Mossers relive glory days in Scituate

In Scituate, MA., tanned and toned, they lived their summer days by low tide: rising hours before sunrise in order to be in their skiffs and on the water by dawn.
Wielding heavy rakes, they filled the rickety wooden boats with algae scraped from the sea floor before heading back to have their harvest weighed and logged.
The ambitious ones returned at night to take advantage of the second low tide, finishing a good day with more than a thousand pounds of the fetid seaweed that was used to make a food thickener. Others made their wages on the beach, spreading the moss to dry and packing it into crates with their boots.
These days, the cast of characters that made up Scituate's Irish mossing industry during the second half of the 20th century are scattered around the South Shore.
The big names are gone; Lucien Rousseau, the area's last commercial sea mosser, died in 1983 after 40 years of providing hundreds of summer jobs off the Scituate-Cohasset coast.
But the men and women who borrowed his dories and used their wages to support families or pay college tuition relived the glory days Sunday at a reunion at Scituate Maritime and Irish Mossing Museum.
"To this day, I can spot a good ledge a mile away," said Kathie McDonald, 55, who collected moss off Peggotty Beach during the 1970s. "It was a lifestyle that stays in your blood."
Now engineers, carpenters, business owners, selectmen and retirees, the mossers haven't forgotten the physical labor or the healthy competition that fueled the industry.
Underneath names scrawled on the tags on their chests, many also wrote the poundage of their biggest haul: 150 lbs., 1,550 lbs., 2,335 pounds.

"The camaraderie was great, but the competition was constant," said Lucien Rousseau Jr., 63, of Quincy, who worked for his father throughout his childhood and teenage years, until "it was time for a real job" after college.

Once a livelihood for Irish immigrants in the mid-1800s, the industry was a summer cash cow for both teenagers and adults from late 1940s until the 1990s. Children as young as 9 spent the summer hauling sopping moss to Rousseau's spot on Cole Parkway, then collected their wages in a lump sum at the end of August.

"Most of the time it was just us kids out there," said Frank Jackson, 51, of Medfield, who started mossing in Scituate at 14. "You'd never get away with it now with child labor laws."

Wages ranged from 1 cent per pound in the early days to 10 cents per pound in the 1980s and '90s, according to the different generations who traded stories and competed for bragging rights Sunday.

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