If it hadn’t been for a fire in the leaves under a Camp Ground cottage where he was soldering pipes, John T. Hughes of Oak Bluffs might have been a plumber like his father. And if he had been more interested in the heath hen in the 1940s, he probably would have become a forest ranger. But instead – happily for the Massachusetts lobster – for more than three decades, John devoted his life to nurturing that most popular of crustaceans.

In 1948, he established the first Lobster Hatchery and Research Station in the Commonwealth. For his efforts, he was honored by the American Littoral Society, the governor of Massachusetts, the World Mariculture Society, and the Atlantic Offshore Fishermen’s Association. In 1973, the Massachusetts State Scientist Association named him Scientist of the Year. But in 2003, the state director of the Division of Marine Fisheries said it no longer seemed to make economic sense to produce juvenile lobsters at the hatchery, and it became a water-quality research station. Long before that, however, John, having reached retirement age in 1984, had sorrowfully left his lobster charges: “I loved the work, but it just didn’t make any sense, with life so short, to keep on with it.”

But now at eighty-five, he still worries about lobsters. “Twenty-five or thirty years ago,” he says, “I was warning that the lobster was an endangered species. If they’d continued to fish for lobsters only in the areas along shore, where they have historically, there’d be none left now. But fishermen were able to find lobstering locations offshore. Now, though, those are being depleted too.”

Although more pots are set now than three decades ago, fewer lobsters are caught in each pot, John says. The only ways to preserve the lobster, he believes, are to increase the minimum size allowed for keepers and to keep lobstering gear just as it is – not introduce more sophisticated gear.

“Ninety percent of the lobsters caught now,” he says, “have just reached the minimum legal size for keeping, and less than half of them have reached sexual maturity. Fewer than 10 percent of the female lobsters being caught have had a chance to reproduce even once.”

John was born on March 23, 1922, in the house at the corner of Pequot and Circuit avenues in Oak Bluffs that is now the Oak Bluffs Inn. His mother, Elizabeth Fraser Hughes, was of Swedish Lapland stock; the family of his father, John Hawksworth Hughes, was Welsh. His grandfather William Inigo Hughes had gone to sea at the age of ten as a cabin boy, and had, in time, become a ship’s captain.

“He worked for the Booth Steamship Company and was the first white man to go more than two thousand miles up the Amazon River in Brazil to bring back rubber and open the rubber trade to western Europe in the late nineteenth century,” his grandson says proudly.

It could, therefore, be said that John T. Hughes came about his interest in things marine naturally, except that his youthful interests, growing up on the Vineyard, were in hunting and trapping. As a teenager, he set muskrat traps at Farm Neck, the ice pond at East Chop, and at Squibnocket Pond in Chilmark, and sold the skins for 75 cents to $1.25 (for a particularly good one) to the Sears Roebuck Co. in Boston, mailing them stretched on a shingle.

Trapping, however, was a solitary pastime, for a trapper did not want to share skin money with others. But he hunted woodcock and quail, ducks and rabbits and geese with his friends Ham Luce and Stanley Garland, Joseph Francis and Herb Lewis. “You could hunt almost anywhere then. The only trespassing sign I remember was at the Daggett property at Cedar Tree Neck where it said ‘Harmless Trespassing Permitted.’ So there, of course, we didn’t hunt. But we’d go to Chappaquiddick and often be the only people there. And we hunted near Felix Neck and at Captain West’s farm on the Middle Road in Chilmark. And, of course, we ate what we shot. Occasionally, we’d get to go duck hunting at the gunning camp down on Tisbury Great Pond in West Tisbury,” he says.

 “But there were no deer to hunt on the Island when I was growing up. They didn’t come until the 1950s when the Rod and Gun Club got ten fallow deer from a zoo in Worcester and brought them over. They were about the size of German Shepherds but had large racks of antlers. Dr. Clement Amaral, who was an Oak Bluffs dentist, and Alpha Leonard, who was the principal of the Oak Bluffs School, were very active in getting them. And before long the fishermen would see the white-tailed deer swimming to the Vineyard from the Elizabeth Islands to mate with the fallow deer. They’d mate all right, but because the imported deer were of a different kind, there were never offspring. Still, that seems to have been the way the white-tailed deer got here.”

To earn spending money in his teenage years – in addition to what he got from the trapping – John would “smash baggage” at the Steamship Wharf in Oak Bluffs. Its name notwithstanding, this was a helpful rather than a delinquent pastime. “Smashing” was simply the boys’ word for carrying travelers’ bags up or down the long wooden pier. He was also a summer lifeguard at the Oak Bluffs beach and a caddy at the Oak Bluffs golf course and, like every other Oak Bluffs boy, dove for coins that visitors would fling into the water for them from the Oak Bluffs wharf whenever the boat came in.

When he was feeling less industrious, he and his friend Howie Leonard, the principal’s son, would become “roofies” and climb from roof to roof of the Camp Ground cottages or boldly shinny up the Tabernacle roof’s support posts. Or he might become involved in a pelting game with his friends – throwing the putty-like horse buns left in the street after the Railway Express horse and delivery wagons would pass.

After high school, determined not to be a plumber, John enrolled at Massachusetts State College in Amherst, which in time would become the University of Massachusetts. He selected it because it offered a course in wildlife management.

“But then World War II broke out, and I ended up in the V-12 program at Cornell University. They kept us in school there while they finished building the ships for us to sail on. I knew I didn’t want to have anything to do with landing craft, so I volunteered for mine warfare,” he says. In time, he was a commanding officer of minesweepers in the North Atlantic, and then in the Pacific. He stayed on active duty for four years before returning to Massachusetts, where he remained “proudly” in the Naval Reserve for twenty years. Still tall with crew-cut white hair, it’s not hard to visualize him in his Naval officer’s uniform on the deck of a minesweeper.

“I was doing pretty well at college after I got back, but you had to write a paper to graduate. I decided I would write about the Vineyard’s heath hen,” he remembers. “I remembered seeing the last one when I was a child and was up at Jimmy Greene’s in West Tisbury with my father. We used to go there to get milk and eggs. This bird about the size of a prairie chicken jumped up on a blind. I learned later that the heath hen had become extinct, both because turkeys were introduced and brought blackhead disease with them and because of all the forest fires we had. People would set them in the Depression because you could get money from the state for putting them out. Heath hens seemed, at first glance, interesting enough to write about.

“But after I had turned in my paper, the professor asked me to stay after class. He said the paper wasn’t up to my usual standard. What was the matter? I said I just hadn’t been able to get fired up about the heath hen. The professor came from Michigan. ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘you come from New England, why don’t you write about lobsters? There’s very little that’s been written about them.’

“So that was what I did. I went to the Marine Biological Laboratory library in Woods Hole and got enough information to write my paper. The professor liked it and sent a copy to the director of Marine Fisheries in Boston, who asked me to come to see him, because they were about to start a lobster hatchery on the Vineyard. I ended up designing it and starting it. In 1949, John Joseph Sullivan joined me as its chief engineer.”

Up until then, lobster hatcheries had been run by college professors on summer holidays, so no year-round study had been made on the lobster, John says. “Because we were there the year around, we were able to watch the whole life cycle.”

At the hatchery, which was established on the Oak Bluffs side of the Lagoon, egg-bearing females (it takes about six years for a lobster to reach a pound in size and become sexually mature) were gathered from lobstermen and put into hatching tanks. The tanks were supplied continuously with running seawater. The female, according to John, is only receptive to male advances within forty-eight hours of the time she molts, and one-pound lobsters molt only once or twice a year.

But even after copulation, the sperm does not go directly to the eggs. Instead, it is stored for nine months in the female while the eggs are prepared for fertilization. Finally the sperm fertilizes the eggs, which then look more like shrimp or mosquito larvae than lobsters. They float away from the mother and tend to stay in the upper layers of the water. The larvae molt as many as four times in the ensuing three weeks until the young – the fry – begin to look like miniature lobsters. During these first three weeks, when they are in the wild, only about 60 of the 60,000 larvae produced will survive the fourth molt to become bottom crawlers. Most will be eaten by birds, fish, or other lobsters.

But in the hatchery that John designed, the hatched fry were caught and placed in breeding tanks where they were safe; the water temperature and depth were kept just right, and the larvae were fed on ground-up clams or frozen adult brine shrimp. Such care resulted, some years, in nearly half the larvae living as opposed to the 0.1 percent that live long enough in the wild to become bottom crawlers. At the hatchery, John was able to get a lobster to one pound in twenty months as opposed to the six or seven years required in the wild, largely thanks to the warm water temperature provided and the good food.

“This proved that, biologically, lobsters could be raised commercially,” John says. “But you’d have to have a huge building like the ones in which chickens are raised, and designers would have to develop the right equipment for circulating and warming the water. Our work at the hatchery also enabled us to do selective breeding and to tell restaurants how they could hold live lobsters, and how offshore lobstering boats could keep their catches alive too.” What is essential to the process, he says, is that the sea water – real or artificial – in which the lobsters are kept, is properly oxygenated, either by recirculation or by air pumps.

As for the lobsters raised at the hatchery, once the females had hatched their eggs, they and the fry that had been raised to the bottom-crawling stage in the hatchery were released in the waters along the Massachusetts coast whence their mothers had come. “That might have been Gloucester or New Bedford, for example,” John says. “I always wished that we could have released them all in one place. I think we would have learned more if we’d had more all together, but the way the bill that created the hatchery was written, the females had to go back into the same Commonwealth waters from which their mothers had been taken.”

From 1948 until 1984, John Hughes devotedly cared for his lobsters, sometimes going to the Continental Shelf between New York and Canada with fishermen so he could collect the lobsters himself. Aboard the Woods Hole Oceanographic Society submarine Alvin, he searched for lobsters in a deep hole off Provincetown. He has seen – and eaten – lobsters as large as forty-five pounds. “One that size is probably about one hundred years old,” he says. “But even when they’re big, if not overcooked, they can be delicious.”

His knowledge of lobsters, in time, was so considerable that Japan, China, Australia, and many European and South American countries asked for his help with their aquaculture – and invited him to visit. When actor Marlon Brando was filming in the South Pacific, he bought an atoll fifty miles northwest of Tahiti and wanted to start aqua farming there in an effort to improve the local economy for atoll inhabitants. He called upon John to help.

“He took me around to see his atoll on a Boston Whaler. I remember Marlon’s climbing up a coconut tree on one atoll and knocking coconuts down for us. But clearly the atolls were no place for lobsters, and I told him so. I suggested Hawaii instead,” John says.

“In any case, I enjoyed him very much and I guess he enjoyed me, for he asked for my phone number so we could keep in touch. I said he could call me at the Lobster Hatchery. He said that wasn’t good enough. He wanted my home phone too. I said then he’d have to pay me $125 a month for it. So I gave him my home phone number, and he did use it. And with the money we were able to transform our garage into two bedrooms. We called it the Marlon Brando Wing. He kept on paying me for quite a long time. He called what he paid me his funny money.”

Meanwhile, the hatchery was prospering – not only scientifically, but as an educational tool for schoolchildren and other visitors. As the director, John would painstakingly explain the life and needs of his favorite crustacean. He chuckles about numerous visits from the late master chef Julia Child, with whom he would discuss the cooking of lobsters.

“She called me once after a visit and wanted to know the most humane way of cooking a lobster,” he recalls. “I told her it was to plunge it head first into the boiling water where the brain is, so it would die almost instantly, but I explained that – like a dead eel – it might continue to move for a while.

John loved his job. “I’d go down to the hatchery every night before I went to bed to see if everything was all right,” he says.

But by the 1980s, the water quality of the Lagoon was deteriorating because of the phosphates and nitrates from gardens and septic systems in the many houses that had begun to be built along its shore. When John turned sixty-two in 1984, he decided it was time to retire and enjoy life with his wife. By then, he had discovered Aquadilla, Puerto Rico, after being invited there to look into a site for cultivating lobsters. It was too hot for that but proved the perfect place from January to April for swimming and for the golfing both Hugheses loved. Soon it became their winter home.

Long before, in 1948, John had married Virginia Shanley, a schoolteacher from Marshfield. “When we were teenagers, all of our gang would go down to the Steamship Wharf on Labor Day to see what the new teachers arriving for the year looked like. Ginny was one of those, though we didn’t actually meet till I was home on leave during the war. It was at a gathering where marshmallows were being toasted, and I remember that we both had marshmallows on our fingers and we were trying to help each other get the sticky marshmallows off. Ginny had gone to Bridgewater State Teacher’s College and came to Oak Bluffs to teach fourth grade,” he says. “But in the end, she became the phys. ed. teacher for Oak Bluffs, Vineyard Haven, and Edgartown. She was always a great golfer, and we used to play a lot at Farm Neck.”

In 1950, after two years in an Oak Bluffs Camp Ground cottage, the Hugheses bought a house that had been moved from Makonikey to Cat Hollow off Causeway Road in Vineyard Haven. “We got three acres and the house for $9,000,” he says.

“I used to play baseball in Cat Hollow when I was a boy and it was pasture land,” John remembers. Today, the land is wooded. He is pleased that it will remain that way forever, for he has given half of his property to the Vineyard Conservation Society. Hemlocks and hollies grow on it, and there is a flower garden too that Ginny, who died in 1994, looked after and a greenhouse where she started her houseplants. John still tends the flower garden and keeps enough of a vegetable garden to grow tomatoes and cucumbers for the pickles he likes to make.

Spring, summer, and through Christmas, John is there. He can see his four children and his grandchildren, stir up pots of kale soup, brew his own beer, play poker and golf (he’s had four holes-in-one at Farm Neck’s fifteenth), and reminisce with friends and family. Among them is his older brother, Bob, of Oak Bluffs, who unlike John, became enamored of the heath hen, and recently saw to the erection of a monument in its honor in West Tisbury.

As for the State Lobster Hatchery, though the sign announcing it still hangs on County Road in Oak Bluffs, the lobsters are long gone and the building now holds offices for the State Division of Marine Fisheries and the Island’s environmental police officer. John has only visited the premises twice since he left, both times in the 1980s to collect personal items.

Does he wish it were still operating as a hatchery? Not, he says, as a hatchery dispatching fry back into the water as in his time there, but as a research facility studying the life cycle of the lobster, its breeding habits and genetics. He would like, for example, to see more research done on developing lobsters of different colors.

“In the old days at the hatchery, we were able to breed some that were cobalt blue,” he says. “Lobsters of different colors are useful for tracking. To protect lobsters, you have to know where they live, but because they shed their shells to grow, you can’t track them by usual tagging methods. But if the shells they shed are a special color, then you can track them. I’d like to have research going on that would give us information like this that would help to protect our wild stock and, as lobsters become more and more scarce, I’d like us to be getting more information on how to raise them commercially.”