Don Cramer - Ocean County Government

Don Cramer by Victoria Lassonde

Don Cramer was born on April 17, 1938, at Atlantic City Hospital, into a legacy of a charter fishing and wreck diving business. He grew up in New Gretna, and summered in Townsend’s Inlet every year of his life (except for 1941). He recalled the quaintness of a smalltown education: His pre-primary school teacher, Mrs. Adams, taught the kids to build forts and knock them down on each other, he recalled. During afternoon naptime, Mrs. Adams would nap, too, at her own peril – at least once she awoke to find her shoes tied together. In his first eight grades of school, Cramer describes himself as a rambunctious, aggressive kid. At a young age he learned to channel those traits constructively. As a boy, he and his friends would ride around the fields in an old Ford Model T they had to push to start “because it would break your arm if you tried to crank it.” “You had to create your own fun,” he said. “There was no one to organize baseball.” 2013

Ocean County Decoy & Gunning Show

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Friend Skip Mathis lived nearby. They would get with a group of guys and make up a game with bats, balls and gloves. And we all had bicycles. He played all four years on high school baseball team. When he became interested in hunting, he loved to go into the woods and hunt, but he wasn’t very skilled with his 12-gauge double barrel, and without a dog. Later, he got a Remington single barrel automatic, and his aim improved. “If you ever teach anybody to hunt,” he said, “you want to teach them with a single barrel and one shell. Because that makes them really concentrate on hitting something, with that one shell.” As a teen he joined the Sea Isle City Beach Patrol, and at age 14 (in 1952), he became the youngest boy ever to win the South Jersey swimming competition in Sea Isle City – a record he still holds. Cramer is now a member of the SICBP Hall of Fame. “Lifeguarding was great, especially the nightlife. You didn’t have to have a line – those girls were just begging to go out with you. I had great fun. I learned a lot (from those) older men, 21, 22 years old, college guys.” It was during one of those summers

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in Sea Isle, 50 years ago, that he met his wife, Sandy. Her career was in banking. “My first time working oyster beds was in 1955, when my father Pratt Cramer and I filled a 22-foot garvey on state oyster beds three times that day.” At age 18 he got his captain’s license, and with it, he and his wife ran a successful fishing and scuba diving business, first in Sea Isle City and then relocating in 1967 to Stone Harbor, until they retired to Stuart, Fla., in 2002. Aboard the Miss Shelter Haven and the Captain Cramer, Cramer ran fishing parties and scuba diving trips on most wrecks from Beach Haven to Delaware. “I was versatile, I did lots of things: Birthday and anniversary parties, booze cruises and bachelor parties, lifeguard parties, burials – we did everything with that boat, besides fishing and diving.” It was a great investment, he said. Even after he sold it, the Captain Cramer is still in use today. But the business also had its challenges, even tragedies. Six divers drowned over the years. He remembers having to bleach the oil and blood stains out of his captain’s uniform. Each summer by midAugust, “I was a mess, no question about

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it. My nerves were shattered, and Sandy’s also.” “People would bring their whole families on the boat,” he said. “… The afternoon trips would drive me crazy. (The kids) would run around, jump up on the benches and swing on the railings like monkeys, yelling and screaming.” Cramer’s friend and colleague, Capt. Gene Peterson, who operated Atlantic Dive Shop out of Pleasantville, wrote about him: “Capt. Don had the well deserved recognition of being one of the most experienced dive boat operations in the mid-Atlantic area. Dive clubs and shops ventured from as far away as Virginia and New York to the Captain Cramer. … For decades Don captained one of the safest dive operations on the coast. “A well respected boat handler, Capt. Don could turn the large 60-foot Virginia pine hull of the Captain Cramer over a wreck site and drop the anchor on any end of a wreck within minutes. Not only could he maneuver this behemoth into tight slips, he made his own inlet. Peterson also noted, Cramer was a gifted birdwatching expert with extremely keen eyesight – sharper and quicker at

identifying birds than those with binoculars – who would take ornithology groups out on bay cruises. “When you do something for a living, generally, you’re pretty good at it,” Cramer said. “If not, you’re poor as a snake.” Aside from lifeguarding and the charter trips, Cramer worked at a gas station in Stone Harbor one winter and for South Jersey Paving on the Manahawkin Causeway bridge project in 1958. By way of his grandfather, he joined the local fire company. His grandfather’s brother, Stan Cramer, had a boat yard in Chestnut Neck. Cramer served three years in the National Guard, then Coast Guard Reserve, then got Army training and joined the Coast Guard, which sent him to Langley Air Force Base in Yorktown, Va. Back home in Stone Harbor, he was elected to two terms on town council. One year he “beat the ones in power by three votes,” he said, calling it “a great experience.” “In this yearbook, it said ‘Don Cramer will not amount to a damn’ – Haha!” But perhaps the real story, the deeper story, in Cramer’s own words, is about four generations of Cramers in New Gretna, “who made their living only on or around the water all of their lives. “They started with salt hay. Bought some oyster lots and moved their products by wagon down a dirt road to Tuckerton, where the railroad was located over 100 years ago. They also expanded their business by freighting young seed oyster from Forked River, where they had oyster beds down to Great Bay or Tuckerton.” Cramer recalled: On his first day of clamming, with his cousin, in the company boat, the two of them caught 1,000 clams and got paid $13.00 or $6.50 each. Typically clams could fetch a penny apiece, but the most he ever got was three cents apiece, right before a “freezeup.” Nowadays clams will fetch 16 cents apiece but, of course, everything is relative. “Most I ever caught was 3,600, down in back of Brigantine,” he said. “What

a run of clams, counted a rake full, 245 clams in the rake. Full.” On one of our many trips to Maryland for duck shows and hunting trips, we happened to run into (Tuckerton Seaport founder) Mrs. Earl Sutton, who was Cramer’s tax preparer. “She and her group were down there getting ideas about a duck show and museum to start in the Tuckerton area,” he said. Now in Florida, Cramer still spends much of his time on or near the water. He has observed in sailfish tournaments on $3 million yachts – one was a 72-foot Viking Yacht made in New Gretna. “Yup, I’ve had a wonderful life – but my wife’s a little tired of listening to it.”

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