Joe The Boatman

 

Joe The Boatman

The Northport mainstay, “Joe the Boatman” was a lonely old guy with horn rimmed glasses and rubber boots. He did wear clothes between the glasses and the boots, but those accessories were his most recognizable attributes. He had a heavy Slovakian accent with a weathered face and we just called him “Joe the Boatman”. He bounced back and forth in employment between Karl's Mariners Inn at the corner of Bayview Avenue/James St. and Holiday Lodge at 181 Bayview Avenue. We later learned that this old guy who seemingly had salt water in his veins actually had a last name; Morrow.

Now my good friend Ronnie lived right next door to Mariner's Inn and we would often see this old guy walking on the beach and since we spent most of our time there, on that sand or in the water, we got to know him as "Joe". He was one of those adults that we could address by his first name and he didn't mind. “Hi, Joe” we’d say and he would return the salutation. Didn’t that make us feel grown up?

Ronnie's father had a lot of maintenance in and about that waterfront home and as much as possible was passed on to Ronnie as “chores”. Being Ronnie’s friend, I often helped him, and on one particular episode we were decommissioning the family “donut raft” for seasonal lay-up one fall around 1958 or so. It was a rectangular shaped cork raft with rounded corners (the kind that was used on Navy ships as life rafts back in those days) and had a piece of marine plywood fastened to the top of it for a flat swimming deck in place of the usual net. This “water toy” remained permanently at anchor during the summer season and was brought up in the fall. The anchor was not really an anchor, but some heavy piece of expired machinery that was being used as anchor.

We were pretty hardy young guys and at the age of eleven or twelve were entrusted to do pretty much any kind of work within reason. This assignment was within the "reasonable" category, so we two stooges set out to retire this floating water-park for the winter. While Ronnie’s mom sat in the comfort of her stately home by her picture window doing her nails and Primping her Toy French Poodle, Ronnie and I donned our swimsuits and set out to do the “man’s work”. We had waited for low tide so that we could actually stand where the raft was anchored and firmly planted our feet in that Northport mud. We both grabbed the anchor chain and lifted with all we had and sure, enough, we got this craggy piece of machinery to break suction. The big part of the job was done and now, we just had to hold the anchor in “suspension” while we let the wind and waves drive the whole kit and kaboodle toward shore. Not so fast………………..

We lost our grip on the chain and this craggy whatever it was fell squarely on my foot. In reality, this “anchor” probably weighed 75 lbs. on dry land and half that in the water, but it was enough to set off the pain sensors. I was injured. Ronnie went into his melodramatic mode and decided to “save me”. The raft was again anchored so he didn’t have to worry about that, and turned his full attention to me as he “swam me into shore”. Clearly, my foot hurt like Hell, and there was some blood, but it wasn’t broken and I just needed some time-out to let the pain subside, then I could resume our “lay-up operation”. Oh, no………………. Ronnie had me up on the beach and advised me to rest.

Just then, along came ““Joe the Boatman”” who saw the opportunity to be a hero and he decided to give me CPR. He applied those chest compressions like those we had seen the firemen do but Joe had rough gritty hands with sand on them. Ronnie was yelling at him that I hadn’t drowned, but I had hurt my foot! Joe didn’t have a firm grasp of the English language. In fact I don’t think he spoke English at all except to say “hi” and he couldn’t understand what Ronnie was telling him. In any event, Joe kept up with those gritty compressions and he wanted to be sure that I was breathing okay.

There was a silver lining in Joe’s random act of kindness of that day. The pain he inflicted on my chest with those gritty hands dwarfed any pain I Was feeling in my foot. When all was said and done, I got up and walked away from this maritime disaster and I’m sure Joe took great satisfaction in “saving my life”. If I really had been in need of medical help, I know Joe would have been there, just the same.

Looking back, I can clearly see that Joe the Boatman symbolized selflessness and it came so naturally. It's a mindset, a value, a shred of human decency of days gone by. Something we now see too little of in public and in the “highest places of respect” where people hide behind the masks of expensive business attire and in corner offices. I mourn the loss of this value.