The Legend: Dick Hathaway

He’s a six-time derby champ, but Dick Hathaway made the papers as much for his fast fists as for his fishing prowess. A 1962 case was typical. Dick and some other men were shucking scallops at Eldridge’s Fish Market in Edgartown. They got into an argument over the volume of the radio, and one guy pointed his scallop knife at Dick. Later, on the witness stand, Dick explained what happened next.

“I hit him in the jaw once,” he said.

“That’s all?” the prosecutor asked.

“I might have swung again,” Dick replied.

“He didn’t take no shit,” his friend “English” Pete Bradshaw told me once. “He were a wild man. He had good hands, did Dick.”

Dick is hardly the only island fisherman to get in a few fistfights—not by a long shot. But his reputation as a renegade made people willing to believe the rumors about that giant striper of his, the 60-pound, 2-ounce that stands as the derby record. He brought it in one October morning in 1978 as soon as the weigh station opened, signed his slip, stood for a picture, and quickly left, according to a newspaper account of the day. People found it odd that he didn’t stick around to bask in the glory of his accomplishment. The Vineyard Gazette called it “modesty foreign to most fishermen.”

What was with that bass, people asked, that a guy as ambitious as Dick would steal away without taking his bows? When I asked around, many longtime fishermen said they were told that something unusual happened in the weighmaster’s station that morning and, somehow, a 50-pounder was recorded as a 60. One guy called it the “Phantom Sixty.” The story is that only one derby official was there at the time, Helen Scarborough. Some say she misread the scale. Some say she was busy setting up the headquarters and left it to Dick to figure out the weight. Some say she had bad eyesight.

In any case, once Dick walked out it was too late to double-check the weight. The fish was gone.

When I spoke to Helen, she said the stories are false. Her husband, Henry, was working as weighmaster that year, and he read the scale correctly. “I was there,” she insisted. “It was not read wrong.” But she acknowledged the controversy over the bass. People didn’t get a look at it, she said, and that gave it a stigma. Some people suggested it had been stuffed. What’s the truth?

“Only he and God knows,” she said.