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Ed & Helen Thieler - The Oxford Years: Michael Valliant
Ed and Helen Thieler: The Oxford Years
by Michael Valliant
I was standing on the edge of the ferry dock in Oxford wearing surf trunks and flippers, getting ready to swim across the river to Bellevue. While I swam, a car was going to drive around from Oxford to Bellevue and we would see who got there first. It was to decide a long-standing bar-room bet. I am not a swimmer ~ had never swum any kind of distance. The OxfordBellevue Challenge had become a small buzz around the bars of Oxford. And some boats had come out to watch. One of those boats belonged to Ed and Helen Thieler, who lived in the boat at the end of the dock at Schooner’s Landing.
Ed watched the river current for a minute.
“If you want to end up at the Bellevue ferry dock, you are going
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to have to swim for that house off to the left,” he said. “If you point to the ferry dock, the current will push you too far to the right.”
I’d grown up swimming in the Tred Avon River, but I’d never had to consider current. About 28 minutes later, after swimming toward the house, I touched the dock in Bellevue about 30 seconds before the car arrived. Thanks to the advice from Ed. That was the summer of 1996.
“I remember well the Oxford-Bellevue Challenge. That kind of thing was going on all the time in Oxford back then,” Ed said. “There was the big blizzard of 1996. Schooner’s always had a wonderful oak fire going in the fireplace. On that big blizzard occasion, nobody could get to work, but everybody managed to get to Schooner’s! And oh, Oxford was fun. We fell in with the people of the town, the old-timers, and it became a special place for us.”
Ed had been an orthopedic surgeon in Somers Point, New Jersey.
Ed and Helen Thieler sold their sailboat and found a 38foot lobster yacht for sale in SoundIn 1993, surgery for prostate can- ings Magazine. It had been built in cer forced him to retire from his Maine by a couple from Texas. Ed practice. He took it as a sign that and Helen flew down to see it and it was time to smell the roses, to arranged to have it trucked back to live life at a different pace. Their Oxford. younger son, Jim, had had a sum- “The truck driver called to tell mer job teaching Laser sailing at us that he would be arriving in Oxthe Tred Avon Yacht Club, which ford the next morning,” Ed said. “A then turned into a job at what was number of friends gathered at the then Crockett Brothers Boatyard. Oxford Market to see our boat arJim offered to help Ed and Helen rive. It was July, the trees formed sail down to Oxford. They pulled in a canopy over Morris Street. I had to a slip at Crockett Brothers but my camera. Helen was on her bicyquickly moved over to Schooner’s cle. We saw the truck come around Landing. And then they made an- the causeway corner and stop at other move. Shanahan’s sales office. The truck
Realizing their sons were moving driver got out and was energetically in their own directions and weren’t talking and gesturing with someavailable as crew, Ed and Helen one who had come out of the office.
Helen saw this happening, went pedaling down the street and asked what was going on.”
The concerned yacht broker was telling the driver there was no way the boat could get through town, that it would have to go to his boatyard in Trappe.
“And Helen said to the truck driver ~ that’s my boat, don’t you dare move, I’ll be right back. She came pedaling back to the Oxford Market, got on the phone ~ we didn’t have cell phones back then ~ and called Oxford Boat Yard, because that’s where it was supposed to go. OBY said tell the guy not to move, we’ll be right there.”
The crew from OBY escorted the boat down the street, and Ed was able to take some terrific pictures of the boat, newly named Rolling Hitch, framed by the Morris Street trees. OBY launched the boat, and Hel and Ed lived on it at the end of the pier at Schooner’s for the next four and a half years.
While the Thielers were living on Rolling Hitch at Schooner’s, the skipjack Thomas Clyde was hauled out for repairs at OBY. The largest skipjack working the Bay at the time, the boat was owned by Lawrence Murphy from Tilghman Island. His brother Jimmy and a number of waterman friends came to help him rebuild it.
“These men were really intrigu-
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ing to me, and I started to watch these guys taking Thomas Clyde apart. They had scaffolding up, and every now and then a tool would fall to the ground. I would just pick it up and put it on the scaffolding. They appreciated that,” Ed said. “And so, I helped more and really got involved with it. During that time, many people were coming by, many were watermen, because this was a big deal, The Clyde was being rebuilt! I listened to the stories the men told and became more and more interested in the watermen, their culture and their history.”
Ed and Helen came to know more watermen during the win-
ter months, when empty slips at Schooner’s filled with boats from Secretary, Madison, Tilghman and other Choptank River harbors. The Tred Avon had some of the best oysters for tongers in those years. On bad weather days, the men would come to check their boats and then come on Rolling Hitch to talk and have coffee. “We got to know some wonderful watermen,” Ed said. “After a while, they wouldn’t even bother to come when the weather was bad; they would call and ask, ‘Hey, Ed, how’s my boat?’ I joked and told them, ‘I can still see the antenna.’ My word was good enough for them.” When the Thielers finally looked for a house, they told their friend
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and realtor Doug Hanks that it had to be between Lowe’s and the boat and had to have space for a separate building that Ed could use as a shop. Doug found a shop, and it came with a nice house in Oaklands.
It was while volunteering for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, where their son Jim was working, that Ed’s talent for building model boats became apparent. CBF asked Ed if he would build a model of a boat being sponsored by a benefactor. The new jet-drive vessel was going to take school groups and others out on the Bay, and to the Bay’s islands, on environmental/ educational tours. Ed agreed to build it.
The boat, Jenny S., was sponsored by Ted and Jennifer Stanley, who lived just up the creek from Ed and Helen, though they hadn’t met each other yet. On the day they presented the Stanleys with the model, CBF staff came up Town Creek on the real Jenny S., picked up Ed, Helen and the model from their boat, and they all went together to meet the Stanleys.
It was Jennifer Stanley who would later ask for Ed’s help to teach the boys and girls in the Oxford Community Center’s After School program how to build boat models and do other crafts. That began a long-standing friendship, and volunteer work for Ed, helping Jenny with kids at OCC After School.
Seeing Ed’s model boats gave then-OCC director Barb Seese the idea to ask him to put together a model boat show in Oxford during Waterfowl Festival. “Anything other than decoys,” she said. The OCC Model Boat Show has become an annual tradition, bringing in dozens of modelers and hundreds of
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visitors each year. Ed and current OCC director Liza Ledford have met and talked about keeping the show going even after the Thielers move north.
Ed has built about 30 model boats, almost all representing the history and culture of the watermen of the Eastern Shore, from the days of sail to the present. The models won’t be going north with the Thielers, though: they have found a home at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Chief Curator Pete Lesher puts Ed’s work in perspective: “I first heard about Ed maybe 25 years ago, when we were researching an exhibit on marine carvings, and we received word that a retired doctor from New Jersey was making new carvings for the skipjack Thomas Clyde,” Pete said. “At some point, Ed approached me about crabbing skiff plans from our Howard Chapelle collection. When I told Ed that not all of Chapelle’s crabbing skiff plans had been pub-
lished, he was intrigued. Ed identified a special niche in concentrating on regional small craft ~ the modest crabbing skiffs and gunning boats that were vital tools to watermen up and down the Shore and that express local character. As you can probably tell, I’m excited about Ed’s collection coming to CBMM. He built not only good models. He built important models.”
One model not going to CBMM is a 10-foot model crabbing skiff that hangs in the lobby of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s headquarters. The story of this particular model says something of why Ed loves building models and has loved the Thielers’ time in Oxford.
While they were living on the boat, Ed often went to Cutts and Case Boatyard to see what they were up to. He became such a fixture that owner Eddie Cutts once had Ed finish a tour of the yard for him when Eddie was called away, telling Ed that he knew the place just as well.
When CBF asked Ed to build a large model for their new building, he found the plans in a Chapelle book for a crabbing skiff that was representative of the Bay and its culture. He wanted to find just the right wood to build it and went to Cutts, drawings in hand, and explained the situation. Eddie told Ed to come with him.
“We went into his new building, which wasn’t quite finished yet. Eddie had just received some beautiful white cedar from North Carolina; it was all stacked up in the museum area facing Tilghman
Street,” Ed said. “Eddie rummaged through that pile and brought out several really wonderful pieces of cedar for me. When I asked, ‘What do I owe you?’ Eddie told me, ‘Not a thing. Just, when you write up your signage, put on it, ‘Wood donated by Cutts and Case Boatyard.” Which, of course, I did. I loved that I could go to a local boatyard like that and the owner himself would select brand-new, beautiful, quarter-sawn white cedar that had just arrived.”
The Thielers’ decades in Oxford were about smelling the roses, about making new friendships, about learning the culture and becoming part of it. They made the town and the community better and richer for being here. They will certainly do the same in the next chapter of their story. As they get ready to move north to be closer to family, Ed is already looking forward to getting involved with the Woods Hole Historical Museum, where they have a very well-known biannual model boat show.
Michael Valliant is the Assistant for Adult Education and Newcomers Ministry at Christ Church Easton. He has worked for non-profi t organizations throughout Talbot County, including the Oxford Community Center, Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum and Academy Art Museum.
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