A Video 44 Years in the Making

My husband and I made a video ad for a reading I'm doing of my novel,  Don’t Ya Know. Once again, in the head to head spirit of the 44 years we’ve worked together, we reached the end of a project.

Let me tell you, it isn’t easy to be on a creative roll with one’s spouse. Issues arise, even in a one minute film edit. What we’ve learned to do is keep our mouths shut and take a break when the whole thing sucks.

That’s why this latest production took a bit more time than usual. The learning curve on these computer programs is rough when you only use them once a year. And we’re in our…well, we’re seniors, a group not known for long, IT retention.

“What did we do last year when this happened?”

This question threads our work which positions Michael at the large screen iMac with me speaking over his shoulder.

“Did you save it as a movie file?” I ask.

“I’m going for a Quicktime movie, right? That’s what we did last year, right?”

That much we recall, but QT looks different and iMovie requires an update. The reviews for the update say it’s worse. But we persist with many deep breaths and a few temper flare ups, mostly aimed at Apple. The glitch-filled draft loops by us and through us hundreds of times, maybe thousands over a week.

Consequently, the underscore of the trailer follows me through the day, and then hums through my dreams at night, until the Hallelujah Singers awaken my morning brain with a full throated chorus of "Carry Me Home." I brush my teeth to their harmony and caffeinate myself to the heartbeat of their drums. This will go on for an indefinite period. Perry Como sang in my head for months when we did the promos for Manhasset Stories, so I’m prepared.

Despite the song worms, there are wonderful moments in this work Michael and I do together.  It’s teamwork that began in 1972 when we first met at Chemical Bank in Manhattan. Employees were not allowed to date. It was that simple. We kept our relationship a secret, though we worked a desk apart in a room full of desks. Our subordination solidified us. 

We got married, moved to a great apartment on the East River, and painted a large canvas together, using tape to mask off the colors in our velour sofa. Posting the photo, shown below, took courage; but here's what we turned out, offering proof that love is blind. Note, however: the painting sits down there at the bottom in a collage of our early years. It's the 1970s in New York and that defines an entire era for us.

There’s another scene that plays in my mind’s eye. It took place in our first home in Georgia, shortly before we became parents. One night we worked together over an old electric typewriter perched on the fireplace stoop. We planned to write our story as a memoir, alternating chapters with each other's perspective. It was a one-night wonder.

Later on,  I wrote a children’s story and Michael illustrated it. Then, I wrote a folk singer’s biography, and Michael read the copy three times before the editor saw it. Again, neither of these projects came to fruition, though each had plenty of drama - enough to leave us broken.

But we put ourselves back together and created another life. I wrote for a weekly newspaper, he set the type, and shoulder-to-shoulder, (with a team), we prepared the boards for the printer.

Stormy weather arrived again, figuratively and literally. It tore the life we’d made apart, and we worked night and day to clean up the damage for 20 years straight.

We slowed down when we retired a few years ago, and found ourselves comfortably back in the same old places, working together as we’ve always done.

Here's our latest effort, a book ad for a Long Island reading coming up. Michael is the one who made this minute happen. I was his assistant:

                                                   


                                                 ****

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Fish Oil Factories on Long Island

Fish Oil Factories and the Long Island Stench 
by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser

Photo: George Bradford Brainerd (American, 1845-1887). Deserted Fish Oil Factory, Shelter Island, New York, ca. 1872-1887. Collodion silver glass wet plate negative Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum/Brooklyn Public Library, Brooklyn Collection, 1996.164.2-360 



Fish oil factories dotted the 400 miles of Long Island’s coastline before the early 20th century. 

Before Long Island's coast was discovered as a respite for the weary, it housed huge and smelly fish oil factories at points along its shore where fish oil production was the mainstay of the economy for generations. Locals seined mossbunker, slimy fish indigenous to the area, and boiled them with bat guano. The word guano refers to dung used as an agricultural fertilizer; it's usually found on rocks or on the floors of caves. Mining bat and seabird guano from  ice-age deposits of granite all over the LI  was an industry in itself. Locals scraped fresh or fossilized guano into pails and sold the contents by weight to the fish oil factories.They pressed the resulting mush to extract an oil known in the trade as 'Long Island Shit.' Containers of the thick, slimy oil were transported to depots where it was processed into fertilizer. 

The oily slime was then spread on lima bean, tomato, and potato fields all across Long Island's farms which stretched far and wide between its shorelines before the arrival of the Victorian era and the discovery of sunbathing by the seaside

East End bayman, Bruce Collins (a menhaden fleet fisherman from 1954-1960), spoke at the East Hampton Library in 2015 about the industry in the Twomey Lecture Series. The East Hampton Star's Irene Silverman covered the event in an article entitled: "The Most Valuable Fish That Swims," (Sept. 24, 2015). She reported that Mr. Collins said the fish oil factories were centered in an area of Gardiner's Bay known as "Promised Land" because of the enormous schools of menhaden found there:

“These fish were put on the face of the earth just to feed other fish. They have no teeth. They swim in huge schools with their mouths open. You can cast into a school of a million bunkers all day long and never catch one. They’re not going to take your lure," Collins said. 

In the 21st century, the popularity of fish oil for medicinal and cosmetic uses has increased the mossbunker's value. Billions of the bony fish are caught with hydraulic cranes attached to huge nets. However, in the early days, it was huge men who were hired to haul the bunker nets. This required no particular maritime skill other than pure brawn.  In The Fish Factory, Barbara Garrity-Blake writes this factor contributed to integration on Long Island when many muscular, black men turned to menhaden fleets for work.

Processing fish oil wasn't the only large industry along that stretch of the eastern seaboard. In fact, horse processing plants joined fish oil processors to further pollute the shores and let loose an ever more odious smell. This kept the hardiest of souls from trying to get a breath of fresh air at the beach. One factory worker said it was an odor of "sewage and death."

www.szannerosenwasser.com

Don't Ya Know, a Long Island novel by Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser, available at online retailers.