Tireless Fish Shack Fundraiser

In some ways, Barb Jobe is best licensed to be a member of the Fish Shack Building Committee; she has been looking out her living room window at the Fish Shack for most of her life.  Her parents moved into the solid gray house on Duley St. when Barb was three years old.  She married, and moved 1.2 miles away to Quarry St., but then returned to the Fish Shack view to care for her mother in 1962.  Barb has been looking out her picture window to all of Lanescove, punctuated on the right by the Shack, ever since.

(In the blizzard of ’78, she and her husband watched a cottage, seized by the roaring seas of that storm, bob in the cove like a lobster pot. The Fish Shack stood fast.)

But Barb’s authority extends far beyond her view:  For two years she joined the Fish Shack crew every Saturday morning, her camera ready to document both the fun and the labor.  Some winter days she had to pack six camera batteries; it was so cold the batteries froze, but the men kept working.  Barb remembers Martin Ray shingling all day in frigid temperatures.

For two years Barb made sure the crew was not just fed, but well fed, soliciting lunches from supportive cooks.  Carol Hong’s lamb stew is still famous among them; Brian Church’s seafood chowder is runner-up.

With Arnie Shore, Barb has been the tireless Fish Shack fundraiser, organizing silent auctions and art auctions to raise funds to rebuild the Shack, and that’s just he beginning. She still kindly marvels at the community’s generosity.

Of the Fish Shack project, Jobe has nothing but joy to report.

“We had more laughs than any other committee on earth; people had to close their doors because we were so loud! (And we had to have our doors open because it was an open meeting!)”

Jobe now sits with just pride on the executive board as treasurer of the Lanes Cove Historical  Association.   More importantly, she sits by her window and looks at the shining new Fish Shack everyday.

“Just about 3:00 in the winter it glows,” Jobe said of the Shack, with its young unweathered cedar shakes.  Soon after that conversation I was driving through Lanesville around 3:30, and caught site of a golden box down the hill.  The sun was low behind the trees to the left of the breakwater, and the Fish Shack caught every warm ray, shining like a prism on the edge of the harbor.

By Heather Atwood