Oregon Humanities

Dory Stories

Linfield College students and faculty, in partnership with area organizations, reel in the history of Pacific City’s fishing industry.

Eric Gold

Fisherman Bill Hook waited two years to keep his promise to spread the ashes of his late stepfather, Bernie, over tuna grounds forty miles off the coast of Pacific City. “We’d gone out and got skunked, and didn’t put any fish in the boat,” he says, “and I just didn’t figure that was his day.” Finally, Hook put Bernie’s ashes in the prop wash behind the boat, along with some Olympia beer and two cigarettes, and watched them fl oat away. Just as the water turned back to azure, Hook says, “Pshh, pshh, pshh…three lines lit up. Damn good joke, Bernie. Thanks.” (Hear audio story below.)

This dory fisherman’s story is one of dozens collected by students and faculty from Linfield College’s Department of Theatre and Communication Arts as part of the project Launching through the Surf, a collaboration with the Linfield Center for the Northwest, the Pacific City Arts Association, and the Pacific City Dorymen’s Association.

In its 1960s and ’70s heyday, Pacific City’s dory fleet brought in more salmon than any other fleet on the Oregon coast. The local geography is perfect for the small, flat-bottomed boats, which are launched from and returned to the beach in the shelter of Cape Kiwanda and nearby Haystack Rock. Known as the “Home of the Dory
Fleet,” Pacific City nurtures this unique style of fishing. It’s a place where anglers are known by the names of their boats, and where, on foggy nights, dorymen park on the beach to guide others to shore with their headlights.

The dory fleet is still at the core of Pacific City’s identity, but regulation and higher expenses have driven a shift to recreational rather than commercial fishing in the area. To preserve the area’s history, four students interviewed almost fifty fishermen and women in summer 2011. They plan to double that number next summer, editing each interview into brief audio stories for Linfield College’s Digital Commons online collection.

Though the students were outsiders in a close-knit community, a liaison from the Dorymen’s Association helped. “Because it’s such a way of life for them,” says communication arts major Casee Clark, “they forget that it’s not common knowledge. They’re surprised that someone would want to hear their stories.” Theater major Caitlyn Olson recalls some dorymen saying, “‘I don’t have anything to talk about,’ and then they’d go on for two or three hours.”

Another student, Chris Forrer, will work with Linfield professor and Oregon Humanities Conversation Project leader Jackson Miller to craft a script from the interviews, melding documentary and fictional elements into an “ethnodrama” made up of vignettes and monologues. The play will run at Linfield and in Pacific City in November 2012, and a mobile exhibit will travel the area as well.

Sid Fisher, an eighty-three-year-old doryman, told how he’d used a cement-handled cod hook to pull fi sh from the ocean by hand. He begged off showing the students his boat, saying it was stowed in the barn under a ton of gear. Later, though, a neighbor reported that he’d been at Fisher’s place to pull out the dory and said, “It wasn’t in that bad of shape!”