HENRY GOURDINE DIES AT 94;
MASTER OF FISHING SKILLS AND LORE
To the few dozen fishermen who still make a living netting shad from the Hudson, Mr. Gourdine was the dean of the commercial fishermen, a man who took up his profession in 1920 at the age of 17 and never really abandoned it. On the day he died, he was working on nets in his basement.
To schoolchildren who flocked to his demonstrations of ancient skills, he was the net doctor, the old man with the magnetic personality and a satchel filled with needles and other tools he would use to teach them how to mend nets while enthralling them with stories from the old days.
For much of his life, Mr. Gourdine was simply one of hundreds of commercial fishermen who netted shad during the spring spawning season and harvested river-fattened striped bass in the fall.
Not that many of them did it as well as Mr. Gourdine, a rivergoing perfectionist who built his own boats, cut and trimmed trees into the poles that anchored his nets and became famous for his knowledge of the river and his innovative experiments in fishing techniques.
In recent years, with striped bass banned to commercial fishermen because of toxic contamination with PCB’s and with the river’s shad supply sharply reduced by ocean shad fishing, he had become something of a living museum, a man cherished by fishermen and conservationists for his devotion to the river.
As Gov. George E. Pataki put it, he was “a state treasure.”
Mr. Gourdine, who was born at Croton Point, N.Y., attributed his love of the Hudson to growing up in a house built so close to the river that waves lapped at the foundation.
When he was a toddler, he liked to recall, his mother would tie a rope around his waist to keep him from falling into the water, or in his case, perhaps, to keep him from jumping in. He became such a river rat, to the neglect of his household chores, that when he was 10, his mother made him wear a red dress, hoping it would shame him into staying away from his friends at the river. It worked, but only for a few days.
Mr. Gourdine got his first boating experiences as a child rowing to the Underhill brickworks with his father, who operated the factory steam engine and whose duties included firing up the boiler at 5:30 a.m.On the days he let his son pull the steam whistle to awaken the other workers, everyone in earshot would know that little Henry was on the job. As Mr. Gourdine recalled it, it was easy to lift a child up to the handle, but not so easy to get him to let go.
As a commercial fisherman who had as many as a dozen men working for him in three crews, he was the consummate professional. As deft with an ax as he was with nets, Mr. Gourdine, who worked as a carpenter between fishing seasons, would sharpen his poles to such a finely tapered point that they would look as if they had gone through a giant pencil sharpener.
And when it came to winching a line of them into the river bottom to hold his nets, Mr. Gourdine had a carpenter’s eye. Other fishermen might set their poles in a squiggly line. His would be string-straight.
As an independent commercial fisherman, Mr. Gourdine experienced the ebb and flow of the industry as prices fluctuated and the supplies of fish receded and surged, sometimes from season to season.
After one flush year, Mr. Gourdine recalled, he began the next season riding to the river in a Cadillac. When the season was over, he said, he walked home.
He had his glory days, to be sure: Once, in the 1930’s, he and his crew unloaded 12,000 pounds of fish on Crawbuckie Beach from a single netting, a huge haul but a mixed blessing. It took so long to pack the catch for shipment to the Fulton Fish Market, the men were too exhausted to set their nets on the next tide.
Always in demand as a skilled carpenter, Mr. Gourdine was fastidious about telling prospective employers that come April, he would be gone fishing. Some doubted that a man would walk away from a secure job for the uncertainties of the river, but as soon as the shad started running, Mr. Gourdine would be gone so fast, as he put it, that he would leave his hammer “hanging in the air.”
Mr. Gourdine’s wife died in 1979. He is survived by two daughters, Jean G. Drumgold and Lydia Yvonne Spencer; a son, Harry Norman, and a sister, Esther Nabors, all of Ossining; six grandchildren and a great-grandson.
October 26, 1997