In mid-August we had a phone call from a polite fact-checker at The New Yorker magazine, wondering if we could respond to a few questions about our late columnist Edward Myers of Damariscotta. Would it be accurate to call him a “seafood tycoon”? Not exactly, we replied — “pioneer” or “entrepreneur” would be better, given that Myers’s fortune from the seafood business was smaller than those of a few others we could name. Why did he dislike the term “nor’easter” so much? Not sure, except that he convinced us (and a lot of other people), through his well-phrased comments over the years that the term was the creation of TV weatherpeople who thought they sounded salty when they said it. The fact-checker then asked a few questions about this newspaper (which he had read, he said), thanked us and concluded our conversation, adding that Myers and Working Waterfront were about to appear in The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town.
We’d been tipped off. The sun was about to shine on us. Twelve years into the enterprise, Working Waterfront was making its debut, however small, in the national press. Being cautious, however, we didn’t say anything to anyone.
Two weeks later the piece appeared. “Tsk-Tsk Dept.: Nor’easter,” the headline ran. The bulk of the story concerned Edgar Comee, 88, of Brunswick, a retired journalist and former Navy ship captain who makes a habit of sending postcard zingers to those who use “nor’easter” in the press or on TV. And there in the third paragraph were Myers and Working Waterfront: “For instance, there was the seafood entrepreneur Ed Myers (now deceased), who, while writing for a publication called Working Waterfront more than a decade ago, identified the frequent use of `nor’easter’ as a `festering sore in today’s marine and weather journalism.’ ”
Edward Myers had a fine turn of phrase, not to mention little patience for ill-considered terms like “nor’easter.” Our thanks to The New Yorker for spotting and celebrating his particular brand of clear thinking.
— ed.