Dale parsons Wanda parsons - Ocean County Government

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Dale parsons Wanda parsons by Victoria Lassonde

Dale B. Parsons is the fourth-generation owner and operator of Parsons Seafood in Tuckerton and a lifelong resident of the same borough. In spite of the gradual decline of wild, naturally growing clams in Barnegat Bay in the last 60 years, as well as the blow dealt by Superstorm Sandy last year, he remains hopeful that the industry will survive and thrive well into the future. His mother, Wanda, 86, is still actively involved with the business in the summertime, and his son, Dale S. Parsons, has carried the family tradition into the realm of aquaculture, or farm raising clams and oysters in shallow water. Wanda was born in Orbisonia, Pa., and moved to Tuckerton with her family as a little girl. Her uncle, Harry Dorman, who already lived in Tuckerton, had written a letter to her father, David Chilcoat, a poor coal miner, enticing him to relocate to the coast. As Wanda recalled, the letter read, “‘Dave, come on down to Tuckerton. I’m out in the bay clamming, in the nice fresh air, there’s plenty of clams, and the people are wonderful.’ And so my father packed everything – I was one and a half, my sister was two years older – and we moved to Tuckerton.” Once resettled, the resourceful and hardworking Chilcoat went to work for E. Walter Parsons, who owned Parsons Clams at the time, borrowing the money to buy his first garvey, his clamming tongs and baskets. According to Wanda, he soon became one of the best clammers Parsons had. He also had a green thumb: “My sister and I used to pull the little red

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wagon down Wood Street to sell all the veggies that Daddy raised in the garden,” she said. The Tuckerton of her childhood was “a beautiful town,” she said. “Had all of these big Victorian homes and mansions, and trees lined the streets.” She and her sister walked along Wood Street to and from school twice a day (once for lunch). “We had lots of exercise, which the kids don’t get today,” she said. As a teenager attending Tuckerton High School, Wanda met and fell in love with John Mathis “Jack” Parsons, E. Walter’s son. The clam doesn’t fall far from the basket – E. Walter had taken over the business from Daniel Mathis, who started it in 1909, and married Daniel’s daughter, Sara Mathis, Jack’s mother. “It was a whole family affair, the business,” Wanda said. After high school, Wanda attended nursing school at West Jersey Hospital in Camden, and Jack joined the Merchant Marines. While he was stationed in New York and she was affiliating for psychiatry at Greystone Park Psychiatric Center in Morris County, they continued their courtship through frequent visits. They married in 1948. Dale was born the following year, and a second son, Jack (now deceased), was born 15 months later. Wanda and Jack were married 62 years until he died in 2009. Jack received the Hurley Conklin Award in 1996. “I’ve had a very full, interesting life, Jack and I both, very happy together,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine myself with anyone else.” Though Wanda had a 35-year career as a school nurse in Southern Regional School District, over the years she also kept a hand in just about every aspect of the clamming business, from the bookkeeping and banking, to hiring staff and waiting on customers, “anything where I was needed.” In the old days, Parsons supplied Campbell’s soup, sending five truckloads a night to the Campbell’s plant in Camden. But when surf clam boats started producing cheaper clams in greater volume, and the bigger chowder clams in the bay started to dwindle, Campbell’s

switched from a bay clam to the sea clam. Parsons operated four clam houses, in West Creek, Parkertown, Tuckerton and Oyster Creek. Today, in addition to the retail seafood market, Parsons does business with wholesale distributors in Philadelphia and New York, smaller distributors in Asbury Park and Waretown, as well as “any number of little restaurants in between,” Dale said. For Wanda’s part, “my routine in the summer is go to the post office, come home and do all the crediting, and make deposits, I take care of all that, I make invoices for Dale… What else do I do, Dale?” “You cook a good dinner,” he said – and mother and son exchanged a loving chuckle. Dale attended Tuckerton Elementary School, in the original wooden building that previously was the high school. Before it was torn down, the school bell was salvaged. It hangs on Wanda’s deck – “We ring it New Year’s Eve,” she said – and will forever remain a part of Tuckerton history. As a youngster, the end of the school day couldn’t come soon enough so he could go duck hunting. He still has his 13-foot inboard sneakbox, built by Mason Price’s grandfather, Harland. “We mainly broad-bill hunted on Rose’s Point in Parkertown. My father would get so mad at me, because I wasn’t around, because I was out duck hunting. But I had a lot of fun. I used to give (ducks) to everybody around town that would take them.” Later on, he earned money by trapping 2013

muskrats in the wintertime and treading for clams in the summer. “It was nice, treading, because you worked the low tide, so when the tide came in, you had the rest of the day to play. As a young kid we would just chase the women around the bay.” Dale’s father bought him his first garvey at age 15, built by Ed Conklin in Cedar Run. (At age 40, Dale built his own garvey, using 26-foot Jersey cedar boards from New Gretna, and he still uses it today. “It’s a Cadillac, kind of a dinosaur, but it’s a good-looking boat.”) On weekends he would help out his dad and grandfathers, and he learned to maintain and repair the boats, paint the bottoms, and winterize them with tin to protect the cedar from ice in Tuckerton Creek. He spent one summer picking blueberries for local berry farmer Bill Roberts; and after high school he tried a year of college but hated it. He spent two years in the Navy, aboard an aircraft carrier in Norfolk, Va., and made two “Mediterranean cruises” during Vietnam. But all along, the bay has been in his blood. “I’ll probably do it ’til I die,” he said. When the market was hot, Parsons clammers would re-plant winter surplus product on clam beds in Tuckerton Cove, building a storehouse of millions of clams to take up again in the fall. Back then, the main harvesting technique was tonging, which required a lot of strength and a special touch, Dale said. Some treaded, and a few used Keyport-style shinnecock rakes, the first in the area. Back at the clam house, the clammers – in the heyday, as many as 30 Ocean County Decoy & Gunning Show

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– would offload their day’s take in piles of tens of thousands, to be counted by hand. “A lot of shell, a lot of debris, some of the clams died, but you’d have to go through it all, clean them up, then bag them.” The work was demanding and tedious, counting them and bagging them by the hundreds in heavy burlap sacks and sewing them up every night. “It was just a daily routine. Nonstop. Every day.” At one time, the clams were so plentiful, and so lucrative, that “if you weren’t catching 300, 400 and hour, you got back in the boat, and you left and searched for a better spot.” In Dale’s view, chief among the many factors contributing to the clam population’s decline is overdevelopment – namely Beach Haven West, Tuckerton Beach and Mystic Island. Another major factor is inlet migration and changes in the water flow into and out of the bay. “Tuckerton Cove was the clam capital of the East Coast. Everybody that worked the bay knew it. It was the best producing area there was. Far as I’m concerned, they’re the best tasting clams on the East Coast.” Now, natural growth in that area has all but disappeared. Still, he’s optimistic. “Someday they’ll come back. I was hoping Superstorm Sandy would punch another inlet through Holgate, which it just about did, to get a better tide flow into this end of the bay. It’ll happen someday.” Dale still holds the leases his greatgrandfather had, and then some. Just keeping it all staked with bed markers is a job in itself – however, he knows the bay so well, he could find his lots in a dense fog, or with his eyes closed. In total, the Parsons maintain nearly 200

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acres underwater between Tuckerton Cove and Great Bay, about 100 of those belonging to Dale S., the fifth generation in the family business. “We have a lot of ground, but 90 percent of it is unproductive right now. We’re just living in hopes.” Oysters are a whole separate matter. Dale is considering putting raceways behind his store to raise oyster seed, pumping water in from Tuckerton Creek, which is the perfect salinity for oysters. Traditional wild oystering is long gone, he said, since diseases such as MSX and Dermo killed off all the stocks. Now the Parsons have thriving oysters in Middle Island. “The oysters do well over there, and I think there’s a good future in that. There’s money in oysters,” Dale said. The wave action from Superstorm Sandy disturbed the seed and stock, distributing oysters from last year’s spawn over a large area. The full extent of the losses is yet to be determined. Luckily, Great Bay reopened after about a week, and the water quality is fine. The hope, over at Middle Island, which remained closed to harvesting while undergoing sample testing, was that in warmer water temps, the clams there would pump enough to cleanse out any contaminants in their tissue. The stakes are high, after Dale S. worked so hard for about two years to get new leases approved for Middle Island, to establish a new site to grow hatchery clams. “And it is a very productive growing area, Dale said, estimating half a million 2 million clams and half a million oysters. “Traditionally that area of the bay, the goose bar area, was a gold mine, back in the day, and it produced billions of clams.” In the early 1900s, according

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to Dale, Little Egg and Tuckerton Bay produced more oysters than clams, until the salinity changed and clams took over the market. Dale’s first aquaculture endeavor was in 1990, on a 28-acre lot he leases at Gravelling Point, in Great Bay, which is traditional oyster ground but also produces, in his opinion, superior clams. “I like those clams better than the clams at Middle Island, because the shells are a little harder, they don’t break as easily, the taste is delicious, it’s a good area, except in the summer when you get a southerly wind and it’s so rough there, you can’t work. Every site has its drawbacks, so that’s why it’s nice to have different locations.” He plants directly on the bottom, and the oysters do well there, he said. “I tong those from the boat, a lot of times. And I put some up in the shallow end of the lot, and I’ll get overboard and catch them that way, too, if the tide’s down.” With weather-related and environmental challenges, stringent regulations on top of customer service demands, retail and wholesale operations, and fierce competition coming from Virginia, the clam business is not getting easier. “It’s hard for us to hold onto what little market we have right now,” Dale said. He estimates 90 percent of the product is farm-raised, but he does what he can to give business to other clam farmers and buys wild cherry and chowder clams. He believes the aquaculture will keep the industry going for several more generations. Through it all, Wanda said, “Dale has always conducted the business with honesty and with the customer in mind.” “You have to have a good customer relationship,” he said.