The Pittsburgh Press (January 21, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
PORT ORFORD, Oregon – A new industry has sprung up on the Pacific Coast, and maybe you’d be interested in it. The industry is shark fishing.
Throughout eons of deep-sea fishing, sharks have been no good. All they did was eat bait and get on the hook you wanted other fish on, or ram around and tear up your nets. Fishermen cussed and despised the shark.
But within the last two years that situation has reversed itself. Now hundreds of fishermen all up and down this coast face high seas and miserable weather to gather in the newly elevated and respectable shark. Today, fishermen cuss the other fish that pet on the hooks they want sharks to get on.
The reason for all this is two-fold – the craze for vitamins and the war.
When this World War started it shut off a great portion of our vitamin-making ingredients from abroad. So we had to look around for our own source.
Scientists reported that the liver of a shark is just reeking with Vitamins A and D. And furthermore, to make it all the nicer for the fishermen, a shark just reeks with liver. The inside of a shark is practically all liver. So here was your new industry.
This little town of Port Orford is a good example of what has happened all up and down the coast. Two years ago there weren’t half a dozen fishermen here, and those few just sort of pecked at it. But today around 40 boats are working out of here.
Many make $1000 a week
Many’s the man who never had $50 in his pocket in his life and who now hauls off and makes $1000 in less than a week. One man paid for a $3500 boat in three days. During the peak of the season more than $1000 in shark livers comes into this little town every evening.
They catch two kinds of shark – soupfin and dog shark. Neither is the man-eating kind. Soupfin is what they want most, for the price of soupfin livers is $5 a pound, and the livers run from 6 to 12 pounds apiece.
The other kind is the dog shark, which is much smaller, and its liver brings only 25 cents a pound. But even that isn’t bad, when you consider that on a good day a fisherman might bring in two soupfins and 100 dogs – which would net him around $125.
One of these shark fishermen is one of the most interesting men I’ve ever met. Unfortunately I can’t write in detail about him, because he asked me not to.
His name is Jimmie Combs. He is a Harvard man. He keeps his past to himself. I know what is behind him, for he told me – both the highlights and the lowlights – but he wants old glories forgotten and old hurts left sealed.
He fishes for a living. He has been around Port Orford about eight years. He is 37. His shack on top of the hill is filled with classics, and he throws Latin into his conversation as though it were slang. And he cusses with a Harvard accent.
Rescues 24 men in storm
He somewhat resembles Bob Hope, of the movies. He is medium-sized, but powerful. They say he is the greatest fighter in southwest Oregon, although he is not pugnacious.
One night about six weeks ago a terrific storm was swirling over the Pacific. The Coast Guard had rescued 24 men from a lumber schooner that had broken up at sea. Many of them were in desperate shape. And then they discovered, on returning to Port Orford, that the waves were so bad the Coast Guard boat couldn’t get up to the dock.
And then Jimmie Combs came down the hill out of the night, got into an old leaking rowboat, and made 12 trips out across the raging black waters, bringing back two men on each trip. It took him hours. The whole town gathered on shore to see hum die. There is a movement now to get him a Carnegie Medal. But he wouldn’t care, one way or the other.
Combs is friendly and likeable. He says he didn’t have a dime for years, but now sharks have bought him a boat, an old car, a shack he built himself, and $3000 worth of fun.
He loves the ruggedness of the life at sea, and the solitude of the forests. When he feels the urge he dresses up and goes to Portland or San Francisco for music or the theater.
Jimmie Combs is one of those strange boiling souls, a combination of intellect and rebelliousness, who could not make himself fit into the regular pattern, and who finally took cloister in a little cabin on a bitterly beautiful shore far removed from the things he used to know.