22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY november 2-8, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com required a second miracle. The owner was a reluctant seller, and eventually requested $100,000. Then Kehoe offered more and acquired it—but never proceeded in retrieving it. In 2015, a new chapter began when Gregg acquired the boat with a mission to get it back on the water. He recruited Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw, her husband and marine biologist William Gilly, and others (Jack Barth, Enrique Umberto, Linda Powell-McMillan, Bob Lesko and Tom Keffer) to his board, and in 2017 the Western Flyer Foundation was approved by the IRS as a 501(c)(3). The story itself was gaining traction; in 2015, Kevin Bailey published a book titled The Western Flyer: Steinbeck’s Boat, the Sea of Cortez, and the Saga of Pacific Fisheries. It was also a story 75 years earlier. “The moment of hour of leave-taking is one of the pleasantest times in human experience,” Steinbeck wrote. “People who don’t ordinarily like you very well are overcome with affection.” Before leaving, in 1940, the boat took part in a fiesta and a boat parade. By the time of leave-taking so many people came to see the crew off that they departed much delayed. It’s interesting to think about whether Steinbeck would agree that the same applies to homecoming. Like many Monterey residents, Enea, the man who first found the boat in 1986, will be on Fisherman’s Wharf to greet the boat upon its return. Just like when the boat took off in 1940— when “the whole town of Monterey became fevered and festive” for the end of the sardine season celebration, as Steinbeck wrote—the homecoming of the Western Flyer will be accompanied by festivities with a decorated boat parade, led by a Monterey fire boat. A retired teacher and now a part-time swim coach, Enea is a nephew of both captain Tony Berry and seaman Sparky Enea, who was part of the crew, along with his inseparable friend, seaman Tiny Colletto. These men were known trouble-makers and were closely supervised by the Monterey police, Steinbeck reported with affection. “We’re not fishing,” Sparky would announce to each passing boat, when the Western Flyer finally took leave on March 11, 1940, full of shovels, nets, fish kits, flashlights, as well as cases of spaghetti, peaches, pineapple tomatoes and whole Romano cheeses. “Why not?” “Aw, we’re going down in the Gulf to collect starfish and bugs and stuff like that,” Sparky Enea would respond casually, making the fishermen’s jaws drop, according to The Log. It was March 1940; “Hitler marched into Denmark and into Norway, France had fallen, the Maginot Line was lost,” Steinbeck wrote. The voyagers on the Western Flyer, at sea for six weeks, didn’t know any of that at the time, but they knew the daily catch of every fish boat within 400 miles. Enea didn’t get really interested in the family story until his Uncle Sparky wrote down his own memories and shared a copy. Sparky Enea was Bob’s uncle; Tony’s Berry’s wife, Rose “Tootsie” Berry, was Sparky’s sister. As a child, Bob didn’t know much about the voyage of the Western Flyer even though names and places were mentioned, typically during Sunday spaghetti dinners that could gather 20-30 people. Sparky and Tiny Colletto grew up together. The Enea and Colletto families’ houses were back to back, Bob explains, both Sicilian families. Tony (Anton, really) came from the other side of the Italian peninsula, on the Adriatic coast. He was a quiet person, an engineer by education and later in life a carpenter. “Sparky, on the other hand, would always tell a lot of stories,” Bob says. “One thousand wacky stories, he called them.” What was the wacky story from the trip to the Sea of Cortez? “That was a crazy trip,” Bob says. For example, Carol Steinbeck was also on the boat, but she didn’t share a bed with her husband, nor was she mentioned in The Log. “Carol was enamored with Tiny during that trip, and later,” Bob says, relating what he heard from Sparky. “The Steinbecks were fighting throughout the trip, and didn’t even sleep in the same room. Sparky said the whole crew thought it was pretty odd.” But there were wonderful memories too: Sparky’s favorite was the day when Tiny, a lightweight Navy champion, fought with a regional lightweight champion they encountered in the Sea of Cortez and was beaten. “Probably because they had a gallon of rum before the fight,” Enea says, passing on what he heard from his uncles. That led to his first reading of The Log, a pivotal moment that resulted with Enea starting his own search for the Western Flyer, in the 1980s, when the first local foundation with aspirations to get the boat back was started. But, despite years of trying, the Western Flyer would never be found without a final consultation that took place between Bob Enea and then-stillliving Captain Tony Berry, who figured out how to confirm a suspect boat’s real identity. “Check the call sign for the radio,” Berry advised his nephew. WB4044; it worked. “I’m a little sad Uncle Tony will not see it,” Bob says. “But I think he knows somehow that the boat is back.” While the late Berry cannot attend, his daughter, Geraldine “Gerry” Schwarz, will be in attendance on Nov. 4 with her family, and she will be a judge in the “best dressed boat” contest. There will also be a lot of Rickettses—and they are coming with their own approach to the story, a bit frustrated that Steinbeck’s version of Ed Ricketts as Doc is the only version posterity pays attention to. One of the things that we don’t learn about Ricketts from Steinbeck, says granddaughter Chris Ricketts, was that he was “a wonderful father and a big family man.” Readers of The Log find out that Ricketts was a womanizer, but the families (of Ricketts, and Steinbeck) are not mentioned. Chris never met her grandfather, inheriting most of the stories from her mother, Nancy, Ricketts’ second daughter with Anna Makar, now age 99, a 50-year resident of Sitka, Alaska. “Collecting was a family endeavor,” Chris says about Ricketts’ passion, adding he shared it not just with Steinbeck, but also with his family. The family would spend summers on collecting trips, practicing Latin names of marine invertebrates. Dominated by Steinbeck’s voice— even though Ricketts was a skilled writer and liked writing—the story of the Western Flyer doesn’t do justice to Ricketts, not as a family man and perhaps not even as an original thinker. His idea that “wave intensity was a critical factor in determining both the types of organisms present in a community, and how these organisms were arranged within a stretch of shoreline became the basis of the seminal ideas that emerged from coastal ecology in the decade to follow,” wrote C. Melissa Miner, David P. Lohse, Peter T. Raimondi and John S. Pearse in their 2020 essay The Legacy of a Naturalist Left: This is not the original steering wheel, it’s older than that. This historic wheel was part of a 19th-century boat. Right: The boat sleeps up to 11 people, and the Western Flyer Foundation will be chartering it to individual scientists who can do research and spend their nights aboard. The hybrid electric diesel engine makes the vessel quiet, perfect for oceanic research. The white parts are diesel, and the black is transfluid, the hybrid part. Daniel Dreifuss Daniel Dreifuss
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