I have to start out with a confession,” West Tisburyite John W. Mayhew says. “It’s a hard cross to bear, but I wasn’t born on the Island.”

But his father was and his grandfather and his great-grandfather and his forebears before that – all the way back to the Thomas Mayhew who came to the Island in 1642 and started colonizing it.

“I wasn’t even conceived on the Island,” John Mayhew, eighty-four, says sadly. “I was conceived in the Orient and born in Cleveland, Ohio. But I did start school in West Tisbury. That was when what is now the town hall was a two-room school with the first four grades in one room and the next four in another. I was second in my class in the seventh and eighth grades. That sounds pretty impressive except that there were only two of us in the class, ” he says with a chuckle. Later, Mayhew went to the Tisbury High School for two years.

Betweentimes, he was in the Philippines and French Indochina, Switzerland, and Hong Kong, for his father, John W. Mayhew Sr., had a job as an accountant for Standard Oil of New York in the Far East.

“And that came about,” Mayhew’s sister, Jane Rust of Hingham, recounts, “because our father wanted to join the Army in the First World War, but couldn’t because he was deaf in one ear. So he joined the constabulary in the Philippines instead. On the way over on the ship, he met our mother-to-be, Helen Lee. She was taking her junior year abroad from Wellesley College and was going around the world. But she never got any farther than the Philippines. They got off the ship together and got married and stayed on.”

After the war, John Mayhew Sr. answered a Standard Oil advertisement and was hired to go to Hai Phong in what then was French Indochina and today is Vietnam. Next, the job took the family to Hong Kong and Switzerland. There were home leaves, of course, but when the Mayhews were in the Pacific it took a month, by ship and train, to return to the Vineyard.

“I figure before I was fourteen, I had been around the world two times, crossed the continent by train ten times, and taken an ocean liner across the Pacific at least that many times. On my last trip home, we went through the Panama Canal and got into a hurricane with seventy-foot waves off Cape Hatteras. That was something, I’ll tell you,” Mayhew says.

But in those traveling years, the happiest times for a small boy were in-between trips when John’s mother, who had grown up in New Jersey, simply couldn’t take the Asian climate any longer and would stay with her son and two daughters on the Island while her husband went back to the Far East. It was then that Johnny Mayhew – as he was then called – got his first taste of the Vineyard fishing that would become such an important part of his life.
He would fish for perch and trout in Look’s Pond behind the Mayhew house on the Tiasquam River (now the home of the David Douglases). Or he would go down to the Mill Pond, or he and his friend Giffy Kenniston would bike to the Tisbury Great Pond with their fishing poles and go after bluefish at the opening.

Sometimes they went swimming at Stonewall Beach. And there was one harrowing time when Johnny’s older cousins, John and Everett Whiting, decided he would learn to swim if they threw him off a diving board into the great pond.

There were afternoons at the dairy farm of John’s Aunt Evelyn and her husband James Adams – the full-sized brother of the midget Adams sisters – on South Road in Chilmark, behind today’s Stan Murphy Art Gallery. Often, there would be ice-cream treats at Aunt Evelyn’s ice cream parlor across South Road. Johnny spent one summer killing and plucking chickens on Harry West’s Music Street farm, earning $10 a week for six eight-hour days. And he made fifty cents for every rabbit he shot at Mabel Johnson’s house on Old County Road, for the rabbits ate the flowers she loved to grow.

All this (even the chicken-plucking) was considerably more fun than attending a French boarding school in Dalat near Saigon, or an American school in Baguio above Manila, or a school taught in French in Montreux, Switzerland. Albion Alley Sr. took Johnny in hand and taught him how to really catch trout – not in the half-hearted, casual way of his boyhood.

“He’d take me and his son, young Beanie, and Forrest Littlefield – Albert Littlefield’s father, who loved to fish, too – to Watcha Pond and we’d fish for perch and pickerel. And later on young Beanie taught me how to build and rig up my first scallop boat. We’d go trout fishing together up in Chilmark Pond. He taught me so much about Vineyard ways.

“Then Nelson Bryant Sr. came to West Tisbury from New Jersey and from him I learned that the best way to go bluefishing, which I loved to do, was with a rod and reel. Up to then, we’d been heaving and hauling, swinging a metal lure around our heads and throwing it out. He showed me how to make a rod out of bamboo and how to attach guides for the line. And old Dan’l Manter, who set eel pots, gave me a key to his ‘car’ – that’s what you called the big wooden boxes with slats where you kept the eels you’d caught. You always kept your car padlocked. I’d open the car up, take out several eels, and string a bathroom chain through them from head to tail. That’s what I’d use for bluefish bait. The eels were dead, of course, but strung up like that, if you reeled them in slowly, they moved around in the water as if they were alive and really attracted the blues. Dan’l gave me permission to fish on his land, too, which was where the great pond opening is, so I was all set, anytime I wanted, to go bluefishing.”

John Mayhew would have been as happy as the proverbial clam just to stay on the Vineyard after that, but there were still to be many separations before he could settle down on the Island for good.

First, he was sent for two years to Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts. (“I remember my mother and my aunt drove me back to school on the day of the Hurricane of 1938. I don’t know how we managed to get there,” Mayhew recalls. “Huge trees and telephone poles were crashing down everywhere along the way, and when we finally got there, it turned out I was the only student who had managed to get back after the summer vacation!”)    
Then he entered Brown University in Providence. There, although he majored in English literature, he found he had a great interest in mechanical engineering, and long enamored of flying, was able to take flying lessons for college credit.

“When I was a boy, I liked building model planes. A few were rubber band–powered models that actually flew. And then when I was thirteen or fourteen, my cousin Everett and three or four others bought a light plane. Everett got his license and took me up a couple of times and let me try to fly for a minute or two.”

When World War II started, he wanted to be a part of it. Though just a junior in college and only twenty-one, he entered the civilian pilot training program at Brown in hopes of becoming a fighter pilot. He was ordered to report to an elimination base to see if he could make it as an aviation cadet.

“Many of the fellows were washing out because they’d never flown before, or didn’t have the knack of flying in their bones. But because I’d had that Brown experience, I was off to a good start.”

It wasn’t long before he was back in the Pacific of his childhood where he joined Fighter Squadron 21. He took part in air campaigns that prepared the way for the invasions of the Philippines, New Georgia, and Iwo Jima. He flew missions over Bougainville and Guadalcanal. He went to Pearl Harbor and flew air escort for oil tankers ferrying fuel to the fleet in combat zones. He flew sixty-eight missions.

“But somehow,” he recalled as a young ensign in a 1943 Gazette interview, “there was never anything going on when I was in the air.” He only once had a shot at a Japanese plane. “And it was really out of range. I followed it, climbing until the airplane stalled, and I got in a couple of bursts, but I know I didn’t get it.”

He told the Gazette then how very fortunate he felt to be in the Naval Air Force. “I wanted to fly a fighter and I asked for service in the Pacific, and I got both. . . . But actually, I don’t know much about the war, or the fighting,” he said. “The ground troops are the men who deserve the credit. . . . Flying is clean and impersonal. You do not have to travel through jungle, and when you engage an enemy, you think of the plane without much thought of the pilot within it.”

The war over, he returned to Brown (where he met his wife-to-be, Shirley Walling, a student at Brown’s sister school, Pembroke College, in a poetry class). And then, finally, he was back on the Vineyard, where, Shirley says, “he put his feet down eighteen feet into the earth and just stayed here.”

When his cousin John Whiting proposed starting an Island shellfish operation, he was delighted by the idea. So he, John Whiting, Everett Whiting, and Willy Huntington together began the Quansoo Shellfish Corporation.

“It was a partnership, but I was the one putting in the physical labor,” Mayhew says. “John Whiting was busy being a college professor off-Island, Everett was farming, and Willy was drawing. The way it worked was, we paid so much to the towns for grants of so many acres for commercial oystering. Theirs were in Chilmark and mine in West Tisbury. Since they were busy doing other things, they hired five or six people to do the work for them. The oysters they got they shelled and shucked and sold by the gallon; I sold mine in the shell in bushel bags. Of course there were fewer labor costs if you sold them in bags.”

But after a while, Mayhew decided to go into business on his own and, in 1951, started the Vineyard Shellfish Company with Shirley as its secretary-
treasurer. The company continued until 1959.

“But I could see the handwriting on the wall,” Mayhew says. “Oysters are extremely fragile. You get a good set only every three or four years. When they’re young, before they have a shell, they’re free-floating larvae, and a heavy rainstorm can kill them, or a change in water temperature. I was putting down cultch – clean shells for the seed to grow on – but some years the flatworms would eat the seed. I had one fairly good year and actually made a little money. But we really were very poor. We were eating lots of oysters, steamers, and fish I caught, but we figured we had an entertainment budget of only three cents a week.”

Deer and ducks and geese that he hunted – often with his friend Stan Murphy – supplied food for the table. Since the scalloping season was only October to April, Mayhew supplemented his winter income by swordfishing – another outdoor activity he loved.

“Swordfishing fever really gets to you,” he says dreamily. “You climb up the topmast to look out for the swordfish. So you won’t miss any fish, you even steer the boat from up there with ropes that go down to the wheelhouse. It’s pretty thrilling when suddenly you see the fish running underwater – a pod of three or four, all turquoise colored.”

With Nelson Blount of Rhode Island, he went swordfishing off Noman’s Land (the small island off what is now Aquinnah) for nine summers. Another summer, he swordfished on Georges Bank in a boat owned by Kenneth Jones of West Tisbury and captained by Charlie Vanderhoop of Gay Head. Two other West Tisburyites – Ken Jones’s son, Everett, and Phil Drew – were also part of the crew. The men got a salary, plus $10 a fish.

And for a few summers, after inventing a jet that sped up gathering steamers, enabling him to get two or three bushels a day, he sold steamers, too, for which he was paid $12 a bushel. He also had his own lobster pots for his family. But in 1958, Mayhew, by then the father of three, decided it was time – much as he loved the sea – to find more remunerative work.

“We were pretty much living on salt air,” he says. For some time, there had been talk of having an all-Island high school, and he thought there was a chance he could get into teaching.

Although he had his BA degree, to teach he needed education credits and a teaching certificate. Getting them required taking courses off-Island. Grimly, he agreed to leave the Vineyard and oystering to attend Boston State Teachers College in Bridgewater, and in 1959, he joined the faculty at the brand new Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School. He would teach mathematics there for the next twenty-seven years. And, with a steady income, he and Shirley could think of a owning a house of their own.

During their living-on-salt-air years, they had been variously occupying Everett Whiting’s chicken coop and the West Tisbury Parsonage. Now they built a house of their own on Look’s Pond, where Johnny had learned to fish. Summers, they rented it for income and stayed in camps and neighbors’ barns. As an investment, they also managed to buy the Music Street house now owned by David and Rosalee McCullough. And in 1966, their income increased even more after Shirley, who had left college before graduating to marry John, completed her degree, got her certificate, and began teaching at the Edgartown School. The days of salt-air and fresh-fish sustenance were over.

That being so, it seemed time to get involved in politics in the town John Mayhew loved. First, he served on the finance committee. Then he was elected a selectman in 1973 and eventually president of the All-Island Selectmen’s Association. During his days in office, zoning was introduced to West Tisbury, he recalls proudly, and the dump was turned into a landfill. “And we had a big party with a bottle of champagne, and we three selectmen – Everett and Allen Look and I – got all dressed up.” Work on the new West Tisbury School also began during his term.

But he admits that he never took to politics the way he did to flying. He became a lieutenant commander and skipper of a squadron in the organized Reserve after the war and in 1960 retired as a full commander, having logged 2,000 hours of Navy flight time, “about 1,000 hours in Wildcats, 1,000 hours in Corsairs, and 350 hours in the Grumman F9F-6 Cougar.” In any case, he didn’t really like the way politics cut into outdoor pursuits.

Until two years ago, despite two knee operations, John Mayhew was still lobstering. It was only this past fall that he sold his Boston Whaler, the last of the three boats – two Whalers and a scallop boat – that he has owned over the years. He still goes out for blues or fluke occasionally if a friend takes him. He splits a little wood in his yard with an electric chain saw and he mows his lawn on a sit-down mower. He has learned to cope with limping a little and spending more time sitting down than standing up.

He still has a yen to be out on the water, among fresh salt and fish smells, or in the woods in fall when the wings of the Canada geese are whooshing
overhead. But climbing in and out of boats has become difficult and trekking through the woods impossible. Since he has a headful of memories of those days, however, on winter evenings when it’s snowy outside, or summer when it’s cool inside, it’s not bad at all, he’s discovering, to just sit before a fire in his living room, remembering.