Topical Guide 309
Mark Dorset
Life: As an Imitation of Art
Art: As an Inspiration for Life
Herb attracted Garth’s attention by designing a new culling table. Formerly, the culling table had been nothing more than a large wooden table, about waist height, covered with a sheet of zinc, placed in front of an opening in the bin into which the clams were dumped like so many lumps of coal. Cullers stood alongside the table, and one of them, the “doorman,” slid a small wooden door upward, releasing clams from the bin. When the table was covered with clams, the doorman, with great difficulty, slid the door down again, and the cullers began work. Each sorted the clams that came immediately to hand, tossing them according to size, without looking backward, into crates arranged along the walls behind the cullers. This method had many faults: the doorman’s job was difficult and frustrating; the cullers often interfered with one another, straying across poorly defined boundaries in their zeal to cull; and, though the cullers were (after much training and practice) very good at getting the clams into the crates without looking, and even knew from the sound of the clams clattering against their crated fellows how nearly full a crate was, clams often collided in midair and ricocheted into the wrong crates, and the concussion of one clam against another, in the air or in the crate, occasionally cracked or crushed them.
Herb was intrigued by the problems the table presented. He began lingering in the carpentry shed after work to put in some time on an idea he had for an entirely new kind of culling table. He worked alongside one of the carpenters, Andrew “Swifty” Switt, to build it. When it was finished, he and Switt installed it one night in place of the old table.Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 9
Shellfish Equipment, Inc. was founded 30 years ago, and its current owner, Chuck Steuer, has been running the show since 1998. The “bread and butter” of the company is clam sorting—separating the little neck clams from the cherry stone and chowder clams once they’re dredged up together from the floor of the ocean. Steuer outfits custom machines called “clam graders” with adjustable gaps between cushioned rollers that trap clams based on size and thickness. This forces the clams down their designated [chute]. From there, the clams are bagged automatically based on a batching system that increases efficiency. As the clams race down the [chute] after sizing, they are detoured into one of two secondary [chutes] per clam grade to fill a connecting bag. Once filled, the [chute] closes off and switches the clams to the other [chute], giving the operator time to switch the bag without losing time. A 4-grader, with an experienced crew, can process up to 60,000 clams per hour. Clams, being delicate, do require some special treatment to prevent shell cracking such as cushioned, short drops and flaps to slow clams down.
Kelsey Tenney, “A Clam Sorting Equipment Company Grows in Bohemia,” Edible Long Island, May 9, 2017 [lightly copy-edited by me, MD]
[more to come on Thursday, August 4, 2022]
Have you missed an episode or two or several?
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
You can ensure that you never miss a future issue by getting a free subscription. (You can help support the work by choosing a paid subscription instead.)
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” “The Static of the Spheres,” “The Fox and the Clam,” “The Girl with the White Fur Muff,” “Take the Long Way Home,” “Call Me Larry,” and “The Young Tars,” the nine novellas in Little Follies, and Little Follies itself, which will give you all the novellas in one handy package.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.