Millard Creamer and his brother Harlan are the last of the generations of Creamer fishermen in Waldoboro. Millard started at six, clamming and learning lobstering on his father’s boat. When Millard was thirteen, he took over the boat and business from his father who was forced to retire because of a bad back. After school, Millard caught a ride to the landing and hauled traps until dark. In winters, he shrimped, and he sometimes dug worms to sell to the smelt fishermen. At home, he picked crab and shrimp alongside his parents. Like his father, Millard sold shrimp from the back of his truck in Brunswick, and he priced like his father, too, charging less to sell more. So, while the guy down the road sold a tray of shrimp for one price, Millard charged less and sold three or four, or six or seven on a good day. In 2010, he rented a stand on Route 1 and sold lobster, clams, oysters, shrimp, crab, and fish. A year and a half later, he bought it, and he still sells there. In his words, he has three jobs: the lobstering; the crab-picking; and the shop. As for entertainment, Millard shoots pool two evenings a week, and every Friday he plays in a friendly poker game at a friend’s house until 1:00 in the morning. Like lobstering, he’s played cards his whole life, always for fun, and winning a lot of the time.
You have your good years and your bad years. Years ago, we had three or four bad years, and lot of people got out of it. But not me and my uncle Carl. Then, when it started picking up, everybody got back in. But him and I, we always stuck it out. Like I said, I’ve been lobstering since thirteen, and I’ve never had a year off yet. I always go. No matter how bad it gets.
I don’t do it for the money. I do it because I love doing it. But when you go out and someone’s whacked off twenty or thirty of your traps, then you’re having a bad day. Out there, it’s always a fighting war to keep your piece of bottom. Years ago, it was my uncles and cousins I was fighting with. Now it’s those Friendship and Bremen fellows you’re fighting with.
But I’ve cut back. Even though I have 800 traps, but I’m only fishing 600. So I got a couple of hundred spares just in case there’s another little war out there.
I’m looking forward to downgrading — running the shop, maybe a little crabmeat picking and a little lobstering because I won’t ever leave that. You gotta keep going to stay in shape. I’m going to keep going until the day I can’t do it any more. The shop and the crabmeat, too.
The hardest thing is getting people to pick crabs. Not many do it now. It’s going to be another dying thing because now they got machines that pick it now. A friend told me that there’s one machine that squeezes the meat from the claws, and another that sucks out the bodies. He said it tastes the same but comes out stringy. You don’t have those nice, big claws and legs that people like.
Everybody here picked crab when I was in my 20s. And shrimp. My mother and father gave it up when they said you had to put in a shop in order to pick. I put up a shop and brought on six pickers.
But lobster? I never heard of a machine that picks lobster. Everyone picks that by hand. They picked shrimp, too, though later they got machines for them. I used to have 12-15 shrimp pickers, my brother, another 12-15, and two or three other women in town had 12-15. There used to be almost 60 people picking shrimp here. They depended on it. But shrimping’s been closed for ten years so nobody picks, and those machines are retired.
In the summertime I get up at 5:00, Monday through Friday. I go up to Owls Head or wherever to get crabs, then bring ‘em back home, cook ‘em up, and by 9, 9:30 I’m ready to go haul. My stern man comes down, we head out, and I get back about 4:00 usually. First thing I do is go home with the crabs I caught so they can be cooked, then head up to the shop with my lobsters. Then make deliveries. I get home around 6:00, and start all over again the next morning at 5:00.
Now in winter, I don’t do much of anything. Just go get crabs and make deliveries. Today I got up at 7:30, headed down to Bremen, got lobsters off from Simmons Lobster and from there, went to my house to drop off the crabs I got for cooking and picking, and to pick up anything that was picked the day before. Then all the way to Bangor to deliver scallops. And then to Rockland to make a delivery of crabmeat. And back to the shop. So, it’s kind of a short day, maybe five hours.
I want to be known as having the lowest prices on the turnpike. When I first opened this place, I used to sell lobsters for just twenty-five cents over what I bought them for. Just so I could get people in the door.
My feeling is, why make too much? And everybody that come in, they say, “There ain’t nobody that can beat your prices.” And I tell ‘em, “I know that!” Life is about being happy and doing what you’re doing. You can’t be greedy. You don’t miss it down the line. All you need to do is make enough so you stay above water, pay your bills, don’t owe anybody, and buy what you want. Long as you have that, you’re fine. Because you can’t take it with you.
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