a lot of young couples here then, they’d get together on a Saturday night. That happened on a Saturday night.

PENNY You’ve heard that story before, they were at a card party when the Robert Cann went…

CG Yup. We heard of a card party happening in Waterford. The same night.

DBK Yup.

CC I’m just going to flip this over. ** End of CD#1 **

D.B. KENNEY INTERVIEW, C.D.#2

CG So in those days they didn’t have insurance for that whole, loss of life and the cargo and everything like that?

DBK No.

CG That was just a tragedy, and…

DBK Well, forget about that. I went, I insured the Robert S., my brother bought it and, and uh, I don’t know, he run it for awhile and then he got tired of it and wanted me to take over the payments and so I took it over and I was going to, what I was going to tell you, I insured it for ten thousand dollars, and it cost me a hundred dollars. That was the government…

CC What boat was this.

DBK Government. Robert S. Government insurance. They sold government insurance. One percent. A hundred dollars. On insurance for ten thousand. Yeah.

CG So there were those, what what did they call those kind of boats? The Cann, the Cann boats. Those were called…

DBK Freighters.

CG Freighters.

DBK Yeah. They were freighters, but they had accomodations for people. In fact, when they brought cars here on the Island they used to bring them on the Keith Cann from Yarmouth. She brought cars here, yeah. And they used to bring cattle. Horses. Everything. They brought everything in those days. Oh yeah, they had a sling and they’d hoist them up and land them on the dock. Yeah. Everybody used to go down when the boat come in. You’d go and see who’s on the boat. (Laughs)

CC I was just thinking how much fun that would have been.

DBK Yeah. Oh yeah. She got in, when she got in here in the morning. She got in at ten thirty, every morning, every time she come in from Yarmouth, be ten thirty in the morning. She’d leave there at seven o’clock. And you could hear that old whistle, hear her blowing through thick fog, she’s blowing every… So you can just imagine, they sailed that boat up here, all kinds of weather, and no radar, no nothing. Almost impossible to believe it, but they did it. And the only one that I ever see run ashore was the, the Robert Cann run ashore in Northern Point, a thick fog one night, and was it, no the Keith Cann, was it… No they had another one after that. What’s the name of the black one that they had, the last one that they had that they…

[GAIL] What was the one that we used to call the Tiggety Taggety?

VIOLA That was it. The Taggety.

DBK No that was out of Freeport. That was Connor’s, that was Davis, Frankie Davis. Yeah, Taggety. Yeah. She was, Frankie Davis had that for to run that to Gloucester, but, no the [?] run that last one Viola, the [Santa Coaster?], no… Oh I’ll think of it. Anyways, they run her on Peter’s Island, right head on, one morning, thick fog, yeh. Oh, there’s been a lot of boats ashore, here. Over the years.

CG And the Robert Cann went aground once, not the time that it sank, another time?

DBK No, that other time. On Northern Point. They were, cause we went up, we went up and see her there. She was there, wallowing back and forth, but during the war there was a lot of ships ashore, here. There was one, down to Pond Cove once, they were having a picture show at night and somebody come in and says there’s a ship ashore. They called from the lighthouse and said there was one there. It was right up at Pond Cove. There was one at [Hog Yard], down here on the other side of the Island. Lot of those boats were ashore. Big ships, they were.

CC Military vessels, during the war?

DBK No, no. They were going for, no radar, see. They were going for Saint John. That one wasn’t, but they all missed, they made into the Bay.

(Brief exchange while Penny shows Chris the Brier Islands shipwrecks chart).

PENNY Dad do you remember, oh no you wouldn’t have remembered when the Aurora went ashore.

DBK No, the Aurora was before my time.

CC Do you remember that, that Greek ship that blew up in the forties? Foreign vessel.

DBK What the, the one that lost all the lives?

CC Mmmhmm.

DBK That’s the one that they brought the military people here that had died on her. There was a lot of them. They had them in the, they had a place down here with the, they used…

CG Like a morgue?

DBK …to keep caskets in, one thing and another, and they took ‘em in there. They were American soldiers. They had, they must have had… In fact they buried them up in the cemetery until after the war was over and then the Americans come and got ‘em. After the war was over they came and got them and took them back. There was, I was trying to think of the name of her. I know the name of her.

CG I just saw it written not too long ago. What was the name of that ship?

CC The one that Derek is researching, Derek Thurber, Raymond’s son, is something called the “Aeketerini” or something…

DBK No. No it wasn’t. No, no.

CC Not that one.

DBK Yeah, are they listed are they, there? (Looks at shipwreck chart). Oh these are all sailing vessels, they’re not the freighters. They’re not the, no they’re all sailing vessels. I can remember the Westaway went ashore at Pond Cove. It was on a Sunday. No, they’re not the, they’re not the ones, Penny. No. No the… Hilbert Garron. Hilbert Garron had the name of her in front of his house for years. The nameplate that come off of her. All gold colour.

CG So there were those boats called freighters. And then this boat that your father was on out of Yarmouth, that went between Yarmouth and Gloucester, was…

DBK Yep. Passenger. Passenger boat and freight, too.

CG What, what fueled that boat?

DBK She was steam. See the black smoke? That’s steam. Yeah. Yeah she carried passengers between Boston and Yarmouth. And then the Eastern Steam Ships came in after that. The Evangeline, the Yarmouth and the Acadia. They were there during the war, until, part of the war they took the larger ones, they took her down, in fact someone told me that they lost the Yarmouth down, down south somewhere during the war, they lost her. But the Evangeline and the Acadia, the Acadia used to run to uh Yarmouth to Boston and from Saint John to Boston. That was before, that was in the railway days. And she, in fact they brought her right up through here. Right up through the Passage, here. They brought her right up through. Yeh. And, just trying to think. I didn’t know what you people were going to talk about, I could have had some of this stuff…

CC (Laughs) We kind of don’t know until we get to a place any, either, what we’re going to talk about!

CG Anything and everything.

DBK Yeh. Well I’m going to tell you a little story. About this one, here. Gail.

CG I was going to definitely make sure we…

DBK Yeah. Gail was to uh, to graduate in the summer. What year was it, Gail?

GAIL Don’t ask me. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Which…

DBK When you graduated, and I… Anyway…

GAIL OK, it had to be in…

DBK In the fifties. In the fifties. Because I was, I was towing boats to Boston. I used to do it for business. And we started in fifty-five and run for about ten years. Anyway, we towed the boats to Boston, and I had a fellow with me, I had a french fellow name of Louis Germain, you probably, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him or not but he was around here for years. He worked with me, he was with me for quite awhile, all the while I had the boats. Anyway, Louis, and then I had a chap from down at Bear Point, Cecil Halliday was the engineer with me. And we used to take strings of boats and tow ‘em to Boston. And we’d leave here with them and we’d go down there and deliver them to people along the way. We’d stop in Rockland and Portland, different places, and get clear of the boats. So, we get down there, I was to get her a graduation dress. This one. This is Gail. And so, we were, we were coming back from Boston, and we’d sail, we’d left Boston, er Gloucester, we left in the afternoon and we were going to sail overnight and I was going in to Rockland to go to, to pick her up a graduation dress. So we got in, got up to Rockland, and Louis went with me, and Cecil went with me. No we’d been in that boat over a week, we’d been aboard that boat. And we went up there, and went, just to show you what we’d do, we went up to the most expensive place, what was it Senator Crane’s. I remember the name. They had a great big store.

CG A dress shop?

DBK Pardon?

CG That was the dress shop?

DBK No, no, they had everything. Department store. They had four floors. So I asked someone where to find a graduation dress, and would you believe it we had to go to the very top. Up we go, Cecil, they followed me, they were all right with me, and we went into the, up there, and they had them in a glass cage. I remember that cage just as, it was all glassed in. And I was looking at them and there was three ladies standing over there that was waiting on us. Supposed to be waiting on us. And whether they got a whiff, or a look at us, we didn’t look too prosperous or what, but anyway they didn’t, none of them, they all hesitated to come wait on us. So anyway after a while I thought it over, I got nerve enough to ask them if I could see a certain dress. In the meantime, when we were in Boston, they used to pay us for the boats, pay us for some boats and pay us for, for towing them down. We got two hundred dollars a boat for towing them down. And we’d had our, had our money with us. So this little, I remember she was a little short lady, she came over, I asked her if I could see a certain dress. She wasn’t very obliging, but she said she would show it to me. So it was, pink, wasn’t it?

GAIL Yes. With a satin…

DBK It was a pink dress, and I said I think a size twelve, wasn’t it? Yeh, I says, that’s the one I want. I asked her how much it was, and she told me, and I reached in my pocket, and I’d had a whole lot of money in my pocket. I hauled these rolls of bills out of my pocket to pay her for it… A whole different atmosphere! (Laughter) Everything was lovely! Can, can have anything you wanted. But doesn’t that show you! Shows you what happens. But just the minute I hauled that roll of money out, it was a different story.

CC Yes, Mr. Kenney, sir! (Laughs)

DBK Yessir, yessir. So that was my trip to Senator Crane’s.

VIOLA Tell the star story about Louis.

PENNY Tell the star, star story about him…

DBK The what?

PENNY The star. Following the star?

DBK Oh yeah, that was Louis. Louis was a French fella couldn’t read nor write. And this is true, these stories are true. Couldn’t read nor write and we had left Gloucester. This was the Danny and Penny which is the white model up there. Anyway we had left Gloucester on our way home and of course it was coming night. In the meantime, well just as we got going, we burned a compass light out. Compass, you know you had a binnacle light for to see with? So Cecil says, oh I’ll fix that, he went down and got a roll of tape and he took a little bulb and he put it in and wrapped it with tape and put it there so the end was sticking out and shone on the compass, and we could see it all right, we could see, where, to steer, so I told Louis, I said Louis, I said you’re first, first turn at the wheel. We’d take two hours apiece. Two hours would give us a chance to lay down for awhile? In the meantime, the old compass light got hot, the old tape stuck, the old fashioned type I don’t know if you remember or not, used to burn. Used to smell like, terrible. And Louis said I can’t stand this, the smell is terrible. So…

CG Like dead horses, or something.

DBK Oh, honest. Well, I say Louis, I don’t know what we’re going to do, but I knew that we could do it. Anyway I went out and I lined up a star. Just about, I looked on the compass, so we’d go parallel to the land, you know, we were going up, up the coast. I lined up a star and I said Louis, you steer for that star. Louis says all right. So I didn’t, I didn’t pay any attention and, so it was my turn to lay down. So I lay down, and I wasn’t there I betch half an hour, and tapped me on the shoulder. He says Daniel, he says, you gotta get up. I say what’s the trouble, Louis? He says the star’s gone. (Laughter) That was true! Louis and the star! The star’s gone! Yeah.

CC What kind of boats were these you were towing down to…

DBK All kinds. Pleasure boats, everything. We’d tow them down to Salem, Massachussetts.

CG Boats that were newly built?

DBK Yep.

CG Brand new boats that people…

DBK Some were new, some were second hand. People would come up here and buy them, see, they’re, they could get more for their money up here, and they bought them and then they… I did that for years. Towed them down, towed as high as a dozen at a time.

CC My goodness. How would you keep them all…

CG You’d tow a dozen at a time?

DBK A dozen, yeah. Strung right out in a string.

CG So you owned, at that time, you owned one boat, yourself?

DBK Yeah. There’s a model of her.

CC I’m going to get a picture of that, too.

CG What was the name of that boat?

DBK That was the Danny and Penny, named after Danny and his sis.. and Penny.

CC How did you choose those two children to name your boat after.

GAIL Exactly!

DBK That was the first one. They were the youngest.

VIOLA Danny’s father said, if you have a lot of “N”s in the name of a boat, it’s very lucky.

CC Oh. I never heard that before.

VIOLA And we had the Kenney name, and then Penny and Danny, so we had lots to choose from.

DBK And then I named them, um, Gail and Nancy, after Gail and Nancy, we had her. And we had different names, we had different, you know over the years we had a few boats and we used to change the name. Nan and Gail, and it was, it was really really interesting, it was a great thing to do. I mean I’ve made a lot of friends down there, and, I’m going to tell you a little story about one chap that.. Teddy Olinsky, he was a Polish chap that lived in Salem, Mass, in fact we were to see him two years ago. The wife and I went to see him for the last time, and, he, some deal, I don’t remember just what the deal was, but anyway there was a cheque, he sent me cheque I think it was for six or seven hundred dollars. And, he felt that he owed it to me. And I said Teddy you don’t owe that to me so what we did we turned right around and mailed it back to him. Mailed the cheque back. And when we were down, when his wife called us to tell us that he had passed on, just this summer, he died this summer, she said Teddy had said the only true friend he ever had in his life… See I didn’t take, I could have taken advantage of that money. But I didn’t, I wouldn’t take it and the results was that we used to go and see him every year. In fact we used to send him a halibut every summer, yeah we’d send him down a halibut. Yeah, Teddy. Teddy Olinsky.

VIOLA But we took many pleasure cruises to Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Virgin Islands…

DBK Oh yeah, we used to take trips together. After he retired. He was a mechanic and a good one. A good, beautiful mechanic. He could do anything. But anyway, Teddy, after he retired, his wife Evelyn, would come down to Florida, they’d rent a place right close to us or something and we’d go on a trip, go to the Caribbean. Take a week, a week to you know, one of those, they’d come pick us up at the bus, took us to the ship, brought us back home. It was really nice. We were to a lot of places.

CC When you got in the fish business, and you were shipping salt fish to the Caribbean, did you go down yourself?

DBK Not, no I didn’t. I went there afterwards, we were to Santo Domingo, we were to Venezuala, we were to Santo Domingo. We were there. But the people that I had been doing business with were gone then. Yeah, yeah it was big business, then. (Question from background). Sanchez, Sanchez, yeah. Rafael. Rafael Sanchez.

[GAIL] Remember he used to send a beautiful big fruit cake every year?

VIOLA And I had enough when the kids were married that I had either their white fruitcake or their dark fruitcake.

CC Oh, nice.

PENNY He came here, though, didn’t they? Sanchez.

VIOLA Oh yes, he came here.

DBK Pardon? Yeah, he was here. Stayed with us. But it was a really good experience, I mean. We went to uh, we went to South America. What was it? What was the name of the place we went in? No, not Aruba, no. We were to Aruba, but when we went into, when we went to that place where we went in the dungeons. What was that?

PENNY Venezuela? It was in Venezuela, but what was the name of the place? You know, that she knows the name of the place…

VIOLA Cartahena.

DBK Cartahena. We went into Cartahena, and this, this is kind of cute. I sort of get a kick out of it. Anyway, we went to Cartahena and, we didn’t go off the ship right at first. A lot of the people were just flocking to get off the ship you know, to go, ‘cause you could buy things cheap down there. South America. So, we didn’t go quite, quite as fast as they did and we waited and we were pretty near the last ones off. Anyway, we went, we walked along, we didn’t, the people were trying to get you to take your buses, their taxis, whatever. We went to the end the line wasn’t it, Viola? And this little guy was there, and we asked him about taking us. There was six of us. Teddy and Evelyn, and Viola and I, and up to Digby, uh…

VIOLA Dorothy and Lloyd…

DBK Grant. From up Barton. Up to Barton. And we decided we were going to take a run. So anyway, by the gosh he had one of these little gol-darned cars. And the six of us tried to get into that little car. We got in it!

VIOLA You know who sat on the edge, don’t you?

DBK He didn’t have any, he didn’t have any second gear. He just had two gears. Low and high. And he decided, he turned to him and he said, uh, you heard tell of Abel in the Bible? He says I’m Abel. Yeah, he says I’m Abel. So he took us, we wanted to go to the dungeons, we’d heard tell of the dungeons, and it was a, it was a prison made into a shopping mall. Right from the street, I mean they had these doors they lifted up, you were just right along the street. So anyway Abel took us there, and we got out, and that’s where we bought all the coffee for what, a dollar a pound or something like that?

VIOLA He went in first, and asked the owner of this boutique not to harass us to buy? That we would take our time and look but that we would buy. We never had one minute trouble, he did that everywhere we would go.

CC Valuable guide!

DBK Yeah, he was well worth the money. But anyway, we bought coffee there. Teddy bought ten pounds, I bought ten pounds. Well after I bought the coffee I had to buy a bag to put it in, so we bought a bag to put the coffee in, to bring it back with us. And anyway, we went out on the street, along the streets there they were selling tablecloths, they were selling all kinds of linens, everything. You could buy anything you wanted, there. We did our shopping and… Viola, you did get some tablecloths out of it, didn’t you? Yeah, she got tablecloths out of it. But anyway, we went back to the ship. The funny part is going to come up. We went back to the ship and we went aboard, and when we come back, what we did we flew to Jamaica, and took the ship out of Jamaica. So when we come back to Jamaica again, we had to get the plane back to Tampa. So we got the plane, to get on the plane to go to Tampa, I let my bag of coffee go with my, rest of my baggage. I didn’t bother with it. Teddy kept his with him. Teddy kept his bag of coffee with him. When we got off the plane in Tampa, going through the customs, when we went through, we went through flying colours. Then we had to wait what, fifteen minutes for Teddy? They wanted to go right straight through his bag of coffee, his bag. Examined everything. Never touched us. Never said a word.

CC They were wondering what he was taking out of Jamaica!

DBK Right. Oh boy, it was funny. You couldn’t bring apples back. You couldn’t bring any kind of fruit. Nothing.

CC I’m, I just need to be able to picture you towing all these boats down to New England. How did you keep them in control?

DBK Well, if you had, you can’t do it today, but if you had time, we’ve got, we got a movie of it. In those days we had the eight millimetre movies. Eight millimetre, and we had pictures taken of all the tows. And Danny, my son, had it all put into one. One large one. That, that would show you everything. How we did it, and how, everything. We operated for ten years, and we went back and forth probably three four times a year. And people would come up and buy ‘em and they would call us. In fact we even went as far as Lunenburg and got ‘em. We got a sailing, got a sailing boat out of Lunenburg, and we towed different, different things. And we took ‘em down, we went as far as New York. There’s one little story I want to tell you. This is true!

CG They’re all true, aren’t they?

DBK Yeah they’re all true, but this one, this one, it gets to you. We, we met a guy by the name of Solo. Dr. Solo. He came here and he stayed with us different times while he was having a boat built. And he had his boat built, and he decided he wanted to take it, wanted us to take it down and we decided, he got it all ready so we took our boat as far as Boston. And then there was two boats. One was going down further, for that, that flying officer that was here. Anyway, it was going to go down further, so we decided that we’d steam the other two boats. Cecil would take one, and I’d take the other. And we had a fella by the name of Raymond, Raymond down there…

VIOLA Hanson?

DBK No, no. No down to, that lived down Irishtown, down there. Yeah remember he lived down, they lived here, what? Yeah, in Hermie’s house. Anyway, we decided there’s two men in each boat see. So we went, we started out from Boston, went down to Rhode Island, out that way, and we got over there. Where were we going to take them? A place called Fire Island? Which is on the lower end of Long Island. We went in to Fire Island inlet, and we tied them up there for the night, and the old doctor come down. And he come down and he says to me, you see some things I had bought and some things Cecil had bought. So he says I will fix up with you for what I owe you. Well, I didn’t pay any attention. And then he says to Cecil, and then he says I’ll go see Cecil, and pay Cecil. The results, neither one got anything.

CC and CG Ooohh.

DBK One of those deals.

CG And he probably had lots of money, living around Fire Island.

DBK Yep. Dr. Solo. He was a, operated on for uh cancer. Cancer uh doctor.

CG What kinds of things would you have bought? Did you actually pay for these boats up front?

DBK Yeah, no, he paid for the boat, but Cecil did all the riggin’ I call it. Putting the engine in, getting it going and all that stuff. And see Cecil had a record of what he had, he says I’ll fix up with, he says I’ll go pay Cecil, I’ll fix up with Cecil. And see he just disappeared. The boat was there, and we were due to go back to Boston the next morning. Due to go back to Boston, so the results was neither one of them got it. So that’s, things can happen. That was the worst one that we had.

(Background talking)

DBK Oh yeah, that’s another story. But on that same, same uh time, that same time we were, we had to take a train into New York to catch a bus back to Boston. And see we had all of our bedclothes, we had everything, we were there. And we were, now Louis could neither read nor write as I told you. And there we were in the bus station, the Greyhound bus station, waiting to catch the bus back to Bos… at the same time, there was a Jehovah’s Witness meetings in New York, and they were trying to get bus, I don’t know just where they were going. Anyway the place filled full. So I said to Cecil, I said Cecil, we were sitting in the corner of a set of stairs, I remember, going upstairs, and we were in the corner we had our stuff piled on top these stairs and I said to Cecil I think I’ll go out and get a, something just to remember New York by, being there. Yeah Cecil says, I’ll go with ya. We turned around and Louis, you’re not leaving me in New York by a damn sight! You’re not leaving me here. He thought we were going to leave him. (Laughter). Ohhh. No, he was funny. He was, he was a good head. He was the cook. Louie was the cook. And we, when we got our money down there, down to Boston, we used to, at night, coming home, we’d get it out on the table to sort out who we owed and what we had to pay for, you know? And we asked Louis to count it. Louis started and counting in french and he’d go into english and go back into french and ohhh… But we had some good times.

CC Sounds like it.

DBK Now what did you want, what was the ones you wanted to, Penny?

GAIL No I was, I was asking you about the time…

DBK Oh about the time, oh yeah. We used to go up to a place called Salem, going into Salem we had to go underneath these bridges, these bridges that went across the harbour. And we had to go in with the tide, you see, you had to have the tide just right to get underneath them. So we had our boat, and they opened the bridge for us to take the large boat, ‘cause she had spars, take her up. We used to moor up in a place called Danversport. That’s where we used to tie up. And we kept the boats there, so come the time, the next morning we were supposed to deliver two down to, down to Quincy. We had to take two of them. He was, Cecil was taking one and I was taking one. So we got all ready to take the boats to Quincy, and, so uh, we started out. In the meantime I had left something, the paperwork to the boat, I had left it aboard of our boat so I went back to get it. So when I come out, the channel went, made a circle like, went around with a big bar right in the middle of it like that, and we had to go around it to get to the bridge. When I come out I broke around the corner and looked, here was Cecil, high and dry. He had run on the bar. Well, I, he says can you pull me off? I says I don’t believe, you’re too, ‘cause he was going at a good speed, you know and all along there it was mud. I said I don’t believe I can do anything with that, Cecil. I said I think what I’ll do is take this one down, and um have to take the other one tomorrow. Wait till tomorrow morning. So we started out, we went down, we delivered the one we had, and the chap that I took it to, he drove us back up to Danversport again. And when I got off, when we got out of the car to go to the, go to the boat, we looked and Cecil was just coming around the corner. He was just coming back. He spent the whole day on there! The next morning, I said Cecil, I said it’s your turn to take this one, I said I took the other one. The next morning, he started out, and everything was going fine, but when he had to go down he didn't allow for the tide being so high, and when he went underneath the bridge he cleaned the top house off it. (Laughter) That didn’t set very good.

CG He hit bottom and he hit top!

DBK Gee! Anyway, you know he never said a word to me about that. I found it out afterwards, after we were on the way home. I don’t know who was with him, anyway they told me about him doing it. So I asked him about it. Yeah, he said, had a little accident. I said what happened. He says well, caught on the bridge. I said caught on the bridge! Yeah, he didn’t allow for it. If he’d a stopped her he could have pulled her through by hand, you see. Because when the boat goes, tips the bow up, raises them in the air. Oh boy. Oh we had some awful rackets.

CG So you, that was just a little sort of sideline, for you, this towing boats down.

DBK Yep. Yeah, yeah.

CG And where did you get the idea? Was anyone else doing it?

DBK Well, from that same chap, Teddy Olinski. We were down there, my sister and Viola and I and her husband, we went down to Boston and I’d always heard tell of Eddie Jaffey who used to sell car engines and I was going to buy some car engines and bring them back here for the fishermen. So we went in there to see him and this guy was there. This Teddy was working there. And uh, we got to talking, Eddie Jaffey introduced me to him, here’s a guy like to talk boats to you. So we got talking and he said he’d like to get a new boat. Well, that’s no problem, lots of places to get boats. Oh, you’re like all the rest of them up there in Canada. You’ll get back, never see ya again. But he did see me. Anyway, I called, when I got back home, after we had our trip we come, in fact Danny was just a baby, wasn’t he? Yeah. Danny was just a baby. We had him with us. And we come back home, and I called some chap that was up at Weymouth North used to build boats. I called and asked him, and he gave me a price what he would build one for Teddy for, and I got in touch with him, told him what I could get it for, he says get it built. So I got it built and that’s what started the friendship. Right from getting his boat, and we towed that boat from Weymouth North we towed it to, over to Eastport Maine. And he brought a truck up, and brought a load of engines for me, and we hoisted the truck up onto, uh the boat up onto the flat bed that he had and he took it to Salem. In fact he just sold that, what, two years ago? Just sold it two years ago. Had it all that time. Yeah. But he was, he was a wonderful person. He knew, he knew everything about engines. Yep.

CG So you brought a bunch of…

DBK Engines.

CG …engines back for fishermen here.

DBK Yeah, and some of them I never got paid for too.

CG Yeah? (Laughter)

DBK I sold them to, I sold them to one chap, won’t mention any names, but I sold them to him up on the Neck, there, never got a cent for it. Well, that was all right, but when I come to settle with Jaffey I had to pay for it. See he had the engines on consignment. Oh dear. But anyway, lot of fun.

CG This was about the same time as you were getting involved with MacLaughlan…

DBK No I was, I was in with MacLaughlan. I got the boat afterwards and I used to boat the lobsters over to Grand Manan to the pound. To him. We boated them to him. In fact we boated them to him all the while we were doing business. With those people. And they went on for quite a few years. But anyway, when I bought the business out, that was just a salt fish business. The lobsters, we took the lobsters, that was my father’s business. See and we took them with, with um, I carried my father’s lobsters, I got two cents a pound.

VIOLA I was the boss. He used to call me the night before and tell me what to go, tell them what to do. And one of the men down there said I despise taking orders from a woman. But they didn’t give me a hard time.

DBK Yeah that was a Barnaby.

CC So when you took over the fish business… when your father was in the lobster business he would buy lobster from people, but he wasn’t directly employing people in any other way…

DBK Oh yeah, he had the fish business. Oh yeah, he had a fish business there, too. Oh yeah, D.B. Kenney Fisheries, he had a fish business there.

CC Oh he had a fish business. I didn’t realize.

DBK In fact as I say we just tore the last of it down this year. See we had that storm in seventy six. That blew the main, main building blew on its side, so I had uh, I had bought it from my mother. After Dad died, I bought it out from my mother. And the main building blew over so we tore it down. Just kept to office part. Which Penny used for two or three years, anyway. We kept the office part because I wanted it for, you know just for a landmark that we owned it. And after, after that blew over, I had the, the plant that Danny has now was mine. That I got from MacLaughlan Brothers, I bought it from them. And Danny, as I said I give it to Danny and he took it over, oh it’s been pretty near twenty years, now. Seventeen, eighteen years anyway. And he’s uh, he’s made it what it is today. He’s gone to work and built it up to it’s present.

CC I guess what I’m, you know when I think of the Kenney name, I think of the major employer on the Islands…

DBK Yeah. Well, see he had that place in Tiverton, too, you know. He had that one of Small Brothers. And he had just moved from there down here this year, last year. It used to be in Tiverton but it wasn’t paying, so they moved the operation down here so he could keep an eye on it. It’s operating down here. Still, they’re still going, I mean they’re still, they’re still processing fish, in fact they had a dragger in last night and they’re expecting one today. They’re still… we got into controversy over him selling his quota. You remember? You probably saw that in the paper.

CG Yeah, I was in, working in Prince Edward Island. I actually missed most of that.

DBK Oh yeah? That’s uh, well, that was up to him. He wanted to get out, he had twenty two boats. And he wanted to get out of it. The boats were getting old, and the government kept…

CG The stocks are low, and…

DBK Yeah. They went to work and kept the, cutting the quotas so, he got a chance and the government wanted to buy the quota so he sold it to the government. Got out of it, and in fact he’s, what has he got, two, three more to sell and all the draggers will be gone. He had twenty two. All he kept the scallopers. He kept his scallop boats. He has all of those.

CG Was that boat your very first boat?

DBK The Robert S. was the first one. My brother bought it, and like I said he rigged it, he rigged it up an he, he got tired of it and I took over the debt in the bank. I think he owed two thousand and something on it, and I took it over, I kept it awhile, I used it for, we had a seine. We used to go seining for pollock in the spring and carried fish with it, carried lobsters and, and then I got it in my head I wanted a boat, so I had it, she was built brand new up at Hillsburn, on the Bay shore. And I went up there and bought it, I paid forty three hundred dollars for it.

CG How many feet long?

DBK Fifty four feet. Forty three hundred. That’s what I paid for it.

CG What year was that boat built?

DBK She was built in fifty six.

CG Yup. A good year.

DBK Yup, I bought her, what was his name? Longmire, Bernard Longmire built it. Yup. He built the boat, and we brought her home, and we used her for towing boats and we used her for carrying lobster and carrying herring and everything we could.

CG It was a real all type purpose boat. Is it have a certain type of boat? Does it have a certain name?

DBK Well, it was a scalloper. Built for a scalloper. And he sold it to me. And then we went from that to another one. I sold that one across to New Brunswick, she went [ ?] er…

VIOLA Newfoundland.

DBK No, no. She went to New Brunswick, over to Deer Island.

VIOLA Which one went to Cape Fogo?

DBK Fogo. Not one of those, but anyway, I had two, three others after that. The last one I had is that blue one, that blue one right there. That’s a model of it, that one there’s the last one I had. And that’s got history! Can you remember when that tow boat sank that seiner down off of Yarmouth?

CG Nope.

DBK You should.

CC No I don’t!

DBK Can’t you remember? Art Ellis was the captain of this tow boat, and he run over top of that, that, she was a seiner, and she had the seine on her. He ran over it and sank it and the man in the bottom, remember they cut the hole and cut the man out alive?

CG Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

DBK Remember that? Well that’s her. Silver King, was the name of it. And they went to work and they took it into Yarmouth, stayed there for awhile, and the people over here, uh, Meteghan shipyard, owned it, they had built it and they owned it and they took it up there and hauled it out and rebuilt it and I bought it from them. That’s where I got it. And I kept her for three, four years. Danny run it. In fact Danny and Roy run it. They run it four a couple of years, and it wound up I sold it in Newfoundland. Yep.

CC Who built your models for you?

DBK The models. That one there’s history. That was built by Captain Payson, uh, lived over here on the corner. Captain Payson built that one, and uh Charlie MacDormand bought it, got it from Milledge Hicks, took it to Frank Shaw, and Frank Shaw rigged it, and he wanted fifty dollars for rigging it, he said if you pay for the rigging you can have it. And I bought it for fifty dollars and I still got it.

CC Mmm. It’s beautiful.

DBK Yeah. You see the sign that’s on it, do you?

CC Yes. (Everyone laughs).

DBK Look at the little figurehead, underneath, under the bow there.

CG Oh yes!

CC Beautiful. Yeah.

PENNY You must know, you must have known Shirley Clayton, didn’t you Cindy, in Digby?

CG I heard of him.

PENNY Yeah he, I got him to build the Danny and Penney for Dad, and that other one over there, and the one on the top. He did that one, yeah.

DBK I’ve been offered quite a lot of money for that one. Because that’s the last salt vessel that ever came here. The Lillian E. Kerr. And so I said as long as I’m around it’s going to be there. So we’ve kept it, yeah.

CG What’s a salt, what was a salt vessel’s purpose?

DBK Salt! Carried salt. Yeah, it’d go to the Turks Islands.

VIOLA Dad used to put his loader in that hold, hold of the…

DBK Put it in the hole, yeah.

VIOLA … and he used to scoop it…

DBK Scoop the salt up. See salt was very heavy. I worked in salt boats for ten cents an hour.

CC You worked where for ten cents an hour?

DBK In salt, shovelling salt. Ten cents an hour.

CC What year was that/

DBK Oh, I was just a young fella.

CC Yeah?

DBK Yeah, I worked for Barkhouse for ten cents an hour.

CG So that’s a sailing ship. So you can remember sailing ships.

DBK Yeah. Oh yes. A lot of them. I remember when the Westaway went ashore down at Pond Cove, was on a Sunday. She went ashore and they dismasted her. She was owned by um people in Weymouth owned it, Viola.

VIOLA Hankinson’s?

DBK No. Where, whatchacallit, [?] Moore’s wife, was her brother. Brooks, yeah. They dismasted her down there, took the spars out and put them in another vessel. But she was a total loss. In fact she, you’ve seen it. You kids have been down there and seen it. Some remnants of her are still there. The ribs and that stuff. Yeah. There was three brothers owned that. Publicover, the three of them. I know Andy was the skipper, and the, I saw them go up the main stay, going up to the top mast, go up the main stay and go down the other one, make the whole circle, going [?] They only weighed a hundred and twenty five or thirty pounds at that time. Boy they were supple.

CG I saw a little bit of that kind of action when the tall ships were here this year. People hanging from the rigging.

DBK The rigging. Yeah, yeah. Yup. You gotta be sure-footed on that, haven’t you? Yeah. Well how you making out?

CG Well we could talk to you all day. Do you want to take a break, though?

DBK Laughs.

CC We might drive him to his first drink!

PENNY You used to raise foxes, Dad.

DBK What? Yeah, we raised foxes.

VIOLA We raised, when I, when we were first married, cause I used to help [?]

DBK Yeah, we raised foxes and I had a tame one. I had one, name was Mushy.

CG Mushy.

DBK Mushy. His mother kicked him out and I got him and took him and Inez Moore over there had a female cat with kittens, and she put him in with those kittens and that cat raised that fox!

CC Wow.

DBK Yup. Raised him until he got big, started to, to um, so he wanted to eat. When he wanted to eat, if another kitten was there, he’d turn his back, stern towards him so to push him out of the way. I can remember him, he, and we had a dog, we had a dog here too, and, Mister Man he’d make the dog hustle, he wouldn’t give him a chance to do anything. He grew, the body of him was that long. He was quite a big fox. Silver fox. Silver black. And we raised them for years. We had them there until the bottom went out of that, you couldn’t make any money, and so my father sold them.

CC What caused the bottom to go out of fox farming?

DBK Just like everything else. The mink farming’s gone, a lot of it too. Over production. There was a large one in Tiverton. Elliott’s had a large one up there.

CG Fox?

DBK Fox, oh yeah a large one. They had hundreds. Oh yeah. We had, I think we had about seventy five. But you had to feed them, you know. You’d feed them bread and some stuff they had made up for them, same as a dog food, you fed them that, and then you gave them the good meal at night. Boys I’m telling you they were slippery birds, I had a good many bites from them.

CC Oh yeah?

VIOLA And got [?] from it too.

DBK Hmm? Oh yeah, got I got poisoned, one of them…

CG Bite?

DBK Yeah. From the fingernail. But they, that old Mushy. He was quite a character.

CC I didn’t know you could tame a fox.

DBK Yeah we tamed him. We brought him here, well not here but over home, there, we kept him over there, and I kept him in the wood house at night. Oh yeah, I let him out in the yard. I never tied him or anything. He’d go, he’d follow me around with his tail just a waggin’ all the time. Tail just going all the time.

CG So raising foxes had nothing to do, it wasn’t at all complementary with fish plant waste or anything like that.

DBK No.

CG You didn’t feed them fish, so…

DBK Yeah, we fed them fish, we had to grind it. We had a grinder down in the, we had what you call a pelting shed, we had a shed up there and we had a grinder in there and we’d grind the meat and grind the fish together. To feed them.

CG This is a whole new industry. You had to teach yourself and learn.

DBK Yeah, we bought them up here in Tiverton, up here, is where we got the foxes to start with. I think he had three pair, we started with, and then you’d go, you’d buy from some other breeder, you know, to get your breed up. Keep going ahead, but it was a nerve-wracking outfit. You had to keep at them things all the time. You had to go in, you had to go in those cages and clean them out, yourself, you had to go clean them. See they had a little house affair built inside, and a little opening for them to go in, and inside of it was another little building made out of cedar. That was on account of fleas. Made out of cedar, about this long, and they’d go in and around it and come in, come into their little nest. Where their nest was. That’s the females. Yeah it was quite a…

CG About what years was this taking place?

DBK Oh gosh, well, I was, it was before I was married. It was before I was married because, um, Mushy was gone…

VIOLA Yes, but, you raised one for me and I had it made into a neck piece.

DBK Yeah. Yeah. I had a neck piece made up of one.

CG It’s earlier than I would have thought.

DBK Yeah I was, probably, I was probably eighteen, nineteen years old when he got them. Was quite a while. ‘Cause I went up, that one they had up in Tiverton was an immense great thing. That’s been gone for years and years. We used to, we raised the silver black. That’s what they were. And we used to take them and go up to Bridgetown, they’d have a, have, uh you’d go up and take your pelts up there and they would assess them and one thing another and see what you’re going to get for them. But they had a, at that time they had a marketing outfit to sell them for you.

CC Do you remember what you would have got for a good pelt in those days?

DBK Oh, sixty, seventy dollars.

CC Wow! Big money!

PENNY Tell them about the dog you trained to go to the store, Dad.

DBK Huh? Oh yes, I, I’ve had dogs since I was seven years old. This poor old fella here was, I don’t want to talk about it, but anyway. I had a, it was part shepherd, he was a part shepherd and he was a part water dog. He was born over here in Freeport. Uh, Fred Brooks, you’ve probably heard tell of the name. Fred Brooks, he has a daughter, he only had one daughter. Anyway, he raised these dogs, and I bought one and I didn’t dare to bring it home. So I hired Georgie Clements down here in Irishtown to keep it for me until he got you know, big enough so that I could train him. And that dog, hard to believe the things he would do. We’d go to work and take and write a note, give him a basket, put the note in the basket, give him a nickel and he’d put the nickel under his tongue, hold it, go to the store, do anything. It was just, let him go, see, go ahead. His name was Rex. Say Rex, you go down to [?] and do an errand. He’d take that basket and away he’d go. If a dog stopped him on the way he’d set his basket down and whatever they had to say to him he’d let them say it. That’s how he was, that’s true! And he’d go and go down to the store, if he wanted an ice cream he’d have a nickel under his tongue or a dime, he’d go up to, he’d put his feet up on the counter and spit it out to ‘em. And [?] would give him his ice cream. Yeah. And he could take an egg, I’d put an egg in his mouth, and he’d jump over the fence with an egg in his mouth. Never crush it.

CC Unbelievable, eh?

DBK It is, it was just an ordinary dog.

CG This is the only story you’ve told us that could possibly be far fetched. But I believe it!

DBK What do you mean, far fetched? Ask her!

CG It’s the nickel under the tongue that kills me.

DBK Yup. Oh yeah!

VIOLA The only reason we got rid of him was because when [?] came along, he was so jealous of her that we didn’t dare leave him anywhere near her, and so Dad was going away in the boat and I had made connections with someone in Meteghan. And he took him to Meteghan.

DBK Yeah, he’d jump the fence. Jump the fence with a basket of eggs, you know. He could do anything! He’d just seem as though you’d talk to him and he’d put his head on one side, he’d listen to you. He was some dog! I’ve never seen one, if I, if I could have been, in fact I, I sent to Ripley’s one time, what was that?

PENNY Believe it or not?

DBK Yeah. I sent it to Ripley’s one time, but I… He really, he really was smart. Toby was his father. Yeah then we had one named Thumper, a shepherd. Danny had the dog, and he, uh…They had him down in, they kept him in the porch, and of course the first thing they got a mess or two and then they got disgusted and he came up by and wanted to know if I wanted the dog. So, we took the dog and we had Thumper until he died up in, hospital up in Kentville. But, we used to take him to Florida. I’d take him to Florida with me every winter. He’d sit in the back of that wagon, just as big as Billy be Damned. Didn’t make any difference to him! And I would go down, every day I’d go down to get a newspaper, in the, to get a newspaper to have, I wouldn’t put him on the walk. They had a boardwalk, you know, to walk over to the office? I’d say Thumper you sit here, I’m going to go get a paper. He’d sit there and I’d come back and everybody went by him he’d never look sideways. Never. Make no difference. He really, really was trained. And there was a lady, remember that, a man and a woman they had a dog and they wanted to know if I’d train their dog for them. You can’t train a dog unless it’s a good dog. Because they learn so quick. Anyway, we had him and I was away in the truck, I was trucking for Danny, I was running fish to Boston, and he got sick. Who took him to Kentville? Penny took him to Kentville. And he died up there.

PENNY You had him trained to tow the boat out, remember?

DBK Had him what?

PENNY You had him trained to tow the tender up off the beach for you, remember?

DBK Oh yeah, he’d do everything. He really was smart. I’ve had two that really was, really was smart.

CC Rex and Thumper.

DBK Yeah. But I first started out I got a, the first dog I ever got was a collie, they got it for me I was seven years old, down at Gull Rock Farm. Charlie Rogers had the farm and he gave the dog to Dad and Dad brought it home under his coat. And we had him for quite awhile. Rex. He was collie. But uh, the most important dogs that I had were shepherds, you could do anything with.

VIOLA But your collies were good when you were home, girls, weren’t they?

DBK And then we had a grey one. Grey… you remember that one that used to watch you fellas, every move you made? Prince. Yeah. But uh, these little ones, here, they’re, they’re clever. They can learn but… We had one before we had this last one, we had a little grey one. He was the same, [Shu-Shitzu], and man, he was a nice little dog, but by the gee you couldn’t train him. Couldn’t train him! Couldn’t trust him, not a bit.

VIOLA They’re very hard to train.

CC Yeah? High strung.

DBK Yeah. But this little guy here, this last one, never had one thing from the time, if he’d get sick he can’t help it, but far as making a mess in the house, never. Nothing! Always the same.

CC Hmm. That’s good with a dog, yeah.

DBK So there now. Where are we now?

CC I want to get your views of fishing over the years. The big picture. Who was it we were talking to the other day and said years ago the lobster declined, and then they came back again?

DBK Yeah they did. They did decline, yeah. Hmm.

CC What, what would cause that? Do you have any idea?

DBK When we were buying on the shore from Watson and Harry and those boys out there, if you got five hundred pounds the first day, you, that was it. And then the next day it’d be two hundred, but I mean they’d drop right down quick. But now they’ve got these large boats, and they fish so far from home, sure they go everywhere. And they’re fishing, where they’d fish a hundred, a hundred and fifteen traps, they’re fishing three hundred now. Makes a big difference. And uh, in 1970 I took Dad’s plant over, took over the lobster business, after he died I took over the lobster business, if we got a hundred crates of lobsters the first day, exceptional. Exceptional.

CG Yup? About how many boats would that be?

DBK Probably thirty.

CG Yeah?

DBK Last year, seven hundred.

CG Yeah.

DBK First day. So that’s the difference. Another thing, the techniques…

PENNY Dad, have a sip of water.

DBK No, that’s okay. The techniques that they use today are so much different too, because they have these fish finders and they have these, everything to work with which they didn’t have in those days. If you found a fishing bottom you found it by mistake, you didn’t, you didn’t know. Now they know where every bit of it is. There’s a lot of difference. They’ve got more equipment aboard those boats now…

CG Still there were probably people that knew, for example, St. Mary’s Bay, like the back of their hand. They could picture in their head what it looked like.

DBK They could. They could tell just what the depth of water, there was one place along that shore that if they got off fifty feet one side they got off in the mud. They had to be just exactly on the spot or they didn’t get anything. But see the lobsters, at the first of the season, ran ashore anyway because they seek the warmer the temperatures. They follow it along. Yeah it’s been a… We had a, we had a, we’ve had that place full of lobsters down there, we’ve had to have a man stay there and water them down all night, we didn’t have room for them. That’s the way it is. Yeah. I’d see us go up in St. Mary’s Bay, pollock seining, when I had the old Robert S., go up there and make one set and load her. Fifty four thousand. One set.

CG So how much of your life were you actually fishing, as opposed to running [?]

DBK Oh, just the first of it. Because uh, I was running, I had the fish plant for Glen and then I was looking to see that Dad and this, we all had fish so I… and we sold them to Connors, we sold them to Davis and we sold them to the Co-op down here, different people.

CG Where did you learn to navigate so well that you could go to Boston and New York?

DBK I never took a lesson of any kind.

CG No? You’re just intrepid.

DBK Yup. One of my main strengths is stupidness. Yup. [Under the stars I was alright]. But you know, never, while I had a boat, I never put a boat ashore. Never had it ashore. We hit one, coming up through [mussel ridges] one time, Louis was steering. And I, we had a, I had a radio telephone I had bought down, Cecil had one and we were playing with this radio telephone, so Louis was steering, and he said what side of the boat would you like it on. I said oh it don’t make any difference. (Laughs) First thing, back end come up and the front end went down. We went over top of it. We never, never hurt her, took the [shoe] off of her, that’s all.

(Chris changes tape)

TAPE #2

DBK No, It wasn’t car sick. They had the flu. Because we got over to, remember I got over…

VIOLA Greta Ann, Greta Ann and the baby, here.

DBK Yeah, I got over to the customs. I’d been to New York and bought a radio telephone, remember? I bought this radio-telephone in New York and I was bringing it home, I got to customs over there, and they weren’t going to let us come. Because the guy that was supposed to appraise them wasn’t there. And it was on a Sunday night. I told them I said I’ve got to catch that boat in the morning, I said I’ve got two sick kids out there. After arguing with them for awhile I told them I’ll pay the bill, I said, I’ll give you my name and everything. You’ll get your duty, you needn’t worry about it, but I says you can assess it now, and if I’ve got anything coming back to me you can send it to me. Doesn’t matter. So after awhile I see that the, was war surplus, that’s what it was. And I had bought it down in New York, and anyway, after I was there a couple of hours, persuading them to let me go, after awhile they…

PENNY Tell them about having to bring the army boat in, the day they put the, the monument down, the Joshua Slocum…

DBK Oh yeah, that was funny. Yeah you should show them that on the tape. We’ve got that on tape in there. They uh, when they were putting the Joshua Slocum monument down to Southern Point down here? They were going to bring, aw, a cruiser or something from Yarmouth up here to um, to dedicate it. They had all the naval guys and everything, because he was a seaman, see, Joshua Slocum? Anyway they got ashore in Yarmouth Harbour, somehow, they got ashore and struck the boat, and they got up here off here and it was thick fog. The boat was out there blowing, and, and um, no one would go out to them so I got, I took Louis and I don’t know who else was with me, I said let’s go out and get ‘em. So we went out, the Danny and Penny. And she had, I had radar on her. I went out and picked her up, then I went up alongside, and they were hesitant, they didn’t want to bring it in. I said you follow me, I’ll take you in okay. So, we went to work and we brought them up, brought them up through the big passage and round the buoy and down till we got to the wharf. ‘Cause it was clear in the harbour. It was just out the mouth of the passage. Was where it was at. Anyway, this, when we had our sixtieth anniversary, there was a chap that lives down, he’s a guy down here, he comes here every summer, he has a summer home here and he’s from down South Carolina. And he gets up by gosh and tells how I rescued the Canadian navy. (Laughs) That was funny!

VIOLA The grandchildren, they had never heard that Papa rescued the navy! Cause they think anything Papa does is A-1 anyway.

CC I’m sure, yes.

DBK But anyway, it’s been a lot of, a lot of you know, good things, been a lot of hard things. I shipped a load of codfish to New York one time? A trailer load. And I used to ship it to Eastern Commission, which is a big outfit, you want to get back to fish stories. It’s a big outfit down there, I shipped, we used to ship them halibut. And everything was fine, we had no problem, we shipped them for years. So anyway, he said he wanted a load of codfish. And we got them, it had to be dried. So we loaded, we got a load of codfish and we shipped them down to him, and just the time we got them down the price went down. Well he says I’ll have to put them in cold storage. Well I said if you have to you have to, I said. Anyway, in the meantime he sold out to a Japanese outfit. And that went on for a year, I don’t know, almost two years and the first thing I got a bill from this Japanese outfit for codfish that I had shipped two years before. Got a bill! For the storage that they had put them in, cold storage. Had ate up everything. I got nothing. So that’s my experience in New York.

Cc What would cause the price to decline so quickly?

DBK Well, see the, those days, see, the Dominican Republic’s all American money. We were paid in American money. And a lot of those countries, I can tell you now, instance on the Dominican Republic, I shipped pollock down there one time, I think it was in the spring of the year, I didn’t get my money until the next year. What they did, they froze the assets of the country. And they wouldn’t let them ship the, send the money out. He says you’re going to get your money, but he says I can’t tell you when. And that’s when Pete Milburn was banker over in Freeport. He was the bank manager, and he, I don’t know if he doubted me or what, but do you know what he used to do? Every Thursday, the Bank come over here every Thursday afternoon. He’d get me and he’d go up and count the fish in the cooler, see how many I had up there. See if I’d sold any in between. ‘Cause he doubted me, you see, that wasn’t my fault. The money was, I had to borrow money from the bank then to operate because my money was all down south. I couldn’t get it. What, was it a year was it before I got that money? A year, so, wasn’t all sunshine. A lot of people think you know because you’re in the fish business you’re doing all right, but that’s not always the case. Because it’s, if you strike it, if you strike the market all right, you’re going to do all right. But if you don’t, you’re going to take what they give you. And you’re here, and they’re over there, and how do you know what they’re doing? You have no way.

CG In those days you had, you didn’t have the Internet or anything. Most of your business was done by, you did a lot of stuff on the phone? Were you on the phone a lot?

DBK Yeah, oh yeah, but here, here I’ll tell you what it is today. Years ago, they only had the telephone. You didn’t know what was going on. You, the price could be a dollar down in Yarmouth, it could be ninety cents up here. How do you know it? Unless somebody calls, or something, that’s the only way you know. And that’s the way since the, the telephone and the radio telephone on the boats has come in, if they’re fifty cents down there and they’re thirty cents here, they’re going to be fifty cents before the day’s out you can be sure. Because the word travels pretty fast. And that really happened. Lots of times, yeah. And it goes the other way, it also happens the other way too. They don’t tell you sometimes till it’s after you’ve bought ‘em and then you find out that the price has gone down somewheres else, and you’re stuck with a high priced article, and they’ve got the cheaper one, they can sell, undersell you. It’s very competitive. Yeah. Yeah.

CC How far did you go in school?

DBK I went through to grade eleven.

CC You did!

DBK Yep. No college education, no nothing. Grade eleven, yup.

CC So when you were a young boy, and going into grade eleven, what did you expect you would do as an adult?

DBK Well, I was going farming.

CC You were!

CG Yes?

DBK Yup. When I got married, I was a farmer. But it soon changed because I see that there wasn’t any money in it, I couldn’t make any money, so that I went with my father and got a basic training from him, learning you know what it’s all about, and like I say I started with MacLaughlin, my break came when I went with him. That’s when I got my break.

CG At one point did you have to formally merger the MacLaughlin business with your father’s?

DBK No, no, they was two separate outfits. And we had one bookkeeper did both businesses.

CG And that would be…?

DBK Myrna Garron.

CG Yeah, we’ve wanted to ask about her.

DBK Yep. Myrna Garron went there when she was seventeen years old with my father. And she went through with my father until he died, and then she stayed with me, and then Danny come along and she spent four, five years with Danny. Three generations.

CC My goodness.

DBK Yep. She went there when she was seventeen and she stayed all of her life. But in those days everything was cash, there was no cheques.

CG Yup?

DBK Everything, we went to the bank, I’d have to go to the bank and get the money, have it over here for when they, when they paid for the lobsters. Paid for them in cash.

CC Right?

DBK Yup. Oh there’s a lot of difference, I’ll tell ya. But now they got, what, seven or eight in the office down there? Seven or eight.

CG Your father stayed in business up until the day he died.

DBK Yup. Yeah, he was still at the business, and we didn’t do a, like I say, the last, how many years did I operate it. Five years? Last five years of his life? Five or six years I operated it for him. But I had them both together. What I used to do, I used to buy for both. I always kept them going so, I, I wouldn’t take it away from him cause he’d spent his life at it so…

VIOLA But he wouldn’t… I did not want to co-operate with government rules and regulations, the new ones?

DBK No. Nothing.

VIOLA And so he wouldn’t upgrade…

DBK The plant. Yeah he wouldn’t upgrade it.

VIOLA …the business. And Dad had to process his fish up at his plant, in order to market them.

DBK Yeah, I, what I did, see, I’d operate all into one so that I could keep his going, but I could sell his fish for him. He couldn’t sell them because he wasn’t inspected. And that’s when inspection first started.

CC What year would this be, now?

DBK In the sixties.

CC In the sixties, okay.

DBK Yeah. That’s when it first started, they came in with all these different regulations and one thing and another, and it’s been going on ever since. Ever since. Yeah.

CC So what’s the biggest change you think you’ve seen?

DBK In the fishing business?

CC Yeah.

DBK Well, when it collapsed was the biggest change. Yeah, I didn’t think it ever would, but, uh, I could see it coming though when you, when they had so many, so many draggers, and so many, many boats into it, and letting it… The government backed National Sea Products, they owned part of it and they backed them, and they got so large that they were too large. And just couldn’t stand it! The results is that we’re, we’re out. Although I mean Danny’s doing all right. We’re buying fish now, he’s getting fish from Alaska, Norway, everywhere. Buying them everywhere. They’re trucking them into us. Yup.

CG They arrive frozen, now?

DBK Yeah. And then we process them here. Put them in our packages and make whatever the order calls for. They do salmon, they do everything. Every kind of fish that swims, they do it now. Yeah. We buy scallops cheaper in Virginia than we can here.

CC Unbelievable.

DBK It is! They were taking codfish, you listen to this, they were taking codfish, buying them in Alaska, transporting them by ship to China, processing them in China, and bringing them back to the United States, cheaper than we could put them up here. In China they pay twenty-five dollars a week for labour, but they have a big boarding house, they supply everything, food and they do not have forklifts or anything, it’s all done by hand. Everything by hand, no forks, no nothing. And it’s all together different world, and they only take them from eighteen to twenty five. After they get to twenty five they have to get out. Can’t stay there.

CC In age? The workers, you mean? Oh! Interesting…

VIOLA They live in a communal unit.

DBK Commune, yeah.

CG Probably pretty close quarters.

VIOLA Very, very clean.

DBK They sent, Danny sent one of his bosses over, they sent him over to see what they were doing. Sent him right over there and watched the processing and came back with film on it. Had the whole thing on film.

CC Oohhh!

DBK Well see, what happened. That was good. He did that for what, four, five years. The first thing, the Chinese people got a hold, they’re doing this, why can’t we do it? So they’d buy the fish from Alaska and take them to China and sell them to the United States. That ended that. So no matter what you do there’s always somebody at the other side.

CC Sure.

DBK And it was, it was a good thing while it happened, while it… He bought fish, millions of pounds, and never even see them. See, you just go to work and process them, bring them in. Now, we’re buying them, like I say we have to buy them from those countries, like United States up here and from Alaska and from Norway, from Iceland, bring them in from Iceland. Bring pollock in from Iceland. Then they take them, he has a plant down in Clarke’s Harbour, which is where my father came from, he has a plant down there and they process them down there. He’s got another large plant in Jeddore.

CG Yup.

DBK You’ve seen that lobster place there?

CG No, but I know where it is.

DBK Well that’s his. Or seventy percent of it’s his. He’s got another one in Rhode Island. Lobster place. I mean he’s, you know, diversified, he’s got different places. I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t tell this stuff.

CC What, what uh, what future do you see for your grandchildren in the fishery?

DBK Grandchildren. Geez I got one now that, she’s got one there that’s just cravin’ to get into it.

CC Is that so? Which one’s that, now?

DBK Chad.

CC Chad is, is he? Yeah?

DBK Yeah.

PENNY Someone asked him not very long ago what he wanted to be when he gets out of school? He said well I might play ball for the Blue Jays or I might play hockey for the Boston Bruins and in the meantime I’m going to go fishing. They said well Chad there’s no, no fish left. He said don’t let anyone fool you, there’s always one more out there that will bite.

(Laughter)

CC It’s in his blood!

DBK Yeah. Now we’ll let her, let her tell a little bit of her, well I got, there’s one story, there’s one story I…

VIOLA Daniel’s a good fisherman, Dad.

DBK Oh yeah, I’m not saying that. There’s one story, there’s been a lot. I could go on for hours on the story deal, but there was one that I pulled off that I was really proud of. Her mother, lived in Little River, and her father, and I was doing quite, I thought I was doing quite well. I was earning a fairly good living at that time, so, we were dealing at that time with Irving Oil. And we were selling their products here. So uh, I said to, I said to myself, I didn’t tell her, she didn’t know anything about it, so I told the Irving Oil guy, I said you go up and you fill her mother, her mother’s oil tank. Fill it full. And I said you keep it full until you hear otherwise. He went up, she drove him away. Says..

CG Your mother, or you?

DBK Her mother. Said, she said she was getting her oil from Imperial Oil. Drove him away. So he come back, I said to him, I said how’d you make out? He said I didn’t. He said I didn’t make out, he said she wouldn’t let me put any oil in. I said next, when you go up the next time you fill it, regardless. And he went and he filled it. So, the funny part of the story is, but anyway he filled it, and he kept it full. So her and I went up there to see her mother, I walked in, she says hello Santa Claus. That’s what she said to me! Hello Santa Claus. I said what do you mean? Viola looked at me…

VIOLA I looked at them both, I didn’t know what was going on.

DBK She didn’t know what was going on, see, I’d never told her. I never, hadn’t said a word. So well I said I just thought probably it would help you out a little bit because I could buy it wholesale and they had to pay retail price. I, we were buying it, shipping it out. So anyway…

VIOLA She explained to me what Dan had been doing.

Chris Oohhh! You scored points!

DBK Yeah. Anyway, that went on until she, until they…

VIOLA Until Dad had to leave the house.

DBK Yeah. Yeah.

PENNY Dad you used to play Santa Claus, I can remember when I was little when you used to make sure all the needy families here had food and boots and…

VIOLA Yes

CC Is that so!

DBK Yeah.

CC We’ll get you to tell us about that, maybe. I’m just going to swing this around…

VIOLA Well actually, I wasn’t the one that did it. He was the one that did it.

CC That’s why I’m getting you to tell me about it, because he probably won’t blow his own horn!

VIOLA Well, he would pick out ones that needed it, the ones he felt that needed it and would appreciate it the best and he used to buy them, if they needed jackets or boots, or… It was not uh candy or junk food or anything like that. It was something very needful.

CC Uh huh.

VIOLA And uh it wouldn’t only be children, though, that he did it for.

PENNY No, but it used to be families with kids ‘cause I can remember going down to the store and filling the boxes and things with things, for what they needed. Right? When I was little.

CC I’m sure that was appreciated.

CC (To CG) Did you want to ask Viola a few questions about the women’s role? I’m just wondering if we should take the mics off Dan and put them on…

CG Yeah. But usually it’s picked up pretty well between two…

CC Do you find? Okay.

CG Although I’m a little worried about what we might have missed (back there).

DBK Missed. What do you mean?

CG Just comments from Viola.

DBK Yeah, well get her, sure.

CC Here let me just, so she’ll be nice and crisp and clean.

DBK This could go on till midnight.

CC It could, easily!

PENNY You didn’t tell them how musical you are, Dad. Get the accordion out!

CC Oh boy! A few sea shanties!

DBK She was always, when I was away on the boats, no matter when I’d call her on that radio telephone, she always answered.

CC Aww.

PENNY She was superstitious, too. We weren’t allowed to watch Dad out of sight.

CC Oh is that so!

PENNY We were allowed to go to the point and wave goodbye….

VIOLA I never allowed them to watch his boat sail out of sight.

CC And why was that?

VIOLA Because it would have been bad luck for him.

CG Was that your own superstition or was that one…

VIOLA That had been handed down through generations.

DBK We always went out just coming dark. Just before dark. That’s when we always left here. In the night. We’d sail all night. Because we knew, we knew, I knew everything you know around Grand Manan and these areas. We knew what it was like and we always wanted to get on the American shore just coming daylight. Next morning. So we’d let her go. We were down below, everything… and then the Bay wasn’t too much traffic anyway would bother you. You know the [?] go back a long way, you know.

VIOLA I went a great deal with him because I took Danny with me. And we never went anywhere without him. He was the only son. We didn’t go anywhere without him.

DBK Yup, took him everywhere.

VIOLA We did leave him that one time, and Myrna told on him, he was driving the big truck down back road without any lights on. (Laughs) So after that he went with us!

GAIL No, he was driving and Jimmy was tending the pedals.

VIOLA Oh that was when he was a lot younger.

DBK …I see it go by the shop and I look, I said that’s my truck! It was the big one, wasn’t it [sis], and gee and I looked, just could see a head sticking up. It was Daniel, Danny behind the wheel and Jimmy was bigger than Danny was…

VIOLA And he was using the pedals.

DBK… pressing the pedals.

(Laughter)

DBK And I used to buy, used to buy little cars for the girls, they had ‘em all named and everything. That’s when they were…

VIOLA Learning to drive.

DBK Learning to drive. And then they used to put them up here in the field, in the hay field, and go to work and learn to drive up there.

VIOLA Dan and I would have to take them to get their test.

CG So altogether you had how many daughters?

VIOLA Four.

CG Four daughters and one…

VIOLA Son. Yeah

DBK And then we made the mistake of, we adopted a girl.

CG Yes? That would be a fifth.

DBK A fifth, another girl. And she was Penny’s age. Penny had no one to play with, she wanted somebody so we said we’ll go get one.

CC Oh! My goodness. Yeah.

DBK She was with us how many years? Seventeen years?

VIOLA Oh yes, all of that.

DBK Yeah? No, no she wasn’t. She left when she was, she went to Toronto when she was seventeen.

PENNY You got her when she was five.

DBK When she was five years old.

CG Okay.

CC Oohhh.

DBK But she had been to several homes and they had abused her…

VIOLA It was a, mmhmm, she should have been in a family where she was the only child. She wanted all the attention. She did not want to share. It was a struggle for all of us.

CC I would, I’m sure. What a… a challenge. A disruption, actually.

VIOLA Yes, right. Dad had to help her with her homework because she refused to do it with me. But it, it, it was very sad, because it ended on Dad’s eightieth birthday. And all the children were so very upset. It just spoiled the birthday, you know. But I hope that she chose right and that she’s happy doing what she’s doing. But she was treated as if she was our own. I dressed the both of them like twins, and she…

DBK What we got for one we got for the other.

VIOLA There was no discrimination. No.

DBK Nothing. But she was, she was a kid, when she, her mother would tell her to bring her clothes down on Monday, to have them, wash day, she’d hide them.

VIOLA Dad would have to go, stand at the bottom of the stairs, wait for her to bring them down.

DBK Yeah. She must have been that when she was in a home that they didn’t… you know it was her upbringing before anyway, because it followed her right straight through.

VIOLA But your formative years, and when you’re smaller than that, between three and four? And it was too bad, her years were formed. But it was just because she was in and out of so many homes. Then afterwards….

PENNY I’m the only one didn’t go on tow boats, I think, wasn’t I?

DBK You’re what?

PENNY I was the only one didn’t go on any of the tows.

VIOLA No, no, she never did go. The rest of them all went.

PENNY I was too little.

DBK We used to take Gail, her husband, I took them. And I took Nancy and her husband when we made the trips, you know.

CC Oh, what an adventure that would be. Yeah.

VIOLA And usually when we took the girls with us it was summertime. And so they liked it. Gail went, and, and of course Danny went every time. But he was my guide because he had a good sense of direction, and when Dad would stop in these cities like Portland and everything, he, he, we could leave the boat and I made sure I’d be getting back okay. Because Danny had the right direction. My sense of direction wasn’t that good.

CC When you were a little girl in Little River, did you ever come down to the Islands at all?

VIOLA No, I had never been down.

CC What did you hear about the Islands?

VIOLA I don’t recollect hearing too much about them because I’d spent two years high school in Bridgetown, in the Valley with my aunt. So, and then you see I had everything all planned and, to be a trained nurse, and I was just putting in time down here until was ready for me to go. I had my money all saved and everything for that for my uniforms and everything. But it didn’t take place. I married Daniel Kenney instead. And I have a very beautiful family. Very caring family. We are very fortunate.

CG So I was intrigued by the person that said they didn’t want to take orders from a woman. So you had a role in the business besides…

VIOLA I did the bookkeeping and, until, and then Cliff would come from Saint John the auditor and do it every year. And then you see like when he went on those boat trips, I used to have to go down and tell them what Dad had told me to tell them to do for that day. And this guy said “how I hate to take the orders from that woman in the morning”. I happened to overhear him but I mean he wasn’t disrespectful to me or anything. They were all very good. (Chuckles).

CC Did you worry a lot, when Dan was off to sea, or off on a boat?

VIOLA No I didn’t worry about him, but I liked to hear from him every day.Because I was very confidant that he would be careful and that he knew what he was doing. So, you don’t worry that much, when you have that much confidence in anyone.

PENNY If anything went wrong though I can remember we always used to say it was because Dad wasn’t home. If we had a cat that died or a lamb, we always had baby lambs…

VIOLA Yes. If daddy was home, it never would have died. That used to make me feel bad. I couldn’t fix it, but Daddy could have if he’d been home.

DBK Christmas morning was a big time around here.

VIOLA Yeah, when you came home from those boat trips, also.

CG These are the boat trips when you were delivering boats.

DBK I spent a lot of money! (Laughs)

VIOLA Yes. He would buy them, whatever occasion it was, spring, fall, whatever, he’d buy them all their new outfits, shoes, coat, everything.

CG And you had total confidence that he would choose…

VIOLA And he, he would buy their dolls for Christmas, and Valentine’s day he’d bring these big huge baskets. He was a very thoughtful Dad.

CC Good family man. Yeah.

GAIL He used to bring home stray dogs….He used to bring us home these dogs from the States that no one wanted. Birds. Goldfish.

VIOLA Birds. Goldfish. And you brought the canaries too. I didn’t like the canaries, but… And I, I don’t care for birds, but you, but that budgie was a real smart bird. And I made her frightened of birds because every time they let Abner out, he was really Gail’s pet, I would run for in there and close the glass door. She’d be right behind me.

DBK But you take over sixty years, a lot can happen, you know.

CC Indeed.

VIOLA I guess.

DBK To be able to remember some of it is quite a problem.

CG Doesn’t seem to be!

VIOLA Specially when they start remembering you’re getting older, and… You remember it yourself, pardon?

PENNY I said I think you’ve got a pretty good memory.

VIOLA Yes, he has.

CG Well I think you have a remarkable sense of the whole world, was your father like this? Obviously, you don’t have your father’s temperament.

DBK No, I don’t have my father’s temperament, because I told you he fired me three times in one day! (Everyone laughs)

CG Well, I fired my son three times in one day in the woodpile one day last week. But that was not a good idea.

VIOLA No, not, probably wasn’t.

DBK See the reason that, the guys that were working, they wouldn’t talk back to him. But just a minute, he says something to me, I was young and I was full of fire, I’d sauce him or something you see, get him…

VIOLA Oh you were another young Daniel.

DBK No, no, no, I wasn’t that but I, I’d talk back to him and… but he told you, when it boiled right down to the end of it, after things got going, he told her what he thought.

VIOLA Well, you see when you’re younger you’re quicker to retaliate.

CG But it’s hard to believe we’re sitting here in your living room in Westport, to think of the vision you have had of the whole world. Something about how you know people, or something, that you make these connections. Like even this connection in Salem, is it, Massachussetts? Not everybody had that.

VIOLA And your best friends, really we relate more to them, because we have friends that lived across the street where we lived in Florida, and they have kept in touch with us ever since we sold our home. And they’ve had a lot of trials and tribulations with cancer and everything, but she’s very faithful in writing on our birthdays and everything, and she’s had a lot to bear, hasn’t she? And it seems that you just meet someone special, and it’s very very nice.

DBK Go out and get, bring in those whatchacallits and show her what my latest hobby is.

PENNY Oh, your latest hobby…

CC I‘m going to get a couple of shots of these…

DBK That clock there came out of a German submarine.

CC Oh it did?

VIOLA That’s the propeller.

DBK Yeah, the propeller out of her.

CG Well what do you think accounts for your interest in everything? Or were you just born that way?

DBK Pardon. I, I don’t know.

PENNY Here’s what he does in the winter. (Brings in various shell art projects)

VIOLA This is what he does.

PENNY See the puffin? And the birds and the animals he makes?

CC Oh they’re wonderful! I saw them, my goodness! These you collect in Florida?

VIOLA Yes.

PENNY And Nancy and I sell them in our gift shops in the summer.

CC Okay. Gorgeous. And look at the character on this little fellow!

DBK That’s a lobster claw.

(More conversation regarding shell art projects for the next few minutes)