· It is surprising how quickly important local happenings disappear from memory. I have found very few people who remember a world renown Westport event that I was a part of in 1971.
During that time I was supervisor for Westport's Prelude Corp., a company founded by Bill Whipple. We had large boats that fished for lobsters on the continental shelf. At the same time the shelf was covered with large foreign trawlers and processing ships, mostly Russian. Those ships dragged their nets through our traps and destroyed gear faster than we could replace it.
Joseph Gaziano, a former vice president of Raytheon, liked what he saw in Prelude and became our president. Joe decided we should do something about the gear losses and had our captains keep a record of what the foreign boats were doing to us. This was done by log-keeping, Coast Guard surveillance and photographs. With a lot of evidence, our lawyer went to court and filed a suit against the Russian government which was accepted by the federal court.
The U. S. State Department immediately came to our president and said, "We are in the middle of a Cold War and you are going to start a real one."
Meanwhile the Russians laughed and said the fishing boats were all privately owned. We all knew that there were no private companies in Russia.
After no response from Moscow, our attorneys went to court and placed a lien on a Russian freighter, the Suleyman Stalskiy, in San Francisco Harbor. A U. S. marshal held that ship for one week while the State Department became very frustrated with us. But a Russian delegation from Moscow arrived at our Westport office in big limousines surrounded by many state police, TV trucks and reporters.
Prelude had sued for $300,000 which today would represent well over a million. After two days of talks, a settlement of $80,000 was agreed on. After the settlement, Joe Gaziano wrote to President Nixon and that letter started the machinery to develop the 200-mile zone around our shores.
I have had to leave out a lot of things that happened during this case because of newspaper space but I do have the court presentations and many news clippings about this incident. Carlton "Cukie" Macomber was born in Westport more than 70 years ago. He has been associated with the fishing industry all of his life and loves local history.