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Copyrights reserved by the author. If you are in doubt, please click on 'Copyrights' and read the details. They don’t make clambakes like that anymore! by J. G. Fabiano
Have you every noticed how good times from the past seem to be better than anything we do now? Especially as we get older. The other day my wife and I joined a group of friends who met at Foster’s Clam Bake in order to enjoy an old-fashioned New England-style dinner. This, of course, included clam chowder, steamed clams, and mussels, lobster, corn in the husk, baked potatoes and blueberry cobbler. Everyone at our table loved the meal and the entertainment that went with it, which was an older gentleman singing old New England sea shanties. Or, at least, I think they were! Looking around the large room, filled with long tables of people having a good time, I started to reminisce about a time in my past when going to a clambake took days to set up. My mind wandered back to a time when a clambake meant work for my father and, when I was old enough to hold a rake, the memory of a lifetime for me. My uncle used to own a fish store in College Point, New York. I loved going to his store. The air was filled with the sharp smell of fresh fish that had just been delivered from the docks of New York City. I remember the black and white tiled floors and the counter being sparkling clean and my uncle, wearing a white apron, talking to his customers while he arranged the catch of the day in a glass display case filled with crushed ice. Because of the ice, the temperature in the store was always cool even when the temperature outside reached 90 degrees. When I was real young, my father used to take me into Uncle Louie’s store at least once a month on a Saturday morning. After a while my father and uncle would drop me off with my mother and Aunt Natalie while they went to do something important that I never understood but which earned my father a little extra money. I didn’t mind being left behind because my Aunt Natalie’s house had a little yard and I would play there for hours, pretending I was Mickey Mantle hitting another home run, trying to stay ahead in the great race that was going on between him and the evil Roger Maris. Then, the day came when my father took me over to Uncle Louie’s market and, instead of dumping me with my mother and Aunt Natalie, my father and my uncle took me with them. My father said they needed my help with the clambake. Wow! I could tag along with the men because they needed my help. I can’t tell you how important that made me feel. At first I didn’t know what to make of it because what had become a tradition in my short life was about to change. The clambake was held at a small airport called Roosevelt Field. Today it is a gigantic mall of stores but back then it was an open field that went on forever. My father and my uncle met with a bunch of other men in the middle of the field to dig a giant hole. They didn’t need my help for this because the shovels were bigger than I was, so I sat on a rock and watched a couple-of-dozen shirtless men work and sweat in the hot summer sun. I remember my father pausing to lean on his shovel and shooting me a big grin, and it made me feel proud because I was there, ready to take my turn doing 'man’s work'. When the hole was dug the men then dragged over a bunch of rocks, including the one I had been sitting on, and arranged them in the giant hole. I remember the grunts and groans of the men as they pushed and shoved the big rocks into place and it seemed to take hours. Once they were finished, the bottom of the hole looked like it was filled with giant round cobblestones. The men then took a break to eat lunch and drink beer. My Uncle Louie supplied the lunch that consisted of fried fish, cherrystone clams, and all kinds of fish and lobster salads. I remember the cans of beer swimming in metal buckets filled with the same ice that kept the fish in my uncle’s store from going bad. The beer cans were wrapped in colored paper wrappers with a picture of a colonial gentleman claiming that Knickerbocker beer was the best beer in the world. Most of the men there seemed to agree. The next step was filling the hole with logs 8 to 10 feet in length, most of them with the bark still on them. The logs were dumped into the hole by trucks that had rumbled up while the men were still digging the hole. Then, after piling a giant mound of logs on top of the rocks in the hole, my father and my uncle doused the trees with gasoline. I remember the smell caught in my throat and made my eyes water. My uncle then told everyone to stand back while he lit a corner of the hole. The explosion that followed was like a nuclear blast. I watched, hypnotized, as a red and black cloud boiled up into the sky. It was early evening at that point and starting to get dark but the blaze that erupted turned the areas around the fire pit into daytime again. It was then time to leave. I was told the fire would be left to burn all night. We went back to Aunt Natalie’s house and I fell asleep with visions of huge fires in my head. The next morning my uncle, my father, and I went back to the field where the fire was still burning. Most of the wood was gone and the giant boulders in the bottom of the fire pit had turned white from the heat. In fact, the heat was so intense some of the huge boulders had split apart. At the same time we arrived, busloads of people were settling into the field all around us. Tents magically appeared and what seemed like thousands of tables and chairs were distributed under and around the tents. I never knew who all the people were who brought the tents and the tables and chairs, or where they came from, because I was mesmerized by the way fire could split rocks. I found out later that an average-size clambake put on by my uncle consisted of over 2000 people. These people were strangers to me but they all seemed to know each other because they all seemed to work for the same company. Another thing I noticed was that the kids these people brought wouldn’t talk to me; they would just look at me like I must really know what I was doing to be part of something so impressive. Then my uncle gave fresh directions to his helpers again and the same men who had dug the hole the day before began dumping onto the white-hot rocks great mounds of seaweed that had been brought in trucks from the beach. I didn’t know that much seaweed existed in the ocean. The first shovelfuls of seaweed thrown onto the rocks vanished in a hiss of steam but, gradually a great green steaming volcanic mound was built up that generated a huge pungent cloud that drifted out among the gathered crowd. That was when meshed cheesecloth bags filled with lobsters, clams, mussels, chicken, potatoes, corn, and fish of every kind would come out to be thrown on top of the steaming seaweed. As soon as the last cheesecloth bag was on top of the seaweed two rows of men quickly dragged a giant tarp over the whole thing to trap the steam. I remember staring at that tarp, with the steam pouring out from the corners, thinking of the heat underneath and wondering how long it would take to cook a small boy who accidentally fell in and wasn’t noticed before the tarp was dragged across! Not long, I guessed, because after just a few minutes the tarp was removed and a wave of steam rolled out filled with a scent I will never forger; sweet and pungent and filled with the smell of the sea. The long rows of tables that surrounded the hole were then filled with bags of cooked fish, vegetables and chicken to be distributed to those who had witnessed the miracle of the clambake. As everyone enjoyed the feast I was given my first job. My uncle handed me a rake and it became my job, along with my older cousins, to rake the seaweed off the rocks so that it could be hauled away. It was a hot and dirty job that I absolutely adored because I was a part of one of the most famous clambakes ever to be held on the Eastern seaboard. At the end of the day, when the busloads of people had left, we would sit around the filled-in hole with its cooling rocks and have our own feast. I remember my father grinning at me again while Uncle Louie shucked fresh cherrystone clams and passed them around drenched in lemon juice and his own secret cocktail sauce. I was nine years old, I had earned my pay and I was one of the guys. Now, whenever I catch a warm gust of steam with the scent of the ocean on it, I close my eyes and I am instantly transported back to my uncle’s clambake. Sometimes it’s hard for the present, no matter how good it is, to compete with the memories of the past. The End
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