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A Whaling Man's Needlework by Helen Wilson Sherman IN 1933 WHEN MY FAMILY celebrated the two hundredth birthday of our house at 25 Hussey Street ("Wisteria Lodge"), the Abel Gardner house, we invited many of the Wharf Rats as well as other guests to the party. Among the guests was John Cross, retired whaling man who ran a machine repair shop in the building on Old North Wharf, now called the "Enterprise". Johnny loved children, and as I was one of seven, and my mother, Fanny Wilson, had died that year, Johnny was especially nice to us. He was overwhelmed to be included in a bash put on by off-islanders, being a very modest man, and afterwards when I bicycled down to the wharf, where we had a boathouse (now the "Sequin") Johnny called me over to his shop. "Here, girl," he said, "Come here, I have something for you." What he gave me was a handmade dark-stained wooden box, with brass corners, about the size of a typewriter case. In the inside of the lid, (the interior was painted a pea-soup green) under glass, was his prize sample of tufted pillow covers, in a daring combination of bright yellow and pink tufts, with one pale blue ribbon, one lavender ribbon and two ribbons in different shades of pink. It was bordered by aqua colored cotton threads, which were fringed on the ends as were yellow and pink threads, the whole piece mounted on bright yellow cotton, which could be sewn on a square pillow. I was overwhelmed. This tufted pillow cover by John Cross is now on display at the Peter Foulger Museum. Johnny at that time was no longer young (he died sometime in the 1940's) and had lost a thumb. His gnarled huge hands were deep imbed ded in engine grease. He wore glasses so dirty one couldn't see through them and most of the time he wore only a cotton undershirt with sleeves, and dirty pants held up by suspenders. Father Griffin, of St. Mary's Church, used to sit with him by the hour. At the end of his working days my uncle Austin Strong, Com modore of the Yacht Club, gave Johnny a yachting cap and a blue jacket. His face was wizened, like a dried apple. He was clean shaven and had a nose that curved down almost to his upper lip. I think he may have sported a mustache, hidden by his hooked nose. He was truly a Dickens kind of character. He had sailed, I believe, on theSunbeam out of New Bedford, as did Nelson Ewer, and I do not know when he "came ashore", but probably when the whaling period slacked off in the very early nineteen hundreds. I think (from memory) that he was English with a Portuguese mother. I know he had a sister in New Bedford and I think at one time
