Looking Back in Time with Eddie Stojak
By Rebecca Settar
Nearly 2,000 miles away from Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, Edward Stojak was getting off his scalloping boat in Madaket when a friend ran up to him and exclaimed, “They shot the President!” Being a fall day like any other, on November 22, 1963, Stojak was out on the water, just going into his seventh year as a professional scalloper, but this type of monumental historical antidote just happens to come along with a career that spans over 63 years, a time when not only the world changed drastically, but the island did too.
We managed to take a moment of this native’s time to hear about his 85 years as a Nantucketer. His accent is true to that of an older local; a casual New England twang that insists that while there was a whole world outside of Nantucket, the man, like most of us reading this, never felt the urge to leave.
Photo courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association
SA: Tell us about growing up on Nantucket.
ES: I spent my earliest years living on a farm on Dukes Road. We raised vegetables and sold milk from the cows. We didn’t have running water. Some of my earliest memories are riding bareback to school. I was small and I had to get up on something to get on the horse. I probably got on a fence and got on the horse that way, and I tied it up across Surfside Road in a big field. I did this from first to sixth grade; not every day but a lot. My parents got divorced and sold the farm for $1,500. The house is still there today.
SA: How did you begin scalloping?
ES: I would go with my stepfather [Joseph Viera] on the weekends, until I graduated from high school, and then I bought my own boat for $1,000 in June of 1956. I just donated it to the Historical Association, it’s the oldest wooden scallop boat on the island.
Photo courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association
SA: What was it like, scalloping in the “old days”?
ES: There’s a lot more of everything now, and less scallops. In those years, they didn’t have any temperature limit. I was out one time at 12 degrees, and we used to haul in by hand in those days. The ropes would ice up instantly.
SA: You have been referred to as “King of the Fleet” and you were written about in Jim Patrick and Rob Benchley’s book Scallop Season. How do you think you became so well regarded as a Nantucket scalloper?
ES: When I first started out, I would follow other scallopers out to where they fished until one day, a friend of the family hollered at me, “Don’t come out here, you’ll have the whole fleet out here!” The guy helped me out by hollering at me like that, and ever since then I found my own. I did pretty well. I guess I was a natural at it; I worked pretty hard on it.
Photo courtesy of the Nantucket Historical Association
SA: Did you have another career in the off season?
ES: I did caretaking of 22 houses the last 30 years, I was a busy guy. One of the houses I used to care for and landscape was Tommy Hilfiger’s house, the clothing designer. He was a nice, nice man, and would invite me in to have coffee with his family at the dining room table, right in my work clothes. The maid would come out and ask me if I wanted scrambled eggs or whatever and I was so nervous, I just wanted coffee and a donut and to get out of there (laughs.) His daughter loved littlenecks on the half shell, so I always used to bring her some.
SA: What is your favorite way to eat scallops?
ES: Right out of the shell. Not a minute older.
