JIM BURGER
TALK OF THE BAY
On the Desk / On the Bow Remembering Ernie Imhoff by Rafael Alvarez
T
he other night, reading in my bunk by the glare of a drop light, I came across something curious in American Sea Writing: A Literary Anthology, published in 2000 by the Library of America. The information, new to me, addressed two ardent, entwined passions: the written word and the bounding main. It came from a story by the celebrated New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell (19081996) called The Bottom of the Harbor, the title essay of the author’s 1959 collection of Gotham maritime tales. Wrote Mitchell of the mossbunker, better known as menhaden, “[It’s] a factory fish; it is converted into an oil
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May/June 2022
that is used…[in] printing inks, which is why some newspapers have a fishy smell on damp days.” (So, the news is fishy even before the guy at Lexington Market wraps it around your rockfish!) It reminded me of my friend and longtime newspaper colleague Ernie Imhoff, who died this past December at age 84. Alongside the sea anthology lay Good Shipmates, Imhoff’s detailed account of the restoration of the SS John W. Brown Liberty ship. At the front of the book, Imhoff writes of crossing the Atlantic after college in 1958 on the SS Groote Beer and the spell cast by “a dome of the sky showed a wider blueness by day and
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