Squalicum Harbor Fishermen's Memorial
Dedication Ceremony
May 31, 1999
Transcribed by Jerri Williams
Speaker: Tom Glenn
Tom
Glenn: The Squalicum Harbor Fisher’s Memorial Committee of the
Whatcom Maritime Historical Society extends you a warm welcome to this
dedication of the Squalicum Harbor Fisher’s Memorial.
Thank you for joining us on this special day to share together this very special event. I’m Tom Glenn. I’m a volunteer representative of the Maritime Historical Society and a member of its memorial committee.
Our program today will be divided into two parts. The first part will be a thread of history of how we got to this point in the matter of a Fisher’s memorial for Bellingham.
Right after that, as part of the first section, Dr. Eugene Fairbanks will give us a description of the memorial itself. Following that we shall proceed with the dedication ceremony.
In the matter of the history, the project started in 1974 when three women auxiliary members of the Puget Sound Gillnet Association of the Whatcom County Chapter came to my office at the Port of Bellingham where I served as the Port’s general manager. They proposed the idea of sponsoring a fisherman’s memorial in Bellingham.
I welcomed their proposal and offered to help. The idea had been in the back of my mind for a number of years but had never come forward. These ladies were Carol Cain, Judy Prettyman and Beverly Quinn.
Shortly afterward, a fisherman from Port Townsend named Jay Gould snagged his drag net at 4 o’clock one morning, very close to Port Gamble, on a heavy obstacle that he couldn’t identify until it had completely consumed his net and he was able to raise it up to the surface to discover the net hopelessly entangled in a large and ancient anchor.
Unable to lift the blob aboard, he lashed it abeam and dragged it to Port Townsend, where he dropped it alongshore at high tide. When the tide ebbed he had a friend with a wrecker and a tow cable drag the whole mess of iron and net up on the beach.
The grapevine of the waterfront got the word to the three ladies I spoke of, and they came to me again to suggest using this anchor for the beginning of the monument.
I asked them to inspect the anchor. They drove to Port Townsend, met with Jay Gould and he was only too glad to have an offer to buy the thing (and pay the price of replacing his net, which in those days was $2500).
It looked like a good deal for all parties, so I phoned Jay Gould and
bought the anchor. He delivered it and that was the start of what we are
finishing up today. The anchor was brought to Bellingham and placed in
front of what is now Harbor Mall as a temporary site.
As an ironic side note, three years later, Jay Gould was lost in a gillnet fishing vessel sinking in Bristol Bay Alaska.
Let’s go forward to 1980. By that time, the Port of Bellingham had been able to construct the new section of Squalicum Harbor, which is behind you where we see all those sailboat masts. The project required dredging of the shallow tidelands and spoiling the dredged material right here and on the other side of the harbor where the Marina Restaurant stands now.
If we had stood on this very site in 1979, there would be 10 feet of salt water over our heads.
Now let’s fast-forward to 1993. This was a major turning point in the growth of the idea of finishing a fisherman’s memorial here. A very sad occasion; the fishing vessel “Lady of Good Voyage” sank in the Bering Sea with the loss of the lives of four young men. Two of them were Bellingham men – Greg Schwindt was the Skipper and Jeremy Scott-Hunter was a crewmember. The other two members were brothers who came from Newport, Oregon.
The widows of those two Bellingham men are with us today, Tina Schwindt and Christine Scott-Hunter. You will meet them both a little bit later.
Tina is the chairperson of this committee that has been developing this monumental piece of sculpture that we dedicate here today. As friends and family and fishing industry people gathered around these two widows, both with very young children at the time, the idea of expanding the theme of the anchor memorial came forward, to build another part of the monument that would be a little more visible, a little more imposing. At the same time, a group of business people in the Squalicum Harbor area, the Squalicum Harbor Business Association, got together and offered to help Tina Schwindt with a larger monument.
Fortunately, there were others involved. One was the Port of Bellingham, which owns the property here. Another group is the Whatcom Maritime Historical Society. The Port asked the Society if they would help identify a new location for the anchor, to take it from its temporary site into a permanent site.
And so a committee was formed and we went to work. The first task was to identify the best site for this lovely piece of sculpture within the general Zuanich Point Park property.
Why this site? First of all, as I said, it’s Port property. It’s part of a park and one of the main features is simply this little piece of property in the midst of a hard-working, serious waterfront. This is not a plaything. Here with all kinds of maritime activities in the harbor, there is a lot of noise. But, as we note today the only man-made noise here is a soft engine noise nearby.
There are moments of quiet out here that are simply beautiful and the noises of man are soft, but the sounds of nature are heard seagulls, water splashing on the rock protection at the edge of the harbor, as well as an occasional wind that does make a little noise.
What we have behind me, in front of you, is the culmination of the dream and the spirit of those three gillnet auxiliary women who came to me in 1974 and proposed the idea of the memorial. And remember, this very pleasant noise {a ships horn in the distance] one answering the other, man made noises, those are pleasant…. And, the anchor is serving as an entrance to this general memorial site. This is a fulfillment of their dream and the dreams of many other people who have volunteered to work on with this whole program for the last 6 years, since 1993 when the Lady of Good Voyage sank.
At the same time these three different forces were coming together, the Society contacted Dr Eugene Fairbanks. Dr Fairbanks had retired from a 30-year career in Bellingham as a very respected and beloved family physician.
In his early years, as a member of a family with 7 male children, he served virtually an apprenticeship in the family business of sculpturing of images and statues. The father was a sculptor of world note. When the doctor retired, he revived seriously these interesting skills that he had learned many years earlier and I have come to know him as a person with the heart and soul of an artist and the hands of a sculptor. And I would like now to present him to you to give an explanation about the monument itself. Doctor Eugene Fairbanks. Artistic Symbolism & Description