Maine’s ‘Lobster Lady’ who fished for nearly a century dies aged 105

Posted by NaOH 17 hours ago

Comments

Comment by JoeAltmaier 5 hours ago

I just lost my Mom, at 97. We would go to lunch on Tuesday and then grocery shopping. She'd talk of the family and where they all were and what they were doing - it was MY day to catch up.

The last Tuesday we got back and she said "That was too hard. I think that was the last one." I agreed, and thought I'd call her next tuesday just the same and see if she'd changed her mind. But there was no 'next tuesday'.

Anyway, life is a gift and I miss her and Tuesday doesn't come but I feel the gap.

Comment by gwbas1c 5 hours ago

They seem to know.

After my mother passed, I found an old essay talking about when her father (my grandfather) passed. She wrote that the last time we saw him, he seemed to know something was up, and then died that night.

My other grandfather figured it out after a blood test determined that he only had a few days left. His kids (including my dad) weren't going to tell him. He was 102 and otherwise healthy. Then, he wheeled himself across the nursing home into the meeting with the social worker, and announced the funeral home, church, and cemetery that his arrangements were with. He had such a big smile too. He "won" and couldn't ask for anything more.

Comment by franktankbank 1 hour ago

Beautiful really. I feel you, there is something about hearing stories from those close to you that hit 100x harder. I have cousins who keep these memories alive by digging into our far past family trees and document it for the rest of us.

Comment by world2vec 5 hours ago

I'm so sorry.

Comment by complianceowl 5 hours ago

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Comment by petcat 4 hours ago

> Some regard stories such as that of Oliver, who came to be known as her state’s “Lobster Lady”, as evidence of the growing number of Americans who extend their working days well past the typical retirement age as the cost of living in the US has soared, wages have stagnated and many therefore have been unable to save.

It's unfortunate that this publication decides to go hard on politics no matter what the feel-good story behind the article is. This Ginny lady clearly said that she loved banding lobsters and wanted to do it for as long as she could. It had nothing to do with working into her old age because she needed the money. Obviously that is a real issue, but has nothing to do with this story.

I like this news website better: https://www.positive.news/

At least it doesn't try to snipe me into feeling bad, or scared about everything.

Comment by VWWHFSfQ 3 hours ago

> At least it doesn't try to snipe me into feeling bad, or scared about everything.

That's the guardian for you. They can't write an article without making sure the reader comes away feeling like a piece of shit. This piece should just be a celebration of Ginny's remarkable life, but they'll still make sure that you know that there are kids starving in Africa and elderly people working past retirement because they have no money.

I also love positive.news, and I subscribe to their newsletter. It's great.

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Comment by ulf-77723 10 hours ago

The article states that a raising amount of people in the US still work, albeit their age and it feels a little strange to me. Ginny, probably got so old because she was working and had a purpose every day. Being 100 and still capable of working is a blessing

Comment by wincy 3 hours ago

My grandfather retired and realized he had no hobbies to speak of, and no desire to travel. So he went back to doing what he enjoyed, he worked part time for the city doing sewer inspections. He’d use a bar and open a manhole, and do whatever it is he did then. He did this until into his 80s, until he passed a few years ago. I guess he just liked being useful.

My other grandpa is a retired design engineer, extremely handy, and while his body is failing from Parkinson’s, in his 80s he’s still smart as a whip. He was working around his farm until he hit 80 when his wife started displaying dementia signs.

I still call him up any time I need advice on fixing stuff round the house or my car.

Comment by Thlom 7 hours ago

Many old people do valuable work even though they are not in the workforce. They are the backbone of many voluntary organizations, they are often the backbone of their apartment complex taking on janitorial work and administrative work, they are baby sitters, home work assistants, they taken on small jobs no one else want to like election clerks and exam monitors. Some start up a small business so the community can get access to their expertise. One guy I know closed his musical instruments repair shop a few years ago, but started up again in smaller scale because there were no one else local to do the work.

Comment by darth_avocado 1 hour ago

Our neighborhood park maintenance volunteers are 80% old ladies in their 70s and 80s. Without things to do, body and mind atrophies. While it’s true that increasing number of people are having to work longer than they need to, a lot of them don’t do it out of necessity and is probably the reason why they’re still alive and kicking at that age.

Comment by bell-cot 10 hours ago

> Being 100 and still capable of working is a blessing

A much under-appreciated blessing. At any age.

Over the past half-ish century, I've visited any number of elderly relatives and friends who were living in the US's long-term care facilities. However bright the decor, or kind the care staff - there is a very bleak "people whose ability to do anything useful has died, waiting for the rest of death" aura to them.

Comment by parpfish 5 hours ago

Over my life I have learned “you must be useful to be valued” and I’m desperately trying to unlearn it.

Reason one is that I should learn to chill out and relax.

Reason two is that I know old age will hit me very hard once I feel “useless” and I should prepare for that

Comment by sethhochberg 3 hours ago

I've personally had a decent amount of luck with trying to reframe this sort of sentiment from "being useful" to "having purpose".

Right now, yes, its true that a lot of my day to day purpose is driven by participating in the economy and setting myself up for the life I'd like to have in my later years, and I get genuine validation from solving problems and collaborating with people in my day job.

But sometimes, my purpose is to go snowboarding and forget about work. Or to help a friend fix their bicycle. Or to get lost in conversation with a new person I'm dating. As far as any of us know, we only get one turn to be alive on this rock, so we might as well purposefully enjoy it as much as we try to purposefully be useful.

If you look at Ginny Oliver from the article, it might be fair to question whether she was as useful on a lobster boat at 105 as she might have been in her youth. But I doubt she was concerned with usefulness since she had such sense of purpose.

Comment by 0xdeadbeefbabe 4 hours ago

Why not learn how to catch lobsters?

Comment by kakacik 5 hours ago

People can be properly useful till their last moment. Caring friend, loving reliable family member - those mean endlessly more than some senior position in some corporation that come and go and with enough distance to see things are mostly meaningless.

You don't need to rewire your core, just look things from right perspective.

Comment by bell-cot 4 hours ago

Yes. But there is a very long and winding gray spectrum between a belligerently entitled layabout, and "your daily work output no longer excuses your continued consumption of our oxygen, meatbag".

Comment by dfxm12 5 hours ago

growing number of Americans who extend their working days well past the typical retirement age as the cost of living in the US has soared, wages have stagnated and many therefore have been unable to save.

Calling this a blessing in the larger context is unconscionable. The USA is the richest country in the world. If someone needs to work into their 100s, it is a sign of failure from our political leaders.

Additionally, "working" and "having a purpose" should not be conflated like this. These are separate things.

Comment by cucumber3732842 2 hours ago

What's unconscionable is that people feel entitled to cherry pick stuff like this and then use it as fodder for shameless moral posturing. The damn near next sentence says this was not the case with her, it clearly wasn't her job, it was what she wanted to spend her life doing.

I don't wonder why public discourse is the way that it is.

Comment by bloppe 4 hours ago

I agree that it's unconscionable to consign a centenarian to unwanted labor, but the article says this is not the case for Ginny.

Also, wages in the US have not stagnated at all. Wage growth in the poorest quartile has outpaced inflation and that of the other 3 quartiles.

Perhaps this is a bit of projection by the British Guardian.

Comment by Ronsenshi 11 hours ago

She must have had so many interesting stories to tell. Such an amazing experiences - born in the early 1920s, being a young adult at the beginning of the Second World War, seeing mass commercialization of air travel, flight to space, miniaturization and age of information. And she even caught beginnings of AI (or pseudo-AI).

She "picked" a good place to live and observe the flow of time and events where she directly wouldn't be affected by various negative events throughout the century of her life.

Comment by jagged-chisel 6 hours ago

I’m generation X. My grandmother will be 97 in March. Her memory is actually really good. She gets frustrated when she’s talking about family and doesn’t recall a specific name of a great- or great-great-grandchild (With five generations alive at the same time, that’s a lot of names. I call my kids and my granddaughter the wrong name all the time - ah the human condition), but her mind is doing well.

Many times, I have mentioned how things have changed in the last century, how most of the things we make use of now were developed and refined in the last 100 years - industrial machinery, communications, computers …

There’s a simpleness to her experience. She is most definitely a beneficiary of society. She has lived comfortably without the need to understand how everything works; and hasn’t had the curiosity to question.

I’m not sure I have a point, but I do personally find it a little disappointing to have someone who lived through so much without having the ability to discuss it at depth.

Comment by julian_t 10 hours ago

Some people lived through amazing change. My grandmother was born in the late 1890s in rural Wales, and died at 95. She remembered electricity coming to her village and the visit of the first motor car, the arrival of radio and telephones. She saw men land on the moon and towards the end of her life went to the USA on a 747. Yet when she was a girl she lived with older farm workers who had never been more than ten miles from where they were born.

Comment by frereubu 9 hours ago

When my family moved to Somerset from London in the 1970s our elderly next-door neighbour, after hearing we'd moved from London, said "I went to Bristol [25 miles away] once. Didn't like it much." Apart from that he'd stayed in the town we'd moved to. I think about that a lot and sometimes envy his contentment in staying where he was - he had everything he needed.

Comment by nashashmi 8 hours ago

I grew up watching movies where it was common for the character to be living as adults in the town they were born in, and sometimes even in the very house they were born.

As an immigrant, I thought this was a missed opportunity. In my head this is what it means to be a local.

My wife on the other hand has been migrating for so long that she has no ties to any land. Not of her forefathers which she has never been to. Not of her grandfather which she also has never been to. Nor of her fathers given that he hates the place. still has longing for the land of her childhood but she is not allowed to go back to. And now she is here, too detached to continue to live in the same place as us.

Comment by lurk2 6 hours ago

Gregory Aldrete opens his Great Courses lecture series on ancient history by noting that although most of us engage with history through works of art and accounts military conquest, 90 to 95 percent of all people living back then would have been born on a farm, spent their lives tilling soil interrupted by the occasional calamities of flood or disease, and then died likely not having travelled more than a few kilometers away.

Comment by delichon 9 hours ago

My grandfather was born in the 1890s. He watched the first moon landing with us. He had tears in his eyes and said "when I was a boy I carried flint and steel to start a fire".

Comment by aaronax 4 hours ago

When I was a boy I had to call the library to get the definition of a word that was not in my family's dictionary. 39 years old now.

Comment by havaloc 16 hours ago

It always seems it's a fall that ends it, I wonder if she could have made 100 years on the water if she hadn't fell. What an inspiring life!

Comment by somenameforme 15 hours ago

It's the senescence that makes the fall, more or less, inevitable. Warren Buffet wrote about it in his final letter to shareholders [1] : "When balance, sight, hearing and memory are all on a persistently downward slope, you know Father Time is in the neighborhood."

[1] - https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/news/nov1025.pdf

Comment by avadodin 10 hours ago

had to check. glad he's still among us as far as i can tell.

Comment by pepy 10 hours ago

I think the Universe Management wants him to see one more recession.

Comment by Aeolun 15 hours ago

It’s not the fall. It’s the enforced idleness afterwards.

Comment by hackeraccount 5 hours ago

Yeah. My Grandmother lived a pretty long time but she had a boarder named Lillian who at 95 was still walking 2 or 3 miles to the store every day. One day her daughter gave her a lift and managed to get into a fairly minor accident. (My Dad claimed that the daughter was herself too old to be driving.)

Anyhow Lillian broke an ankle. Went to hospital. And there was some complication. And then another. And 2 weeks later she's passed away, never having gotten out of the hospital.

I think people - especially when you're old - are more like sharks then not. If you don't keep moving nothing good happens.

Comment by interloxia 12 hours ago

I sometimes wonder if VR is ever successful, perhaps in the 2050s, some of the idleness will be less of an issue.

The lack of movement rather than rich stimulation might remain the issuem I look forward to a study if there hasn't been one yet.

Comment by zdragnar 9 hours ago

Muscles atrophy without consistent activity. VR can't replace that for someone with a broken hip / leg / spine. The whole cardiopulmonary system weakens with age, as does the immune system and healing takes longer, so an injury from a fall is much harder on the body than an equivalent injury to a younger person.

Comment by bell-cot 9 hours ago

Old family wisdom - "People fall at every age. But getting back up gets harder every year, and the time comes when you can't."

Comment by kadushka 46 minutes ago

Can you imagine writing code for 100 years?

Comment by GuestFAUniverse 11 hours ago

So Long, and Thanks for All the... Lobster.

Comment by dayyan 16 hours ago

Rugged individualism. Rest in peace, Queen.

Comment by dostick 15 hours ago

Who else reading the headline thought it’s about 100 year old lobster that died?

Comment by innis226 15 hours ago

Lol me too

Comment by hdjdjfjb 5 hours ago

She is a proof women should not be excluded from hard physical labour! They can handle anything. It is just patriarchy holding then back!

Comment by inglor_cz 10 hours ago

I wonder if there is a lobster that survived her.

Lobsters are long-lived, they don't age (in the sense of slowly losing their fitness - senescence) and they only die when they grow too big and suffocate during moulting, or possibly catch some infection, or get killed by other animals/people.

A 105 y.o. lobster is plausible.

Comment by Gracana 5 hours ago

I went looking for information on the oldest known lobster, and found this article about a 20lb lobster named George who was estimated to be 140 years old. Neat!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_(lobster)

Comment by nephihaha 9 hours ago

Early reports by European colonists in New England suggest some of the lobsters back then were far bigger than today.

Comment by linksnapzz 2 hours ago

My grandpa said that it was not unusual to see 5-10pounders crawling around in the shallows at night...in the 1920s, in Narragansett Bay, not even offshore.

Comment by kiliantics 3 hours ago

I took a boat ride in Maine on a lobster boat once that was owned and operated by a man in his 90s. Someone else in the town told me that he was being pressured to stop working by his family because he had recently fallen out of the boat while lobstering alone and broken a rib. He still managed to climb back into the boat with his injury and get home. It's a different America up there.

Comment by nephihaha 9 hours ago

It says she died at 105 and spent almost a century fishing for lobsters. I doubt she was catching many at the age of five.

Comment by defrost 8 hours ago

* Fishing's not catching,

* I just pulled up a family video of several kids, mine, my siblings, friends, making commercial marbles for sale pulling glass from a furnace and rolling them on a bench, using optic moulds, canes for decoration, etc .. at the age of five.

Sure, we weren't running them like chimney sweeps or coal mine donkeys 24/7 - that's what they wanted to do for pocket money - make their own, how ever many, and sell them.

Comment by rubzah 8 hours ago

> Fishing's not catching

Sounds like something from an MLM seminar. "Telling's not selling!"

Comment by nephihaha 8 hours ago

I doubt she was doing much in this direction until at least the age of eleven and even then...

Comment by defrost 8 hours ago

I can't say either way, having never met her.

I can say that Sandy over the road (now deceased, made it to 94) was hitching bullocks to sled a water tank to a spring and back every morning setting out at 4am from the age of five or so - both his parents died of influenza just a few years later.

My own father, (still alive, born 1935) was shooting and trapping rabbits at that age to feed the family.

Comment by cucumber3732842 2 hours ago

In the days before OSHA there was a lot of stuff on a lobster boat an 8yo can be tasked with.

Comment by barry-cotter 6 hours ago

Depressing to realise that soon most people will not even have second hand experience with children being useful.

Comment by jpk2f2 2 hours ago

From 8 to 105...97 years. I'd say that qualifies as "almost a century".

Comment by tokai 8 hours ago

She started working at the age of 8. Which we both know from reading the article.